Every book in the Berrett-Koehler catalog, in one place. Browse our full collection of titles spanning leadership, management, workplace culture, social change, and beyond.
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Drawing on life lessons from management legend Peter Drucker, journalist and scholar Bruce Rosenstein shows knowledge workers how personal and professional diversification is the key to navigating our "flat world" of zero job security, information overload, portable skills, and 24/7 work expectations.
Award-winning guide to transitioning leadership and creating lasting business impact.
Winner of the NYC Big Book Award in Business-Entrepreneurship & Small Business and silver winner of the Nonfiction Book Awards, this acclaimed handbook shows you how to transition leadership, implement shared ownership, and preserve your organization's core values—setting the stage for your business to thrive for generations to come.
This visionary but practical guide offers mission-driven business owners a roadmap for ensuring their company's lasting impact, building leadership internally, and fostering participatory management. Through inspiring real-world stories of B Corps, worker co-ops, ESOPs, and employee ownership trusts, this book demonstrates how to create resilient organizations that benefit workers and communities.
Drawing on his 50-year journey with South Mountain Company and extensive research, Abrams outlines five critical transitions for mission-driven businesses to become what he calls a CommonWealth company:
As 3,000,000 US small business founders over 55 prepare to retire, $10 trillion in assets will change hands over the next two decades. This timely guide shows how to preserve your company's mission and legacy while empowering the next generation.
Winner of the NYC Big Book Award in Business-Entrepreneurship & Small Business and silver winner of the Nonfiction Book Awards, this acclaimed handbook shows you how to transition leadership, implement shared ownership, and preserve your organization's core values—setting the stage for your business to thrive for generations to come.
This visionary but practical guide offers mission-driven business owners a roadmap for ensuring their company's lasting impact, building leadership internally, and fostering participatory management. Through inspiring real-world stories of B Corps, worker co-ops, ESOPs, and employee ownership trusts, this book demonstrates how to create resilient organizations that benefit workers and communities.
Drawing on his 50-year journey with South Mountain Company and extensive research, Abrams outlines five critical transitions for mission-driven businesses to become what he calls a CommonWealth company:
- From founder to next-generation leadership
- From sole ownership to widely shared
- From hierarchical control to democratic management
- From unprotected mission to preserved purpose
- From business-as-usual to B Corp force for good
As 3,000,000 US small business founders over 55 prepare to retire, $10 trillion in assets will change hands over the next two decades. This timely guide shows how to preserve your company's mission and legacy while empowering the next generation.
The workforce crisis is here-and retaining your best employees is no longer optional.
In Targeting Turnover, Dick Finnegan draws on decades of experience and groundbreaking data to reveal a stark truth: the US is running out of workers. As baby boomers retire and birthrates fall, the only sustainable path forward is to keep the good employees you already have.
This book offers a proven, research-backed strategy for doing just that-by building trust between employees and their immediate supervisors.
Forget one-size-fits-all solutions like pay and perks. The top predictor of retention and engagement is whether employees trust their boss. Yet most first-line leaders have never been trained-or held accountable-for building that trust.
Finnegan delivers a call to action: make employee retention an executive-driven priority and equip your leaders to lead differently.
You will learn how to do the following:
• Use stay interviews and practical tools to reduce turnover
• Hold managers accountable for engagement and retention
• Understand the real costs of attrition-and how to reverse them
• Apply forecasting and metrics to drive leadership behavior
At a time when there are fewer workers and more complex employee needs, Targeting Turnover gives leaders the tools to stabilize teams, improve performance, and face the workforce future with confidence.
In Targeting Turnover, Dick Finnegan draws on decades of experience and groundbreaking data to reveal a stark truth: the US is running out of workers. As baby boomers retire and birthrates fall, the only sustainable path forward is to keep the good employees you already have.
This book offers a proven, research-backed strategy for doing just that-by building trust between employees and their immediate supervisors.
Forget one-size-fits-all solutions like pay and perks. The top predictor of retention and engagement is whether employees trust their boss. Yet most first-line leaders have never been trained-or held accountable-for building that trust.
Finnegan delivers a call to action: make employee retention an executive-driven priority and equip your leaders to lead differently.
You will learn how to do the following:
• Use stay interviews and practical tools to reduce turnover
• Hold managers accountable for engagement and retention
• Understand the real costs of attrition-and how to reverse them
• Apply forecasting and metrics to drive leadership behavior
At a time when there are fewer workers and more complex employee needs, Targeting Turnover gives leaders the tools to stabilize teams, improve performance, and face the workforce future with confidence.
