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Making progress on complex, problematic situations requires a new approach to working together: transformative facilitation, a structured and creative process for removing the obstacles to fluid forward movement.


People today face increasing complexity and decreasing control. They need to work with more people across more divides. But the traditional ways of advancing-subsuming individual interests to the good of the whole, or providing total autonomy for all stakeholders to work out their own solution-aren't adequate to resolving these difficult situations.

Drawing on his experiences working with Black people and white people in post-apartheid in South Africa, First Nations people and the government in Canada, multiple stakeholders in war-torn Columbia, and many more, Kahane describes what he calls transformative facilitation. It combines the two approaches, cycling back and forth between them. The facilitator pays careful attention to what is going on in the group and decides which approach will work best at any given moment.

Adam Kahane describes precisely what the facilitator needs to watch for and how to manage the delicate balance between a focus on the collective and a focus on specific stakeholder needs. This book is for anyone who helps people collaborate in any setting. Not only does it offer a way to facilitate breakthroughs, it is a breakthrough in itself.

Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research recounts the strategies used by the country’s top economic policymakers to conceal their failure to recognize the housing bubble or take steps to rein it in before it grew to unprecedented levels, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and the life savings of tens of millions of people. He quashes dire warnings of looming rampant inflation and spiraling debt with solid historic evidence to the contrary—evidence that supports more stimulus, not less. With a dose of optimism, Baker outlines a thoughtful progressive program for rebuilding the economy and reshaping the financial system, including new financial transaction taxes that will reduce or eliminate economic waste while providing stimulus and incentives where and when they are most needed.

Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research recounts the strategies used by the country's top economic policymakers to conceal their failure to recognize the housing bubble or take steps to rein it in before it grew to unprecedented levels, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and the life savings of tens of millions of people. He quashes dire warnings of looming rampant inflation and spiraling debt with solid historic evidence to the contrary—evidence that supports more stimulus, not less. He reveals the evolving role of the U.S. dollar in today's global economy and lays down cogent arguments about why the dollar will fall in value. With a dose of optimism, Baker outlines a thoughtful progressive program for rebuilding the economy and reshaping the financial system, including new financial transaction taxes that will reduce or eliminate economic waste while providing stimulus and incentives where and when they are most needed.

Despite reports that the recession may be ending, the unemployment rate is sky high and home foreclosures are at record levels. It's no secret that the U.S. economy is in shambles because of the recent housing bubble. However, according to Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the people who looked the other way as the eight trillion dollar housing bubble grew unchecked are trying to rewrite history by downplaying the impact of the bubble. In False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy, he recounts the strategies used by the country's top economic policymakers to keep the American public unaware of their failure to recognize the housing bubble and to take steps to rein it in before it grew to unprecedented levels, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and the life savings for tens of millions of people.

We live in a world that needs radical transformation if our children and grandchildren are to live healthy, peace-filled lives. But where to start? Activist Roberto Vargas says the answer lies surprisingly close: at home, with our family and friends. We can apply the practice of family activism to foster what he calls familia—warm, loving connections with our relatives and with those we choose to call family—and develop the skills and attitudes we need to tackle broader problems in our community, our nation, and the world. In Family Activism, Vargas draws from his own life to show how to apply tools such as copowering communication, family councils, and unity circles to create family and community cultures that empower all of us to become more committed and skillful agents of positive change.  

We live in a world that needs radical transformation if our children and grandchildren are to live healthy, peace-filled lives. But where to start? In this inspiring new book, activist Roberto Vargas says the answer lies surprisingly close: at home, with our closest relationships. In our daily lives we experience countless opportunities to empower, inspire, and support positive change in those around us. In Family Activism Vargas explains how fostering what he calls familia—close, loving connections with our relatives and with those we choose to call family—can help us develop the skills and attitudes we need to tackle broader problems in our community, our nation, and the world. Vargas explains the ideas underlying the familia approach and the techniques that support it using examples from his own life, some of them very emotionally charged. He does more than just describe practices like the family council, unity circles, and family ceremonies—he shares how they transformed him as a husband, father, son, brother, friend, and as a committed community activist. Each chapter ends with a series of questions that will help readers understand these practices more deeply and apply them inside and outside of the family.

In Family Activism, consultant and family activist Roberto Vargas shows how, by facilitating love and mutual support within our families and friendships, all of us can take can take the first steps toward advancing positive change in our communities, culture, and society.

Faster Together
Accelerating Your Team's Productivity

There are more roadblocks to productivity today than ever before. Everyone who works must deal with countless emails, constant communication, cascading deadlines, and seemingly endless meetings. These can be managed efficiently, or they can be a huge time suck. When you're surrounded by slow-moving coworkers, you're stuck in a traffic jam of sorts. What makes the difference isn't individuals working harder or faster or smarter but “teaming well.”

You have at your disposal what Stack calls “the most powerful productivity machine in existence”: your team. Individual productivity is just the beginning of business profitability; the real winner is team productivity. A good team can accomplish more, and more quickly, than any one Lone Ranger. Yes, there are always stars—in sports, Peyton Manning, Mia Hamm, and Stephen Curry come to mind—but they couldn't do their jobs without the rest of the team doing theirs.

