NOBL Academy

How Best Buy’s CEO Managed a Corporate Turnaround

Best Buy’s turnaround emphasizes the importance of staying positive and encouraging employees to get the momentum going: start first, obsess over strategy later.

Quick Studies

How Google Used Simple Psychology to Promote Employee Wellness

If you want to encourage health and wellness at the office, make healthy food choices easier and more enticing. Combining this strategy with support and resources will help employees lead healthier lifestyles.

Quick Studies

Start with a Skateboard: How Spotify Builds Products

If you set out to make the most robust thing you can imagine, it will take you a long time before you create value for your customer or gain any learnings for yourself. Instead, focus your team on something you can make quickly that will provide an opportunity to gain real feedback. At the start of every new project, ask your team: “What’s our skateboard?”

Quick Studies

At Lever, A Simple GIF Makes New Employees Feel Welcome

Reinvigorating a mundane process, especially onboarding, can kickstart a new hire’s success at a company. Look for simple and inexpensive ways that your team can personalize the experience and make new team members feel welcome.

Explainers

Avoid the Strategy of the Month Club

As a leader faced with uncertainty and questions, it’s all too easy to be lured into the latest management fad. But if you bounce your team from one business book to another, you’ll confuse and exhaust them.

Tools

Decide as a Team Using Square’s SPADE Model

Your team should use a decision making framework that feels right for you, but the most important thing is that you codify how decisions get made and what roles people play in important decisions.

Quick Studies

How IKEA Defines the Role of its Internal Incubator

The objective of a company’s incubator (skunkworks, lab, etc.) is to discover new opportunities, but it’s up to the rest of the organization to operationalize and commercialize those ventures. Moreover, the test-and-learn mindset and process that the lab develops is usually it’s most valuable asset and should be spread to the full enterprise.

Quick Studies

Three Rules that Supercell Uses to Ensure Aligned and Autonomous Teams

Once you’ve put together a capable team, give them clear goals and the ability to make their own decisions.

Quick Studies

How ustwo Created a Culture of Continuous Learning

Feedback is not a tool for criticism or correction. And it’s not an excuse to run around telling people to change because we think they should. It is a tool to help us all see ourselves more clearly, which in turn helps us all learn and grow together.

Tools

How to Use Storytelling in Your Presentations to Sell Better

Use our template of Freytag’s Pyramid to start to map your presentation to the framework. Remember, the more you can involve your audience in the story you’re telling, the more likely they’ll want to support your efforts.

Quick Studies

Why Asana’s No Meeting Wednesdays Increase Productivity

Designating time for production is critical. Setting aside time specifically to work can make your team more effective and boost morale.

Tools

Turn Your Status Meetings into More Effective Action Meetings

By making simple changes to your status meetings, you can exchange information faster and move on to doing real work, rather than getting stuck in a conference room for half a morning.

Tools

How to Define Your Vision, Values, Purpose and Mission Statement

Clearly defining your Purpose, Vision, Mission, Values, and Measures will help your team understand what you’re trying to achieve. Aside from motivation, this will enable them to make decisions independently, rather than referring to the chain of command. It will also help your organization track whether or not it’s achieving its goals.

Tools

The Definitive Guide to Agile Retrospectives and Post Mortem Meetings

The process of a Retrospective itself is less important than simply developing a habit across the enterprise to look back, reflect, and make needed changes to work better, together. Just start with one Retrospective and note how it affects future work.

Tools

How to Decide What Work to Outsource

Not only will team members feel happier about focusing on work they’re good at, but this process will also free up time to tackle more ambitious challenges.

Quick Studies

How Capital One Convinced Teams to Use Design Thinking

If a complex financial institution can transform itself with a willingness to actually listen, there’s hope for other industries as well. The lessons Capital One has learned are to encourage teams to talk directly to customers and to adopt a bias towards action and experimentation.

Explainers

Eight Questions Every Head of Innovation Should Ask Themselves Weekly

Don’t forget that transformation is a marathon, not a sprint: if you can answer even one of these questions affirmatively every day, you’re making good progress.

Tools

Share Your Story to Quickly Foster Empathy

How your team approaches this exercise will tell you a great deal about their willingness to work as a team. Each team is different, and there is no “right” way to respond, but your team’s response will demonstrate the amount of work ahead before the group of individuals is truly ready to operate as one team.

Tools

Solicit Candid Peer Feedback with an Anxiety Party

More and more companies are ditching annual performance reviews for mechanisms that provide faster, friendlier feedback focused on personal growth. If you’re interested in exploring alternatives, be sure to design the process in such a way that 1) feels right for your culture, and 2) is aimed at the direct problem you’re trying to solve for.

Explainers

Stepping Up as a Leader when the Team Has No Direction

Leading a group of individuals who prefer making their own decisions can be the true test of a new leader, but hard work and a positive attitude can win them over.

Impossible is temporary.

How Best Buy’s CEO Managed a Corporate Turnaround

How Google Used Simple Psychology to Promote Employee Wellness

Start with a Skateboard: How Spotify Builds Products

At Lever, A Simple GIF Makes New Employees Feel Welcome

Avoid the Strategy of the Month Club

Decide as a Team Using Square’s SPADE Model

How IKEA Defines the Role of its Internal Incubator

Three Rules that Supercell Uses to Ensure Aligned and Autonomous Teams

How ustwo Created a Culture of Continuous Learning

How to Use Storytelling in Your Presentations to Sell Better

Why Asana’s No Meeting Wednesdays Increase Productivity

Turn Your Status Meetings into More Effective Action Meetings

How to Define Your Vision, Values, Purpose and Mission Statement

The Definitive Guide to Agile Retrospectives and Post Mortem Meetings

How to Decide What Work to Outsource

How Capital One Convinced Teams to Use Design Thinking

Eight Questions Every Head of Innovation Should Ask Themselves Weekly

Share Your Story to Quickly Foster Empathy

Solicit Candid Peer Feedback with an Anxiety Party

Stepping Up as a Leader when the Team Has No Direction