Just as American educators, parents, and policymakers reconsider the No Child Left Behind Act and its heavy emphasis on standardized testing, Todd Farley's Making the Grades raises questions about the validity of large-scale educational assessments. His behind-the-scenes account of the for-profit testing industry is provocative, hilarious, and instructive.
THE WAYS WE GO about changing organizations usually don't work, asserts Geoff Bellman. Our underlying assumptions predetermine the results and preclude the broad success we so desperately seek. Change efforts often end up off-track because of small expectations. What is needed are grand expectations, so big that they cannot be realized in many lifetimes. It is only when people awaken to and work toward these immense purposes that they have the chance of finding fulfillment. Organizations are the perfect place to do this-these "beasts" which we create and curse, love and hate, that are so essential to our lives. In The Beauty of the Beast, Bellman shows how we can explore our huge potential and shift our daily organizational focus to one of long life and fulfillment-and in the process redesign our organizations for tomorrow.
Bellman examines why we keep creating these creatures that fall so far short of our dreams for them. He reveals how to recognize the beast in ourselves, showing how organizational control and hierarchy multiply our natural and less constructive inclinations many times over. He points out that the problem is not the existence of organizations but in the ways we imagine them.
Bellman asks us to consider what we want to pass on to future generations, helps us imagine the organizations we would be proud to create, and challenges us to take action from where we are today. He offers twenty renewal assertions to help us in redesigning organizations for tomorrow. These solid guides (with related questions for work groups) open the organization to new possibilities, helping us to embrace the organizational world as it really is while working hard to change it. In the process we will also change ourselves, as we ultimately feel less distant from-and more responsible for-creating those troubling structures we love to vent about.
The Beauty of the Beast. will help people see their daily work in a new and larger perspective. It will help them embrace the real organizational world while they work at renewing it. And it will help people to recognize the choices available to them-and to exercise those choices for positive results.
Bellman examines why we keep creating these creatures that fall so far short of our dreams for them. He reveals how to recognize the beast in ourselves, showing how organizational control and hierarchy multiply our natural and less constructive inclinations many times over. He points out that the problem is not the existence of organizations but in the ways we imagine them.
Bellman asks us to consider what we want to pass on to future generations, helps us imagine the organizations we would be proud to create, and challenges us to take action from where we are today. He offers twenty renewal assertions to help us in redesigning organizations for tomorrow. These solid guides (with related questions for work groups) open the organization to new possibilities, helping us to embrace the organizational world as it really is while working hard to change it. In the process we will also change ourselves, as we ultimately feel less distant from-and more responsible for-creating those troubling structures we love to vent about.
The Beauty of the Beast. will help people see their daily work in a new and larger perspective. It will help them embrace the real organizational world while they work at renewing it. And it will help people to recognize the choices available to them-and to exercise those choices for positive results.
Based on the work of best-selling author Parker Palmer and his Center for Courage & Renewal, this exploration of the inner life of leadership shows how to become a better leader by orienting yourself, your life, and your work toward greater courage, wholeness, and integrity.
Leadership demands courage. This book is about a way of life that names and explores this important resource and shows leaders how to access and draw upon courage in all that they do. It has its roots in the work and thought of Parker J. Palmer, who, over forty years of teaching, speaking, and writing has explored the human spirit--what he has called "the inner landscape"--and its role in life and leadership. The book offers specific practices developed by the Center for Courage & Renewal to build courage in seven key areas: the courage to become self-aware, to answer your calling, to question and be a deep listener, to see both/and and as a whole, to choose wisely, to connect and trust in each other, and to stay in the game...or leave. This book inspires leaders to reach inward to discover and trust in their true self and reach outward to bring their unique self into the world.
Leadership demands courage. This book is about a way of life that names and explores this important resource and shows leaders how to access and draw upon courage in all that they do. It has its roots in the work and thought of Parker J. Palmer, who, over forty years of teaching, speaking, and writing has explored the human spirit--what he has called "the inner landscape"--and its role in life and leadership. The book offers specific practices developed by the Center for Courage & Renewal to build courage in seven key areas: the courage to become self-aware, to answer your calling, to question and be a deep listener, to see both/and and as a whole, to choose wisely, to connect and trust in each other, and to stay in the game...or leave. This book inspires leaders to reach inward to discover and trust in their true self and reach outward to bring their unique self into the world.
