Products

Since the 1980s, Appreciative Inquiry has proven to be one of the most powerful and effective methods for organizational change. Now two top consultants show how leaders can adapt its principles to become more personally and professionally resilient.

Appreciative Inquiry is a venerable and widely used organizational change method that emphasizes identifying what's working and building on those strengths. It is the focus on the best of what is and using that to generate the future that makes it so powerful. In answer to numerous requests from their clients, consultants and scholars McArthur-Blair and Cockell show how to apply the lessons of AI to build resilience in leaders. Every leader has moments of despair, that "dark night of the soul" where there seems to be no clear path forward. The authors' ALIVE process (Appreciate, Love and Inquire in order to Venture and Evolve) helps leaders forgive themselves for their own failures and those of others, focus on their strengths in times of despair, and amplify and grow those strengths so that they are better able to build hope in themselves and throughout their organizations. In times of rapid change like ours, building resilience is a vital leadership skill.

Building the Future

Machiavelli famously wrote, “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

That's what this book is about—innovation far more audacious than a new way to find a restaurant or a smart phone you can wear on your wrist. Amy C. Edmondson and Susan Salter Reynolds explore large-scale systemic innovation that calls for “big teaming”: intense collaboration between professions and industries with completely different mindsets. This demands leadership combining an expansive vision with deliberative incremental action—not an easy balance.

To explore the kind of leadership required to build the future we need, Edmondson and Reynolds tell the story of Living PlanIT. This award-winning “smart city” start-up was launched with a breathtakingly ambitious goal: creating a showcase high-tech city from scratch to pilot its software—quite literally setting out to build the future. This meant a joint effort spanning a truly disparate group of software entrepreneurs, real estate developers, city government officials, architects, construction companies, and technology corporations. By taking a close look at the work, norms, and values in each of these professional domains, we gain new insight into why teaming across fields is so challenging. And we get to know Living PlanIT's leaders, following them and their partners through cycles of hope, exhaustion, disillusionment, pragmatism, and renewal. There are powerful lessons here for anyone, in any industry, seeking to drive audacious innovation.

Building the Future

Machiavelli famously wrote, “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

That's what this book is about—innovation far more audacious than a new way to find a restaurant or a smart phone you can wear on your wrist. Amy C. Edmondson and Susan Salter Reynolds explore large-scale systemic innovation that calls for “big teaming”: intense collaboration between professions and industries with completely different mindsets. This demands leadership combining an expansive vision with deliberative incremental action—not an easy balance.

To explore the kind of leadership required to build the future we need, Edmondson and Reynolds tell the story of Living PlanIT. This award-winning “smart city” start-up was launched with a breathtakingly ambitious goal: creating a showcase high-tech city from scratch to pilot its software—quite literally setting out to build the future. This meant a joint effort spanning a truly disparate group of software entrepreneurs, real estate developers, city government officials, architects, construction companies, and technology corporations. By taking a close look at the work, norms, and values in each of these professional domains, we gain new insight into why teaming across fields is so challenging. And we get to know Living PlanIT's leaders, following them and their partners through cycles of hope, exhaustion, disillusionment, pragmatism, and renewal. There are powerful lessons here for anyone, in any industry, seeking to drive audacious innovation.

Innovation within an organization is no longer sufficient; in a growing number of businesses, collaboration between companies and even industries is critical to success. A respected Harvard professor and a journalist team up to show how one creative startup exemplifies this new, intensely interactive form of leadership.


Niccolò Machiavelli famously wrote: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

Constructing a new order of things, which Edmondson and Reynolds call “building the future,” is the focus of this book. It explores how to bring complex new systems into being, particularly systems that transform human experience and make the world more livable and sustainable. Intense collaboration across professions and industries is vital to come up with new ideas and innovative solutions. This requires practicing new forms of leadership that enable complex, team-based, whole-system innovation.

To reveal how pioneers build the future, Edmondson and Reynolds study a startup's long and innovative journey in the smart-city industry, which uses digital, information and communication technologies to enhance the quality and performance of urban services, They follow the leaders in this company, Living PlanIT, through cycles of hope, exhaustion, disillusionment, pragmatism, and renewal in creating the city of the future.

