I wanted to share some of my favorite leadership development links I came across this week, including some advice on change innovation, productivity and sales techniques. What stories caught your eye? Please share your picks in the comments.

• Tim Cook Is Giving Apple Employees Two-Week Breaks To Work On Special Projects. Business Insider: it shows Apple’s culture is changing gradually under Tim Cook. It’s becoming a little bit more like a typical tech company. The hope is to keep Apple’s employees at the company longer.

• The Easiest, Most Cost-Effective Way to New Profits. Inc.com: “If you’re able to respond to your customers’ ever-expanding requirements and demands, you have a good chance of holding your own. But that’s about it—you can forget about growth. To grow, you need to anticipate new consumer demands and you need a plan and a program to consistently get out ahead of them.”

• The Power of Key Performance Indicators for Sales Teams. SalesForce blog: “If you want to improve the way your team plays the game and boost the score in the future, you need to be paying much closer attention to another set of numbers, namely, the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that give you insights into how well each member of your team is actually playing.”

• How to Hack Your Culture – Decision Making. We Know Next: “Regardless of how decision making plays out, having an unwritten, unclear, inconsistent decision making process compromises that capacity in your organization. Without explicit agreements in place, these social processes (which are some of the most important things that happen inside your organization) are very susceptible to human nature, time pressures, power dynamics, personality, mood swings, etc. — all things that do not have anything to do with good decision making.”

• The Real Productivity-Killer: Jerks. Inc.com: “Crummy bosses aren’t just a pain; they’re bad for business. But how bad? We’ve found the stats–and it’s not pretty.”