Books

If management theories and systems (think: "Management by Objectives" and "Process Optimization") are the religion, consultants are the high-priests. With years as a top Fortune 100 executive and, yes, management consultant, Karen Phelan exposes the whole game. Takeaway: consultants have forgotten that business are made up of real people, not numbers. Empathy, not MBA's, is the real future of management.

The fact is, because they're the ones actually doing the day-to-day work front-line employees see a great many problems and opportunities that their managers don't. But most organizations do very poorly at tapping into this extraordinary potential source of revenue-enhancing, savings-generating ideas.
Ideas Are Free sets out a roadmap for totally integrating ideas and idea management into the way companies are structured and operate. Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder draw on their ten years experience with more than three hundred organizations in fifteen countries to show precisely how to design a system to take advantage of this virtually free, perpetually renewing font of innovation.
Robinson and Schroeder deal with two fundamental principles of managing ideas that are highly counterintuitive - the importance of going after small ideas rather than big ones, and the problems with the most common reward schemes and how to avoid them. They describe how to make ideas part of everyone's job, and how to set up and run an effective process for handling ideas-how to take a good idea system and make it great. And they show how good idea systems have a profound impact on an organization's culture. At the end of each chapter they provide "Guerrilla Tactics for the Idea Revolutionary", actions to promote ideas that any manager can take on his or her own authority, and that require little or no resources.

The only book on raising startup capital written by a professional who has himself raised over a billion dollars that goes deeper into the standard "how-to" process of raising capital to highlight and reveals those hidden factors that no one but a true insider would know to look for.

Leading thinker and change consultant Peggy Holman provides leaders, trainers, and other agents of change grappling with disruption with a theory of "emergence" and tools for fostering it in organizations.

A microfinance industry insider offers a shocking account of corruption and betrayal of the poor by an industry supposedly dedicated to doing good. The author is one of the rare field workers who has seen microloans work at the ground level; he concludes that predatory lending and profit pressure are causing most of them to do far more harm than good. This is the sad tale of a good idea gone horribly bad.

This is the first book on social laboratories, a new methodology for addressing complex societal challenges. The book includes case examples of how this new methodology has proven successful over the past decade in bringing people together in many nations to make breakthroughs in solving such problems as poverty, ethnic conflict, and environmental issues.

“Fear and doubt are the two greatest enemies of high performance in the workplace. This powerful book shows you how to instill more and more courage and confidence in every person, releasing personal potential you didn't know you had available.”
-Brian Tracy, author of Eat That Frog!


The hardest part of a manager's job isn't staying organized, meeting deliverable dates, or staying on budget. It's dealing with people who are too comfortable doing things the way they've always been done and too afraid to do things differently-workers who are, as Bill Treasurer puts it, too “comfeartable.” They fail to exert themselves any more than they have to and make their businesses dangerously safe.

Treasurer, a courage-building pioneer, proposes a bold antidote: courage. He lays out a step-by-step process that treats courage as a skill that can be developed and strengthened. Treasurer differentiates what he calls the Three Buckets of Courage: TRY Courage, having the guts to take initiative; TRUST Courage, being willing to follow the lead of others; and TELL Courage, being honest and assertive with coworkers and bosses.

Aristotle said that courage is the first virtue because it makes all other virtues possible. It's as true in business as it is in life. With more courage, workers gain the confidence to take on harder projects, embrace company changes with more enthusiasm, and extend themselves in ways that will benefit their careers and their company.

Most conversations to get things done at work are of one of four types - initiative conversations, conversations for understanding, performance conversations, or conversations for closure - but they are often done poorly or misused. This book shows managers and employees how to use the right conversation at the right time, plan and start each conversation well, and finish each conversation effectively.

This exposé of the investment world shows how most popular investment strategies are based on confusion and deception and do not work-and reveals the few, simple, low-cost, easy-to-follow strategies that do work.

Well-intentioned diversity programs are failing to create true workplace equality; Martin Davidson provides a new model for the future that makes "leveraging difference" a critical business strategy, not just politically correct window dressing.

The idea for this book came to Martin Davidson during a disarmingly honest conversation with a CFO he worked with. “Look,” the executive said, clearly troubled. “I know we can get a diverse group of people around the table. But so what? What difference does it really make to getting bottom-line results?”

Answering the “so what?” led Davidson to explore the flaws in how companies typically manage diversity. They don't integrate diversity into their overall business strategy. They focus on differences that have little impact on their business. And often their diversity efforts end up hindering the professional development of the very people they were designed to help.

Davidson explains how what he calls Leveraging Difference™ turns persistent diversity problems into solutions that drive business results. Difference becomes a powerful source of sustainable competitive advantage instead of a distracting mandate handed down from HR.