Offers data-driven proof that products and services appealing to customer’s emotional needs outsell the competition Provides a clear method and set of tools to enable companies to develop high emotion products and services Includes case examples from a wide variety of industries Emotion is the single greatest lever in building enduring relationships with customers—it’s what makes them not just purchase a product or service, but get excited about it. Leading companies do more than produce things that work better. They address their customers’ emotional needs—they make them feel better. But this isn’t something you can add on after the fact. Your products and services must be built to love from the very start. This book shows you how. Peter Boatwright and Jonathan Cagan have worked on product and brand strategy with market leaders like Apple, Whirlpool, International Truck, PG&E, and many others. They’ve found that to really connect with customers emotions must be generated by the product itself, not simply tacked on through advertising. And they prove the bottom-line value of product-driven emotion by analyzing the stock performance of companies that sell high-emotion products and through data that show people are willing to pay more for products with emotionally-rich features. After showing that authentic product emotion really does pay off, they move on to how—how emotion can be broken down into its core building blocks, how it is then used to develop new products and services, and how product touchpoints —in particular visual touchpoints — deliver those emotions. Engaging case studies from a variety of industries will help you understand how to integrate emotion into your products and services, regardless of the nature of your business. Emotion is fundamental to all that is human, including the products we enjoy. Built to Love will help you gain loyal, even fanatical customers by going beyond mere efficiency and speaking to their deepest needs and wants.

Leading companies do more than produce things that work better. Their products and services make customers feel better. They create captivating products that energize the marketplace and set the standard for what customers want and expect. But this isn't something you can add on after the fact. Your products and services must be built to love from the very start. This book tells you why and shows you how.

Peter Boatwright and Jonathan Cagan have worked with market-leading companies ranging from Fortune 100 corporations to niche firms in a variety of industries. They've found that for companies to form deep bonds with customers, emotions must be generated by a product itself—trying to associate emotions with a product simply through advertising is unreliable, expensive, and ultimately ineffective. They marshal stock market data that proves the bottom-line benefit of high-emotion products, as well as data showing that people are willing to pay more for products with emotionally rich features.

After demonstrating that authentic product emotion really does pay off, Boatwright and Cagan move on to how—how emotion can be broken down into its core building blocks, how it can then be used to develop new products and services, and how product touch points, in particular visual touch points, deliver those emotions. Emotion can be built into any product or service—a point vividly illustrated through case studies from a variety of industries.

Emotion is fundamental to all that is human, including the products we enjoy. Built to Love offers a clear method and a set of tools to help you gain loyal, even fanatical customers by going beyond mere efficiency and speaking to people's deepest needs and wants.

Boatwright and Cagan show how a firm can create products that electrify the market with excitement, products that go beyond functional performance to provide emotional fulfillment. There is a hum in the marketplace about these products, because they are the topic of conversations, media discussions, and social media posts. Built to Love reveals how to understand, design and deliver products that engage and excite their customers through emotions evoked by the product itself, not just through advertising slogans and campaigns.

“Eileen delivers a new perspective on the burnout crisis with humor, good sense, and unique ideas on how to manage our brains. I owe my daily well-being to her. Keep this book at your side to help you glide through your workday.” —Marcia Reynolds, PsyD, author of The Discomfort Zone

It's official. For the first time, the World Health Organization has classified burnout as a health problem. Renowned motivational speaker Eileen McDargh proposes that to tackle it, we must learn to break out of energy-draining thoughts and behaviors.

Resilience, she argues, is strictly a matter of energy management--by better managing your energy, you can both build resiliency and overcome burnout. Breakthrough happens when our energy is consciously distributed to what matters most in our lives. So after a short survey that will tell you where you fit in a burnout and resiliency profile, McDargh helps pinpoint the causes of your burnout and examine the energy demands that keep you from refueling and recharging. She provides an in-depth energy analysis and gives you the keys to master the four dimensions that can give you a resilience breakthrough: head, heart, hands, and humor.

McDargh guides the reader through the process of identifying energy drains and implementing strategies for handling them, whatever phase of life you are in. Her intention is to help you not only to successfully manage work and life demands but also make even larger strides in understanding how to put together a life by design and not by default.

“Eileen delivers a new perspective on the burnout crisis with humor, good sense, and unique ideas on how to manage our brains. I owe my daily well-being to her. Keep this book at your side to help you glide through your workday.” —Marcia Reynolds, PsyD, author of The Discomfort Zone

It's official. For the first time, the World Health Organization has classified burnout as a health problem. Renowned motivational speaker Eileen McDargh proposes that to tackle it, we must learn to break out of energy-draining thoughts and behaviors.

Resilience, she argues, is strictly a matter of energy management--by better managing your energy, you can both build resiliency and overcome burnout. Breakthrough happens when our energy is consciously distributed to what matters most in our lives. So after a short survey that will tell you where you fit in a burnout and resiliency profile, McDargh helps pinpoint the causes of your burnout and examine the energy demands that keep you from refueling and recharging. She provides an in-depth energy analysis and gives you the keys to master the four dimensions that can give you a resilience breakthrough: head, heart, hands, and humor.