Bestselling author Laura Stack's FAST model mobilizes teams to be the most effective they can be, while keeping each other's best interests at heart. Using her original model, teams learn to work together Fairly, accept Accountability, apply Systems Thinking, and maximize available Technology. An interactive assessment helps you evaluate your team's current speed and rate of acceleration.

By the end of this book, you'll truly understand the abilities of your team. Team members will ask themselves, “How can I help my team go faster together?” You work to save everyone else time, and they work to save you time. For your business to win, everyone must contribute. As Stack puts it, “Team up; don't slow down!”

So, rev your team's engines, and you'll soon be roaring down the track together!

Faster Together
Accelerating Your Team's Productivity

There are more roadblocks to productivity today than ever before. Everyone who works must deal with countless emails, constant communication, cascading deadlines, and seemingly endless meetings. These can be managed efficiently, or they can be a huge time suck. When you're surrounded by slow-moving coworkers, you're stuck in a traffic jam of sorts. What makes the difference isn't individuals working harder or faster or smarter but “teaming well.”

You have at your disposal what Stack calls “the most powerful productivity machine in existence”: your team. Individual productivity is just the beginning of business profitability; the real winner is team productivity. A good team can accomplish more, and more quickly, than any one Lone Ranger. Yes, there are always stars—in sports, Peyton Manning, Mia Hamm, and Stephen Curry come to mind—but they couldn't do their jobs without the rest of the team doing theirs.

Bestselling author Laura Stack's FAST model mobilizes teams to be the most effective they can be, while keeping each other's best interests at heart. Using her original model, teams learn to work together Fairly, accept Accountability, apply Systems Thinking, and maximize available Technology. An interactive assessment helps you evaluate your team's current speed and rate of acceleration.

By the end of this book, you'll truly understand the abilities of your team. Team members will ask themselves, “How can I help my team go faster together?” You work to save everyone else time, and they work to save you time. For your business to win, everyone must contribute. As Stack puts it, “Team up; don't slow down!”

So, rev your team's engines, and you'll soon be roaring down the track together!

Teaming up shouldn't mean slowing down. Bestselling author Laura Stack's FAST model mobilizes teams to be the most effective they can be, while keeping each other's best interests at heart.

Today's workplaces require people who can "team well." Collective effort results in greater results and faster outcomes than an individual effort, in almost all instances. It takes less time to get things done with a team. Using the Four Keys in Laura Stack's original FAST model, teams will learn to work together Fairly, accept Accountability, apply Systems Thinking, and maximize available Technology. The trick is for team members to continually ask themselves, "What can I do to make my team go FAST?" Paired with an interactive assessment, each team will evaluate their current speed and path towards acceleration. If you want your business to win the race, everyone has to contribute. When done well, the team wins championships.
As Laura Stack puts it, "Team up, don't slow down."

Business communication expert and bestselling author Dianna Booher shares practical wisdom on how to write effective emails that get results and how to organize documents to gain control and increase your productivity.

Today, most business writing is email writing. We handle even our most important customer transactions, internal operations, and supplier partnerships solely by email.

Yet many of us still struggle to write emails that get results. And we often are so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of emails that we feel as though we're in email jail!

How we handle email has a large impact on the trajectory of our career. Emails can build or destroy credibility, clarify or confuse situations for our coworkers and customers, and reduce or increase security risks and legal liabilities. This book will help you master your emails and stand out as a clear, credible communicator. After all, clear, credible communicators become leaders in every industry.

With more than three decades of experience analyzing emails across various industries for corporate clients, Booher offers guidance on how to identify and stop email clutter so you can increase productivity while improving communication flow. In this book, you will learn how to:

• Compose actionable emails quickly by following Booher's philosophy of Think First, Draft Fast, and Edit Last 
• Write concise emails that get read so you get a quick response
• Organize a commonsense file storage system that helps you find documents and emails quickly to attach and send
• Present a professional image when you email prospects, customers, and coworkers
• Be aware of legal liabilities and security risks as you send and receive email

Business communication expert and bestselling author Dianna Booher shares practical wisdom on how to write effective emails that get results and how to organize documents to gain control and increase your productivity.

Today, most business writing is email writing. We handle even our most important customer transactions, internal operations, and supplier partnerships solely by email.

Yet many of us still struggle to write emails that get results. And we often are so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of emails that we feel as though we're in email jail!

How we handle email has a large impact on the trajectory of our career. Emails can build or destroy credibility, clarify or confuse situations for our coworkers and customers, and reduce or increase security risks and legal liabilities. This book will help you master your emails and stand out as a clear, credible communicator. After all, clear, credible communicators become leaders in every industry.

