Books

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.

Are you asking for what you want or just taking what you are given? Chances are, it's the latter. Linda Swindling will teach you how to ask outrageously-and get the results you want.


Not getting what you want or living with what someone decides you deserve is exhausting and dispiriting. Linda Swindling provides principles, tactics, and strategies to help you show up powerfully to negotiate for the best deals at work and in life with confidence and integrity.

Asking outrageously does not mean being obnoxious or taking advantage of others. It means making a big ask-if you're going to ask anyway, why not be bold? In her former life as an attorney, Swindling found she was doing this all the time for her clients but was puzzled to realize she rarely did it for herself. She describes a straightforward, three-step process: (1) determine what you want, (2) approach those who have the authority to grant your wish, and (3) feel the fear and ask anyway. With a wealth of practical tools-checklists, suggested questions, case studies, and an online assessment so you can evaluate how well you ask now-this book helps you overcome blockages and inhibitions to reach breakthrough results and ask for more than you believe is possible.

In this extensively revised new edition of one of the pioneering and bestselling books in the growing category of personal branding books, star business speakers and consultants McNally and Speak provide an inspiring and practical guide to how people can achieve more of what they want by developing and communicating a strong, entirely authentic, personal brand. Over 50,000 copies of the 1st edition sold.

Looking back to the ancient knowledge of the Indian scripture the Upanishads, Ram Nidumolu finds the core philosophy of sustainable leadership that's needed today. In this remarkable book, he uses a powerful parable from these scriptures to create a business vision that our world desperately needs.

How can the world's nearly 3 billion who live on $2 a day or less be lifted out of poverty? Paul Polak (bestselling author of Out of Poverty) and the organizations he has founded have pioneered methods that have already helped nearly 20 million of the world's poorest people to get out of poverty without charitable or government handouts. Now Polak teams with social entrepreneur and author Mal Warwick (bestselling author of Values-Driven Business) to reveal the keys for entrepreneurs, businesses, and others to replicate this success and expand its scale to include hundreds of millions of the poorest of the poor around the world.

Traditional pathways to delivering health care to the global poor are failing. Five million children die each year before their fifth birthday due to lack of basic health education, services, or low-cost treatments. Bing and Epstein show how focusing micro-innovations at the level of care is the way to end these grim health statistics.

Based on the bestseller Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, this workbook is a practical guide that helps readers ask the right questions for successful change.

In the bestselling classic Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, Marilee Adams introduces the Question Thinking method, which uses questions to help people make wiser choices, find solutions, and transform their lives. This standalone workbook puts the ideas of the original book into action and makes them easy to implement.

Along with summarizing the concepts in Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, the workbook includes plenty of tools, warm-up exercises, and learning scenarios that help readers apply Question Thinking in their personal and professional lives. Readers will learn how to use the Choice Map, identify and switch from a Judger to Learner mindset, and facilitate effective meetings and conversations. Thoroughly engaging, the book has a strong narrative voice that makes the reader feel a deep connection to the author and is designed to deliver tangible benefits.

They Just Don't Get It! explores an all-too-common dilemma: when people around us just don't "get" our ideas. Through a charming illustrated fable, it tells the story of Julie Buffet, a hard-charging advertising executive with what she thinks is a fantastic idea for a new campaign. But nobody gets it-not the client, not her boss, and not her coworkers. And Julie can't understand why.
We have all found ourselves in this situation at one time or another, and we typically see this problem as a failing on the part of the other party. They Just Don't Get It! shows that when they don't get it, the problem is really with ourselves. And it shows how we can finally really get it.
If you've ever wondered why your ideas haven't been received or acted on in the way you expected, this book will reveal your own personal responsibility in helping others understand your intentions. Examining the root source of the problem, it details five keys to "getting it"-Take Responsibility; Practice Humility; Begin with Questions; Remain Open; and Believe They Can. These five simple steps will enable you to overcome the problem, and prevent it from happening in the future.
They Just Don't Get It! will teach you how to communicate your ideas better, and how to motivate others to pull together and achieve your highest goals in any situation.

The Pebble and the Avalanche shows how the Internet, the auto industry, music downloading, and other rapidly evolving industries are all connected by the same dynamic -- disaggregation. Moshe Yudkowsky shows why this dynamic is crucial to survival in the 21st century marketplace, and how you can use it to bring about change in your industry.

Disaggregation means taking things apart -- for example, the break-up of AT&T, which greatly improved phone service. But there are more subtle examples. Separating information from the storage medium -- digital music doesn't rely on records, tapes, or CDs; digital photographs don't require paper; and digital movies don't need film -- has enabled millions of people to create and share their work (and others') far more easily than ever before, with enormous implications.

Think of this process as an avalanche: at the top of a mountain, rocks are jammed together in a solid mass. Pry some of these rocks loose and you will unleash a tremendous outpouring of energy that sweeps everything from its path. The same thing happens in technology: with the right innovation, you can pry the pieces of technology apart and unleash an outpouring of powerful ideas that shake apart whole industries.

Yudkowsky details exactly how disaggregation works, describing five different ways of taking things apart, and the many ways it can be used to generate new innovations. The Pebble and the Avalanche provides strategies for successfully adapting to a disaggregation revolution, and points towards the future, identifying several industries that are about to be completely transformed by disaggregation.