McDargh guides the reader through the process of identifying energy drains and implementing strategies for handling them, whatever phase of life you are in. Her intention is to help you not only to successfully manage work and life demands but also make even larger strides in understanding how to put together a life by design and not by default.

“Eileen delivers a new perspective on the burnout crisis with humor, good sense, and unique ideas on how to manage our brains. I owe my daily well-being to her. Keep this book at your side to help you glide through your workday.” -Marcia Reynolds, PsyD, author of The Discomfort Zone


It's official. For the first time, the World Health Organization has classified burnout as a health problem. Renowned motivational speaker Eileen McDargh proposes that to tackle it, we must learn to break out of energy-draining thoughts and behaviors.

Resilience, she argues, is strictly a matter of energy management-by better managing your energy, you can both build resiliency and overcome burnout. Breakthrough happens when our energy is consciously distributed to what matters most in our lives. So after a short survey that will tell you where you fit in a burnout and resiliency profile, McDargh helps pinpoint the causes of your burnout and examine the energy demands that keep you from refueling and recharging. She provides an in-depth energy analysis and gives you the keys to master the four dimensions that can give you a resilience breakthrough: head, heart, hands, and humor.

McDargh guides the reader through the process of identifying energy drains and implementing strategies for handling them, whatever phase of life you are in. Her intention is to help you not only to successfully manage work and life demands but also make even larger strides in understanding how to put together a life by design and not by default.

The seventh edition of this pragmatic guide to determining right and wrong in the workplace is updated with new case studies, exercises, and ancillary materials.

Joseph Weiss's Business Ethics is a pragmatic, hands-on guide for determining right and wrong in the business world. To be socially responsible and ethical, Weiss maintains, businesses must acknowledge the impact their decisions can have on the world beyond their walls. An advantage of the book is the integration of a stakeholder perspective with an issues and crisis management approach so students can look at how a business's actions affect not just share price and profit but the well-being of employees, customers, suppliers, the local community, the larger society, other nations, and the environment.

Weiss includes twenty-three cases that immerse students directly in contemporary ethical dilemmas. Eight new cases in this edition include Facebook's (mis)use of customer data, the impact of COVID-19 on higher education, the opioid epidemic, the rise of Uber, the rapid growth of AI, safety concerns over the Boeing 737, the Wells Fargo false saving accounts scandal, and plastics being dumped into the ocean.

Several chapters feature a unique point/counterpoint exercise that challenges students to argue both sides of a heated ethical issue. This edition has eleven new point/counterpoint exercises, addressing questions like, Should tech giants be broken apart? What is the line between free speech and dangerous disinformation? Has the Me Too movement gone too far? As with previous editions, the seventh edition features a complete set of ancillary materials for instructors: teaching guides, test banks, and PowerPoint presentations.

The seventh edition of this pragmatic guide to determining right and wrong in the workplace is updated with new case studies, exercises, and ancillary materials.

Joseph Weiss's Business Ethics is a pragmatic, hands-on guide for determining right and wrong in the business world. To be socially responsible and ethical, Weiss maintains, businesses must acknowledge the impact their decisions can have on the world beyond their walls. An advantage of the book is the integration of a stakeholder perspective with an issues and crisis management approach so students can look at how a business's actions affect not just share price and profit but the well-being of employees, customers, suppliers, the local community, the larger society, other nations, and the environment.

Weiss includes twenty-three cases that immerse students directly in contemporary ethical dilemmas. Eight new cases in this edition include Facebook's (mis)use of customer data, the impact of COVID-19 on higher education, the opioid epidemic, the rise of Uber, the rapid growth of AI, safety concerns over the Boeing 737, the Wells Fargo false saving accounts scandal, and plastics being dumped into the ocean.

Several chapters feature a unique point/counterpoint exercise that challenges students to argue both sides of a heated ethical issue. This edition has eleven new point/counterpoint exercises, addressing questions like, Should tech giants be broken apart? What is the line between free speech and dangerous disinformation? Has the Me Too movement gone too far? As with previous editions, the seventh edition features a complete set of ancillary materials for instructors: teaching guides, test banks, and PowerPoint presentations.

The seventh edition of this pragmatic guide to determining right and wrong in the workplace is updated with new case studies, exercises, and ancillary materials.

Using a unique stakeholder-based approach, this book takes business ethics out of the theory realm and provides practical ways to analyze any business decision. Including dozens of cases, Joseph Weiss looks beyond the impacts of ethical lapses on share price and profit to focus on relationships between stakeholders, including individuals, groups, corporations, and governments.

The new seventh edition includes seven new cases and ten new Point/Counterpoint exercises, which challenge students to argue both sides of a contemporary issue. It incorporates the latest research as well as updated cases dealing with recent scandals at organizations such as Boeing, Facebook, and Uber. Professors will have access to online support, including teaching notes, PowerPoint slides, and sample tests. The book is equipped with a step-by-step guide to implementing stakeholder analysis, tips to help students apply ethical principles in their personal and professional lives, and comprehensive coverage of employee workplace issues.