With more than three decades of experience analyzing emails across various industries for corporate clients, Booher offers guidance on how to identify and stop email clutter so you can increase productivity while improving communication flow. In this book, you will learn how to:

• Compose actionable emails quickly by following Booher's philosophy of Think First, Draft Fast, and Edit Last 
• Write concise emails that get read so you get a quick response
• Organize a commonsense file storage system that helps you find documents and emails quickly to attach and send
• Present a professional image when you email prospects, customers, and coworkers
• Be aware of legal liabilities and security risks as you send and receive email

Business communication expert and bestselling author Dianna Booher shares practical wisdom on how to write effective emails that get results and how to organize documents to gain control and increase your productivity.


The majority of business writing is email writing. Yet many of us still struggle to write effective emails that get results. And we feel overwhelmed by the volume of email we receive to the point where we feel like we are in email jail! In this book, you will learn how to:
•Compose actionable emails quickly by following Booher's philosophy of Think First, Draft Fast, and Edit Last
•Write brief emails so they get read and get a quick response
•Organize a common-sense file storage system that helps you find documents and emails quickly to attach and send
•Present a professional image when you email prospects, customers, and coworkers
•Be aware of legal liabilities and security risks as you send and receive email

Once you’ve discovered your strengths, you need to discover something else: your strengths can work against you. Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, and they see it in others. But they don’t see it as clearly in themselves. Mainly, they think of leadership development as working on their weaknesses. No wonder. The tools used to assess managers are not equipped to pick up on overplayed strengths—when more is not better. Nationally recognized leadership experts Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser have conducted thousands of assessments of senior executives designed to determine when their strengths serve them well—versus betray them. In this groundbreaking book, they draw on their data and practical experience to identify four fundamental leadership qualities, each positive in and of itself but each of which, if overemphasized, can seriously compromise your effectiveness. Most leaders, they’ve found, are “lopsided”—they favor certain qualities to the exclusion of others without realizing it. The trick is to keep all four in balance. Fear Your Strengths provides tools to help you become aware of your leadership leanings and excesses and provides insights for combatting the mindset that encourages them. It offers a practical psychology of leadership, a better way for leaders to calibrate their performance so that you can make sure your strengths don’t overpower you but rather move you—and your organization—forward.

Once you've discovered your strengths, you need to discover something else: your strengths can work against you.

Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, and they see it in others. But they don't see it as clearly in themselves. Mainly, they think of leadership development as working on their weaknesses. No wonder. The tools used to assess managers are not equipped to pick up on overplayed strengths—when more is not better.

Nationally recognized leadership experts Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser have conducted thousands of assessments of senior executives designed to determine when their strengths serve them well—versus betray them. In this groundbreaking book, they draw on their data and practical experience to identify four fundamental leadership qualities, each positive in and of itself but each of which, if overemphasized, can seriously compromise your effectiveness. Most leaders, they've found, are “lopsided”—they favor certain qualities to the exclusion of others without realizing it. The trick is to keep all four in balance.

Fear Your Strengths provides tools to help you become aware of your leadership leanings and excesses and provides insights for combatting the mindset that encourages them. It offers a practical psychology of leadership, a better way for leaders to calibrate their performance so that you can make sure your strengths don't overpower you but rather move you—and your organization—forward.

Leaders have countless resources and books aimed at helping them discover their strengths–which is fantastic–but none of them address what happens when these strengths are inevitably overplayed and start to do more damage than good, or what to do to rectify that dilemma. Until now.

Take the First Step Toward Building a Strong Foundation in Federal Acquisition!
Federal Acquisition: Key Issues and Guidance is an essential guide to understanding and working within the complex world of federal government contracting. It offers brief but comprehensive explanations of the major phases and essential tasks in the contracting process. Written in a clear and easy-to-understand style, this resource provides the perfect foundation for building a thorough understanding of federal contracting.
Author Paula Compton focuses on the most problematic areas of federal contracting, highlighting the deficiencies cited most often by the Government Accountability Office and Inspector General audits and reports, such as:
• Not performing market research
• Inadequate independent government cost estimates
• Violation of the bona fide needs rule
• Insufficient statements of work
• Inadequate price or cost analysis
Anyone new to government acquisition will find that reading this book is the ideal first step on the path to understanding the federal acquisition process. Seasoned contract professionals will find it an excellent quick review.

Take the First Step Toward Building a Strong Foundation in Federal Acquisition!
Federal Acquisition: Key Issues and Guidance is an essential guide to understanding and working within the complex world of federal government contracting. It offers brief but comprehensive explanations of the major phases and essential tasks in the contracting process. Written in a clear and easy-to-understand style, this resource provides the perfect foundation for building a thorough understanding of federal contracting.
Author Paula Compton focuses on the most problematic areas of federal contracting, highlighting the deficiencies cited most often by the Government Accountability Office and Inspector General audits and reports, such as:
• Not performing market research
• Inadequate independent government cost estimates
• Violation of the bona fide needs rule
• Insufficient statements of work
• Inadequate price or cost analysis
Anyone new to government acquisition will find that reading this book is the ideal first step on the path to understanding the federal acquisition process. Seasoned contract professionals will find it an excellent quick review.