To begin with, leaders must identify the differences most important to achieving organizational goals, even if the differences aren't the obvious ones. The second challenge is to help employees work together to understand the ways these differences matter to the business. Finally, leaders need to experiment with how to use these relevant differences to get things done. Davidson provides compelling examples of how organizations have tackled each of these challenges.

Ultimately this is a book about leadership. As with any other strategic imperative, leaders need to take an active role-drive rather than just delegate. Successfully leveraging difference can be what distinguishes an ordinary organization from an extraordinary one.

Sam Horn explores in this work what it takes to really connect with others and communicate clearly and compellingly. We're taught how to read and write in school; but we're not taught how to genuinely engage people and create mutually rewarding interactions. We're not taught how to earn people's interest so they voluntarily give us their attention, friendship and business. This work teaches you how.

In an impatient world of INFObesity, people don't want more information; they want to be intrigued and they want to be intrigued fast. They want to know, “How is this relevant and useful to me? Why are you worth my valuable time, mind, and dime?”

Sam Horn has developed a disruptive eight-stage INTRIGUE process that teaches readers how to replace boring, overlong, one-way communications with concise, compelling, mutually rewarding two-way interactions that add value for all involved. Given that goldfish have longer attention spans than humans (nine seconds to our eight), this is a must-read for every executive, entrepreneur, sales and marketing professional, and nonprofit leader who wants to build meaningful relationships with others.

The bottom line? If you can't get people's favorable attention, you'll never get their business. This book has been called an updated version of Dale Carnegie's classic How to Win Friends and Influence People for our digital device era. Readers will appreciate these innovative but proven ways to win respect and motivate people to take action now, whether that's to hire you, refer you, fund you, or say yes to you.

The service sector has grown to become 80% of the US economy, yet it's poised for a revolution in personalization, big data, and complexity. How can companies design a strategy to compete?

The service sector-any company not involved in the production of products-is now 80% of the US economy, and growing part of the world economy. Written by the three leading scholars of service sector management, this book seeks to provide a roadmap for the design and delivery of winning services for leaders and managers entrusted with the task in the years to come.

The authors review their own seminal work on service management, testing the durability of concepts they've helped develop over the past thirty years. Then they move on to look at how better results will be achieved in the future-what needs to be done to create great places to work, design efficient and enjoyable service experiences, use technology to improve service delivery, and engage and retain customers. Using examples of dozens of companies in a wide variety of industries, the authors present a narrative of remarkable successes, unnecessary failures, and future promise.

In today's knowledge-based society, where intellectual capital is an organization's most competitive asset, learning is serious business. Effective Training Strategies offers a comprehensive approach to creating a focused philosophy of learning, choosing the best approach to planning programs and activities, and developing appropriate systems for assessing results.

Davis and Davis describe seven powerful training strategies. They provide a detailed description of each strategy-the well-researched learning theory behind it, illustrative examples of it in practice, its strengths and weaknesses, and side-by-side comparisons showing its appropriate uses-and demonstrate the strategy in action, showing how the facilitator can use it effectively to maximize learning.

Based on well-researched theories of learning, this book is rich in examples from over 65 worldwide leaders-including Eastman Kodak, Motorola, SHARP, United Airlines, Norsk Hydro, ABB Atom, Boeing, TELEBRAS, and the U.S. Air Force.

Coauthored by the legendary, bestselling author Ken Blanchard, Go Team! (over 22,000 copies sold) explains how too many people operate in teams that perform well below their potential. Go Team outlines a 3-step process that can benefit work teams, project teams, problem solving teams, leadership teams, and more.

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?

PEOPLE IN ORGANIZATIONs of all types-public and private, large and small-have for years had to wrestle with the formidable challenge of successfully planning and implementing changes in how they do business. Today, the demand for faster approaches is increasing across a broad spectrum of organizations in business and society, as they are faced daily with an array of change mandates-new business strategy development and deployment, merger and acquisition integration, work re-design, community organizing, and more. Traditional command and control structures and processes no longer enable and mobilize people in organizations-the rapid rate of change in the environment demands new and different ways for organizations to respond.
Whole-Scale Change: Unleashing the Magic in Organizations combines systems theory and practical methodology to offer a proven, flexible approach that leads to aligned action by hundreds, even thousands of people-and creates powerful processes for change. Shattering the old paradigm about how long it takes organizations to change, the book shows how to rapidly engage the whole system in meeting organizational agility and flexibility demands. It offers adaptable, repeatable strategies for different settings and convening issues through the authors' unique Whole-Scale approach-which has been successfully applied in diverse businesses and industries, the service sector, health care, education, government, other nonprofits, and communities throughout the world.
Imagine everyone in your organization pulling in the same direction, everyone with the same information, acting quickly to solve the problems and confront the issues facing your organization. Whole-Scale Change provides not only the theories and principles underlying the approach, but also the practical methods, tools, and road maps for unleashing the energy and combining the power and wisdom of all the people in an organization.