Discussion Guides

Discussion Guides for the following books are available free of charge.

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BK Business

Corporate Management & Organization

Blind Men and the Elephant:

Schmaltz exposes such oft-cited difficulties as poor planning, weak leadership, and fickle customers as poor excuses for project failure, providing a set of simple, project coherence-building techniques that anyone can use to achieve success.

Corporate Celebration:

Shows how celebration is an important factor in many of the major issues in today's business environment: leadership, profit, purpose, community, and team building; links celebration and fun to the financial bottom line.

Corporate Creativity:

Alan Robinson and Sam Stern propose a radically different way to manage for creativity that allows companies to realize their creative potential and significantly improve their competitive position and profitability.

Customers as Partners:

Provides the step-by-step analysis techniques essential for effective corporate training, quality, and re-engineering programs; vividly shows how to achieve lasting success by creating sustaining personal bonds, which are the true source of a company's profitability. 

Future of Staff Groups:

Teaches staff groups-groups within organizations that perform internal functions such as human resources, finance, legal, quality, information systems, and others-how to shed old patterns and roles and speak directly to the concerns of their clients, their managers, and the groups themselves. 

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go:

Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni show managers how simple and regular conversations with employees can make career development both more effective and a whole lot easier.

Images of Organization:

As the first book to offer a concrete method for integrating the strengths and overcoming the weaknesses of competing management perspectives, Images of Organization has established itself as a classic and influenced management thinking throughout the world.

Imaginization:

Details the process of "imaginization" (imagination + organization) - a new core competence that's essential for leading and managing in a world characterized by flux and change; teaches managers to unleash the creative abilities of employees, develop new ways of organizing, and remain open, energized, and empowered in the face of this constant change.

Love 'Em or Lose 'Em:

The latest edition of this Wall Street Journal bestseller offers 26 simple strategies—from A to Z—that managers can use to address their employees’ real concerns and keep them engaged.

Make Their Day!:

Ventrice offers new examples of successful recognition programs from around the world and addresses providing effective recognition in an increasingly virtual work environment. 

Managers As Facilitators:

Presents a new, easy-to-understand model of facilitation that focuses on getting work done; provides practical guidance for managers and leaders who need to be successful in this new role. 

Managers as Mentors:

Rapid-fire read and a provocative guide to helping associates grow and adapt in today's tumultuous organizations; covers unique mentoring situations: mentoring through distance learning, mentoring peers (and bosses), and mentoring using artificial intelligence

New Business of Business:

Examines the responsibility and opportunities of businesses and business people to make significant contributions to the future of humanity; encourages broad dialogue on the important socio-economic, ecological, and moral questions facing business today.

New Management:

Practical yet thought-provoking book that presents a wealth of evidence to show that the two recurrent themes of democracy and enterprise are transforming our institutions. 

The New Organizational Wealth:

Shows how some of the fastest-growing, most profitable companies are discovering that potentially limitless revenues can flow from their firm's intangible assets-the ability of employees, customers, and even suppliers to create new concepts, models, products, and services.

Preferred Futuring:

A powerful, proven process that links the act of managing change to the "spirit" in today's workplace; applies the New Science mental model from Modern Physics to a three-phase process for whole system change. 

Stakeholder Strategy:

Provides an integrated framework for understanding a corporations responsibilities to a broad array of stakeholders-from customers to suppliers, employees, and communities; offers a step-by-step guide as well as practical strategies that companies can use to forge a network of powerful and profitable collaborative stakeholder relationships.

Stewardship:

Explains how to integrate the management of work and the doing of work, to redistribute purpose and power within an organization; speaks about how this can affect work flow, quality control, performance appraisal, pay systems, supervisory methods, job design, and human resources.

Stirring of Soul in the Workplace:

Weaves together lessons from history, psychology, and management theory, with numerous real-life examples, to tell the story of how the modern workplace has evolved to value technology and productivity over soulfulness and relationship.

Empowerment & Self-Improvement

Breakdown, Breakthrough:

Helps professional women experiencing feelings of disempowerment and dissatisfaction regain the confidence, courage, and energy to take control of their lives.

Brilliance by Design:

(automatic PDF download)

Shows how to dramatically improve learning by making learners, not teachers, the focus of instructional design and delivery; offers a systematic way to reach joyfully into the soul of learners and facilitate their brilliance so they can make their contributions and realize their potential.

Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute:

Illustrates three simple (although not easy-to-achieve) keys that organizations can use to effectively tap into the knowledge, experience, and motivation power that people already have: 1. share information with everyone; 2. create autonomy through boundaries; 3. replace the old hierarchy with self-managed teams

Feminine Quest for Success:

Offers practical advice for women in all phases of their careers and tells how women can bring their whole selves, including their more feminine sides, to their careers and prosper in the business world.