Addressing relevant topics such as risk management, preferential hiring, and sexual harassment in conjunction with the digital divide, bribery, the environment, and more, Business Ethics, seventh edition explores ethical implications in today's increasingly interconnected global business environment.

Management icon Henry Mintzberg dismantles twenty dangerous business myths in this essential guide for thoughtful leaders.

Henry Mintzberg, legendary management thinker and recipient of the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent decades challenging conventional wisdom about how organizations work. In this powerful distillation of his life's work, Mintzberg tackles the most persistent and damaging myths in business—from “if you can't measure it, you can't manage it” to the blind worship of “strategic planning.”

With characteristic wit and clarity, Mintzberg offers refreshing alternatives that will transform how you think about leadership, structure, and organizational effectiveness. He replaces tired maxims like “managing is controlling” with more nuanced approaches that embrace “controlled disorder” and suggests that “ordinary creativity” often matters more than exceptional genius.

Drawing from his extensive body of work across sixty years, Mintzberg provides a masterclass in critical thinking for anyone who leads teams or organizations. His irreverent style makes complex ideas accessible without sacrificing depth, making this book as intellectually stimulating as it is practically valuable.

Whether you're a seasoned executive, an aspiring manager, or a student of organizational behavior, this concise volume will challenge your assumptions and provide a clear-eyed framework for more effective, humane management.

Management icon Henry Mintzberg dismantles twenty dangerous business myths in this essential guide for thoughtful leaders.

Henry Mintzberg, legendary management thinker and recipient of the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent decades challenging conventional wisdom about how organizations work. In this powerful distillation of his life's work, Mintzberg tackles the most persistent and damaging myths in business—from “if you can't measure it, you can't manage it” to the blind worship of “strategic planning.”

With characteristic wit and clarity, Mintzberg offers refreshing alternatives that will transform how you think about leadership, structure, and organizational effectiveness. He replaces tired maxims like “managing is controlling” with more nuanced approaches that embrace “controlled disorder” and suggests that “ordinary creativity” often matters more than exceptional genius.

Drawing from his extensive body of work across sixty years, Mintzberg provides a masterclass in critical thinking for anyone who leads teams or organizations. His irreverent style makes complex ideas accessible without sacrificing depth, making this book as intellectually stimulating as it is practically valuable.

Whether you're a seasoned executive, an aspiring manager, or a student of organizational behavior, this concise volume will challenge your assumptions and provide a clear-eyed framework for more effective, humane management.

Management icon Henry Mintzberg dismantles twenty dangerous business myths in this essential guide for thoughtful leaders.

Henry Mintzberg, legendary management thinker and recipient of the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent decades challenging conventional wisdom about how organizations work. In this powerful distillation of his life's work, Mintzberg tackles the most persistent and damaging myths in business—from “if you can't measure it, you can't manage it” to the blind worship of “strategic planning.”

With characteristic wit and clarity, Mintzberg offers refreshing alternatives that will transform how you think about leadership, structure, and organizational effectiveness. He replaces tired maxims like “managing is controlling” with more nuanced approaches that embrace “controlled disorder” and suggests that “ordinary creativity” often matters more than exceptional genius.

Drawing from his extensive body of work across sixty years, Mintzberg provides a masterclass in critical thinking for anyone who leads teams or organizations. His irreverent style makes complex ideas accessible without sacrificing depth, making this book as intellectually stimulating as it is practically valuable.

Whether you're a seasoned executive, an aspiring manager, or a student of organizational behavior, this concise volume will challenge your assumptions and provide a clear-eyed framework for more effective, humane management.

A 52-card self-discovery tool that helps you identify your natural gifts, clarify your values, and find the work you were made to do.

Calling Cards is an experiential deck from bestselling author and executive coach Richard Leider, built for anyone questioning their career path, craving more meaningful work, or trying to understand what they do best and why it matters.

What's inside:

• A set of 52 cards representing a wide range of natural gifts, from “Creating Dialogue” to “Fixing Things” to “Seeing Possibilities”
• A guided five-step sorting process that narrows your gifts down to a personal top five
• A hexagon work environment guide based on Holland's six personality types
• A “My Calling Card” reflection exercise connecting your gifts to real work possibilities
• Instructions for involving a friend or family member to gain an outside perspective on your strengths

Who it's for: Career changers, life transitioners, coaches, and anyone craving clarity about purpose and direction.

A hands-on companion to Richard Leider's The Power of Purpose and Work Reimagined.