When leaders learn how to manage the emotions and drama in their organizations, conflict can be made healthier. Nate Regier uses the Drama Triangle Model and the Compassion Cycle to show leaders how to exercise compassion, not passion, and turn the negative energy of conflict into a positive energy for increased productivity and growth.
“Conflict without Casualties fills a gap by showing leaders at any level how to leverage positive conflict. Practical, insightful, challenging, relevant.
-Dan Pink, New York Times bestselling author
Most organizations are terrified of conflict in the workplace, seeing it as a sign of trouble. But Nate Regier says conflict is really just a kind of energy and can be used in positive or negative ways. Handled incorrectly, conflict becomes drama, which is costly to companies, teams, and relationships at all levels. Avoiding, managing, or reducing conflict is a limited alternative. Instead, Regier explores the interpersonal dynamics that perpetuate drama in organizations through a concept called the Drama Triangle and offers an alternative: the Compassion Cycle. The Compassion Cycle allows leaders to balance compassion and accountability, transforming conflict into a growth experience that enables organizations to achieve significant gains in energy, productivity, engagement, and satisfaction in relationships. Provocative and illuminating, the concepts Regier shares will turn conflict from an experience to be avoided into a partner for positive change.
“Conflict without Casualties fills a gap by showing leaders at any level how to leverage positive conflict. Practical, insightful, challenging, relevant.
-Dan Pink, New York Times bestselling author
Most organizations are terrified of conflict in the workplace, seeing it as a sign of trouble. But Nate Regier says conflict is really just a kind of energy and can be used in positive or negative ways. Handled incorrectly, conflict becomes drama, which is costly to companies, teams, and relationships at all levels. Avoiding, managing, or reducing conflict is a limited alternative. Instead, Regier explores the interpersonal dynamics that perpetuate drama in organizations through a concept called the Drama Triangle and offers an alternative: the Compassion Cycle. The Compassion Cycle allows leaders to balance compassion and accountability, transforming conflict into a growth experience that enables organizations to achieve significant gains in energy, productivity, engagement, and satisfaction in relationships. Provocative and illuminating, the concepts Regier shares will turn conflict from an experience to be avoided into a partner for positive change.
Based on rigorous research of twenty-three real companies-and the unique practices they are using to encourage innovation and spur growth-DRIVING GROWTH THROUGH INNOVATION by bestselling author Robert Tucker (Managing the Future - over 75,000 copies sold) offers a practical but comprehensive approach for designing and implementing an enterprise-wide innovation strategy.
John Perkins's sensational New York Times bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (more than 300,000 sold) revealed just the tip of the iceberg of the secret world of economic hit men and the web of global corruption. Now more economic hit men and investigators tell the whole shocking story.
Leaders, coaches, and mentors are charged with helping others to stretch their limits. However, few people enjoy hearing the messy-and sometimes painful-feedback it takes to overcome a personal obstacle. Marcia Reynolds shows how to use the discomfort zone to help others grow, not suffer.
Milton Friedman's “financial capitalism” business model, which focuses exclusively on maximizing returns to shareholders, has caused tremendous harm to people, planet, and even profits, argue Mars, Inc., executives Bruno Roche and Jay Jakub. They advocate a detailed, field-tested alternative that takes a broader view and enables businesses to do well while doing good.
For the past fifty years, the business world has been dominated by the Milton Friedman “financial capitalism” economic model, which preaches that it is the “sole social responsibility of business to maximize profit for distribution to shareholders.” This one-dimensional focus represents a grossly incomplete view of reality-businesses need to pay attention to many other factors if they are to thrive and endure-and has resulted in increasing global economic dysfunction, widening inequality, and environmental destruction.
In this new book, Roche and Jakub offer a new model that is built around detailed metrics to measure and track performance in all forms of capital, including social, human, and natural, as well as financial. And this is not simply theory: the model has been extensively field-tested in live business pilots in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. It is delivering superior measurable performance across the different forms of capital, including generating more profit than a profit maximization approach. Recent high-profile books like Capital in the Twenty-First Century have exposed the shortcomings of today's financial capitalism model, but this book goes far beyond by describing a well-developed, proven alternative.