This book has a simple message for business leaders: you help yourselves by helping the poor. If the poor can gain a stake in the economy they can buy your products and put money in the banks. Increasing poor people's financial literacy will help them move into the middle class and enrich everyone, rich and poor alike.

When we talk about how to save our struggling economy, Operation HOPE founder and successful businessman John Hope Bryant says that for far too long, we've been having the wrong conversation. Fully 70% of the American economy is generated by consumer spending. If we want capitalism to work, we have to make it work for the poor.

“We must make financial literacy – teaching each and every one of our children the language of money – the new civil rights issue for the twenty-first century America,” Bryant writes. In the book, Bryant exposes the historical roots of poverty, explains why the solutions tried so far have held the poor back from getting “the memo” about financial literacy, and offers a way forward. He lays out what he calls a Marshall Plan for our times, a series of straightforward, actionable steps to build financial literacy and expand opportunity so that the poor can join the middle class.
Praised by Dr. Bernice A. King of the King Center and former President Bill Clinton, John Hope Bryant's book aspires to create a thriving economy that works not just for the 1% or even the 99%, but for the 100%.

All countries signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. This book is part of an ambitious project to make the fundamental human rights in the Universal Declaration enforceable in the courts of all countries by 2048, the 100th anniversary of the Declaration's signing.

You often have to consider how a decision you make now will impact your future. Most of us just make our best guess. Peter Newwirth says there's a better way. He takes the idea of “present value,” developed by actuaries, and turns it into a practical and simple tool that anyone can use to evaluate possible future outcomes and make better decisions now.

Our economic crisis has shown that we need a fundamentally new kind of business leader-able to make ethical decisions in the face of strategic unknowns, serve the environment and society while also serving the needs of investors and shareholders, and understand how their personality and the social context in which they operate impacts their leadership. This book lays out a compelling model for creating and developing these new entrepreneurial leaders.

Deliver razor-sharp points in all of your work communications! This updated classic enables you to captivate any audience, create meaningful impact, and make your words matter.

Every time you communicate, you're trying to move someone to feel, think, and act. You're trying to make a point. But very few communicators-regardless of their purpose or position-know their points, have true points, or even understand what a point is, rendering themselves pointless.

In this expanded second edition of the bestselling Get to the Point!, Joel Schwartzberg draws on his decades of experience as a strategic communications executive and public speaking coach to deliver a masterclass in high-impact communications for the digital age.

The new edition features a substantial amount of new content, including surprising research, real-world insight, and actionable tips that meet the modern needs of professionals up and down the organizational chart.

Using his trademark encouraging and often humorous voice, Schwartzberg helps you:

•Understand the Power of Points: Learn how points outperform topics, themes, and observations.
•Identify and Elevate Your Key Points: Create impactful speeches and slide presentations, emails and work chats, and Zoom and in-person meeting communications
•Distill Complex Ideas: Transform complicated concepts into crystal-clear messages.
•Boost Leadership Perceptions: Enhance impressions of competence and confidnce.
•Hook Audiences: Start and finish with compelling openings and closings.
•Tell Impactful Stories: Use stories, examples, and data in a way that highlights your points, not distract from them.
•Conquer Public Speaking Jitters: Use proven techniques to stay calm and in control
•Leverage AI Tools: Use artificial intelligence to support-not replace-effective communication
•Avoid Common Pitfalls: Sidestep the landmines that derail most communicators.

Whether you're a C-suite executive, salesperson, scientist, or student, Get to the Point! is a blueprint for evolving your written and spoken communications from informing to inspiring and pointless to powerful.

Don't just share ideas and make an impression. Champion your points and make a difference!

Video games can actually be good for you…and Rusel DeMaria (whose books on video games have sold 2 million copies) proves it.

In this insider's analysis of the increasingly violent and uncreative video gaming industry, he offers a roadmap for parents, educators, gamers, and industry insiders to leverage the inherent potential of games to promote positive personal and social change.

Most companies put values statements on their websites and in their annual reports, but as recent scandals and financial crises have shown, the practice of values is dying in organizations. Edward Freeman and Ellen Auster argue that the problem is values are imposed from the top down and offer a process for involving employees in values creation through ruthlessly honest organization-wide conversations.

Studies have consistently shown that employees are deeply cynical about corporate values statements. (Enron had a great one.) The reason, argue top scholars and consultants Edward Freeman and Ellen Auster, is that most companies' values are handed down from on high with no employee input. This practically invites disconnects between intention and reality-and the results are disengagement, lower productivity, less innovation, and even outright corruption.

Freeman and Auster here offer a process, Values through Conversation, that makes values living, dynamic, and evolving, not just static words nobody really believes in. Based on scrupulous research and experience, VTC gives employees a safe space to speak honestly and freely about what's happening in the organization, what is important to them, and what values would have real meaning and impact. The book focuses on four core values areas: introspective (who we are), historical (what we've stood for), connectedness (how we lead and work together), and aspirational (why we do what we do), offering questions, exercises, and examples for developing values in each area. VTC allows companies to explore and create values authentically, not impose them from without.

Picking up where he left off in his bestselling book Synchronicity (over 150,000 copies sold), Joseph Jaworski tells the story his and his colleagues' discovery of the ultimate Source of visionary leadership, transformation, and breakthrough innovation.