Fourth Wave:

Demonstarates the need for a new kind of leadership-managers and CEOs who embrace an attitude of global stewardship; who define their assets as ideas, information, creativity, and vision; and who strive for seamless boundaries between work and private lives for all employees.

Getting to Resolution:

Enables readers to shift from thinking about problems, fighting, and breakdowns to thinking about collaboration, engagement, learning, creativity, and the opportunity for creating enduring value.

Identity Is Destiny:

Transcends the superficial elements of "corporate identity", such as names, logos and brands, to reveal what lies at the heart of every company to demonstrate how organizations that are aware of their identities can discover and realize their true potential. 

Paradoxical Thinking:

Takes the mystery and unpredictability out of performing at your peak by providing an easy-to-learn method of understanding and maximizing your personal success, then extending that to success in teams and organizations.

People Smart:

Empowers each of us to become the kind of person who can establish solid relationships, easily connect with others, and effectively link their needs with what we have to offer.

Trance of Scarcity:

Shows that life is characterized by vitality, fulfillment, and efficacy; shares specific practices you can use to change your story--to identify and interrupt negative, constraining patterns and replace them with more positive and liberating ones to achieve greater freedom, fulfillment, and satisfaction.

What To Do When There's Too Much To Do :

Author Laura Stack presents a straightforward and comprehensive system that allows you to do less and achieve more.

• Discussion Guide
• Leader Guide

Leadership

Courageous Follower:

Chaleff strips away the passive connotations of the follower role and provides tools to help followers effectively partner with leaders; results include increased support for leaders, reduced cynicism, and organizations saved from serious missteps.

Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box:

Reveals how we unwittingly sabotage relationships, at work and at home, despite our best intentions—and how we can stop; shows readers how to consistently tap into and act on their innate sense of what’s right, dramatically improving all of their relationships.

Leadership and The New Science:

Shows how discoveries in quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory enable us to deal successfully with change and uncertainty in our organizations and our lives; most acclaimed and most influential guide to applying the new science to organizations and management.

Leadership Wisdom of Jesus:

Offers profound lessons in leadership for readers of any religious background and for anyone who wants to become a wise and highly effective leader; outlines a uniquely constructive and compassionate approach to leadership based on positive spiritual principles contained in the teachings of Jesus.

Putting Our Differences to Work:

Draws on the latest research and a wealth of real-world examples to offer compelling evidence showing exactly how putting our differences to work accelerates innovation and contribution.

Sustainability

Lean and Green:

Debunks the myth that businesses must choose between profit and the environment and shows how anyone, at any level of an organization, can help increase revenues by reducing harmful environmental impact; includes 100 compelling, real-life examples from 20 prominent and varied organizations, including Intel, Louisiana-Pacific, Horizon Organic Dairy, and Apple Computer.

Making Sustainability Work:

Marc Epstein builds on his influential and highly respected previous work to produce the ultimate how-to guide for corporate leaders, strategists, academics, sustainability consultants, and anyone else with an interest in actually putting sustainability ideas into practice.

The Great Turning:

(automatic PDF download)

Korten draws on evidence from sources as varied as evolutionary theory, developmental psychology, and religious teachings to make the case that “Earth Community”—a life-centered, egalitarian, sustainable alternative to Empire based on democratic principles of partnership—is indeed possible.

BK Currents

Uses a whimsical disease metaphor to explore the serious negative consequences of the obsessive quest for more and more possessions.

The Accidental American:

Advocates a bold new approach to immigration: a free international flow of labor to match globalization’s free flow of capital. Corporations are encouraged to move anywhere in the world they can maximize their earnings. People shouldn’t have to risk exploitation, abuse, even imprisonment when they try to do the same.

BK Life

Explores fundamental new beliefs about organizations and life; though rooted in science, it breaks new ground by developing insights from literature, spiritual teachings, and direct experience.

Gifts from the Mountain:

Pithily, profoundly, and practically reflects on what nature can teach us about handling the demands of life and work and is beautifully illustrated throughout with full-color watercolor paintings.

• A Leaders’s Fire-starter Guide

• A Coach's Fire-starter Guide

• A Companion’s Fire-starter Guide

P ower of Purpose:

Details a graceful, practical, and ultimately spiritual process for uncovering your purpose and making it central to your life; provides a detailed and practical process for uncovering your purpose and is illustrated with inspiring stories and eye-opening research.