For the past fifty years, the business world has been dominated by the Milton Friedman “financial capitalism” economic model, which preaches that it is the “sole social responsibility of business to maximize profit for distribution to shareholders.” This one-dimensional focus represents a grossly incomplete view of reality-businesses need to pay attention to many other factors if they are to thrive and endure-and has resulted in increasing global economic dysfunction, widening inequality, and environmental destruction.
In this new book, Roche and Jakub offer a new model that is built around detailed metrics to measure and track performance in all forms of capital, including social, human, and natural, as well as financial. And this is not simply theory: the model has been extensively field-tested in live business pilots in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. It is delivering superior measurable performance across the different forms of capital, including generating more profit than a profit maximization approach. Recent high-profile books like Capital in the Twenty-First Century have exposed the shortcomings of today's financial capitalism model, but this book goes far beyond by describing a well-developed, proven alternative.
Tim Mohin argues that environmentalists can do as much good for the earth working "inside" the corporate system as by protesting from the outside. This book outlines how to work in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), either as a new career, of as a leader in a CSR initiative.
Nationally syndicated radio host and bestselling author Thom Hartmann exposes the covert war conservatives, and corporations are waging against America's middle class-a war that's reducing the rest of us to a politically impotent working poor. This book asks: How did this happen? Who's benefiting? And how can we stop it?
In this hard-hitting and controversial exposé, activist, writer, and former Ford Foundation officer Michael Edwards critiques the ubiquitous and deeply flawed myth that we can achieve real social change by making civil society run more like a business.
You are not in charge and you want to make a difference: that is the dilemma. You may not know who is in charge in today's changing, temporary, and virtual organizations, but you know you are not! You are searching for ways to contribute through the work you do and gain some personal satisfaction in the process. This book can help you do just that.
In this new edition of his classic book, Geoff Bellman shows readers how to make things happen in any organization regardless of their formal position. The new edition has been written for a wider audience, including people in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, paid and volunteer workers, managers and individual contributors, contract and freelance workers. More than seventy percent of the material is brand new, including new examples, new chapters, new exercises, and much more.
In this new edition of his classic book, Geoff Bellman shows readers how to make things happen in any organization regardless of their formal position. The new edition has been written for a wider audience, including people in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, paid and volunteer workers, managers and individual contributors, contract and freelance workers. More than seventy percent of the material is brand new, including new examples, new chapters, new exercises, and much more.
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
Winner, 2025 Good Business Book Awards (Business – Management)
Finalist, 2025 IAN Book Awards (Business/Leadership/Management)
What if the most powerful growth strategy in business today isn’t AI or cost-cutting—but your people?
In an era defined by talent shortages, employee disengagement, DEI backlash, and pressure for measurable ROI, this groundbreaking leadership book delivers a bold answer: share power to unlock performance.
Based on research from more than 1,200 companies—including Walmart, Google, and JPMorgan Chase—this data-driven business book reveals how employee empowerment, inclusive leadership, and human capital strategy drive profitability, retention, and long-term growth. For the first time, the research quantifies the financial impact of investing in people.
Jackson offers 9 proven strategies:
For CEOs, CHROs, HR leaders, and managers, this practical guide shows how equity and profits rise together—proving that people-first leadership is a competitive advantage.
Winner, 2025 Good Business Book Awards (Business – Management)
Finalist, 2025 IAN Book Awards (Business/Leadership/Management)
What if the most powerful growth strategy in business today isn’t AI or cost-cutting—but your people?
In an era defined by talent shortages, employee disengagement, DEI backlash, and pressure for measurable ROI, this groundbreaking leadership book delivers a bold answer: share power to unlock performance.
Based on research from more than 1,200 companies—including Walmart, Google, and JPMorgan Chase—this data-driven business book reveals how employee empowerment, inclusive leadership, and human capital strategy drive profitability, retention, and long-term growth. For the first time, the research quantifies the financial impact of investing in people.
Jackson offers 9 proven strategies:
- Centering employee voice
- Building mutualistic, high-trust workplaces
- Advancing intersectional inclusion
- Reimagining employee benefits
- Activating frontline leaders
- Hiring STARs (Skilled Through Alternative Routes)
- Developing deep talent benches
- Using human capital reporting as competitive strategy
- Practicing distributed leadership
For CEOs, CHROs, HR leaders, and managers, this practical guide shows how equity and profits rise together—proving that people-first leadership is a competitive advantage.