What if some of the most powerful words in your organization were “I'm not sure,” “I need help,” and “I have a new idea”? Imagine the potential for innovation, connection, and results if your employees felt courageous enough to say anything to you.


What if people could simply communicate what they are really thinking without fear of having a bad idea? When you are in a leadership position, your people should feel comfortable to learn from and brainstorm with you. It is your responsibility to create an authentic environment characterized by honesty and trust that encourages everyone to share ideas. When your people don't speak up, it's not their problem-it's yours.

Building a culture in which people are able to say anything opens up pathways to innovation that would otherwise not exist. Ultimately, this book is a letter to leaders-filled with experience, research, and practicality. Peering inside a vast array of organizations for the past decade, the authors have seen time and again that leaders are failing to draw out ideas from their introverts and, at the same time, shutting up their extroverts. Inhibitors in organizations make candid communication unsafe. As a leader, you must recognize and acknowledge these complex dynamics and then work tirelessly to inspire your team to speak freely.

The new edition of an international bestseller helps individuals and organizations shift to a new mindset that will improve performance, spark collaboration, accelerate innovation, and make your life and the lives of everyone around you better.

These leadership lessons work for leaders at every level when everything goes wrong, from the doctor who saved lives after the 9/11 attacks, in war-torn Ukraine, and on the NFL sidelines.

Dr. Thom Mayer doesn’t just talk about leadership: he lives it in the world’s most high-stakes situations. From commanding the 9/11 Pentagon rescue operation to rushing onto NFL fields during medical emergencies to training doctors in war-torn Ukraine, Mayer has learned that leadership isn’t about titles or positions. It’s about action.

In this practical guide, Mayer reveals eleven provocative principles that flip conventional leadership wisdom: “Leadership is worthless . . . but leading is priceless.” “Power is worthless . . . but influence is priceless.” “Success is worthless . . . but failure is priceless.” Through gripping stories from the Pentagon’s smoking corridors, NFL sidelines, and Ukrainian hospitals, he shows how real leaders emerge not from corner offices but from moments of crisis when someone must step up and act.

Whether readers are managing a team, raising a family, or facing a crossroads, Mayer’s hard-won insights will transform how readers think about influence, teamwork, and making decisions under pressure. This isn’t theoretical leadership. Mayer offers battle-tested wisdom from someone who has led when lives hung in the balance.

Now in paperback with a new discussion guide for leadership development programs.

Ron Wallace rose from driver to president of UPS International. Here he reveals the UPS secret sauce--culture--that allows it to outcompete younger companies that are not unionized, not sprawling, and not Brown.


The steady, long-term success of UPS is sometimes a mystery to business observers. Founded over a century ago, UPS has been moving up, not down the Fortune 500 list. Massive in size, UPS has cultivated a family environment where promotion is almost always from within, lifetime employment is the norm and even the executives are union members. In one of the most mature of mature industries, UPS is consistently seen as a strong investment on Wall Street.

What is the UPS secret sauce? In this groundbreaking book, Ron Wallace credits the unique “people culture” of UPS as the distinguishing factor. Ron credits this culture with giving him his start in management and helping him rise from driver to president of UPS International. Different from the typical business memoir that celebrates the leader as celebrity, Ron's book focuses on the people and simple principles that taught him the UPS way. He exhorts his fellow leaders to grow their people, not just their business plans. Ron's key takeaway comes straight from the UPS founder and Ron's inspiration, Jim Casey: “Treat your people well, and the company will flourish.” These simple principles can work in any company, whether or not brown is the wardrobe color.

One of the world's top experts on applying analytics to organizational performance provides a new, more comprehensive approach for using analytics to effectively guide business decisions.

There are tons of books on how to do strategy execution better, but they all operate from the premise that their one-size-fits-all solution works for what ails all companies. But each company's context and problems are unique. You need analytics to diagnose where improvements really need to be made, but existing approaches don't give you the full picture. Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations, Alec Levenson provides a roadmap for doing diagnostics that will lead to actionable insights and solutions.

Levenson's model, combines the enterprise (or organization-level) approach to analytics and the human capital (or job-level) approach. This solves two parallel problems in organizations today: senior leaders pay too little attention to the practical challenges of implementing the business strategy and setting goals for achieving it, and frontline managers and HR too often focus on narrow improvements to jobs and processes that appear to be useful yet have little strategic value. The book provides an in-depth critique of common measurement approaches and, through case studies and real-world examples, shows how to apply the model to increasing customer retention, spurring innovation, developing go-to-market strategies, making budgeting and investment decisions, and more.

Renowned scholars and consultants Monica Worline and Jane Dutton offer a new argument for compassion in organizations, showing leaders how to tap their innate ability for compassion to create more effective and humane workplaces.


We are living in an epidemic of disengagement and despair that calls us to action. Awakening Compassion at Work answers the call, showing us new ways to enliven the humanity of work and in so doing address the suffering of the world and create an innovative, optimistic, and engaged workforce.

Scholars and consultants Monica Worline and Jane Dutton approach compassion in organizations through the lens of new research that helps us see what compassion is, how we can create it in our everyday work, and the benefits it offers to both individuals and organizations. They reveal why compassion is integral to recruiting and retaining talented people, essential to delivering high quality service and rapid innovation, and inextricably linked to engagement, collaboration, and adaptability. They even include a tool for assessing your organization's “compassion potential.” This book gives us the tools to build skill in creating compassion and invigorating the humanity of our basic institutions.

Alec Levenson's immensely practical guide shows every organization that uses employee surveys or is considering using them how to make them more effective, valuable, and reliable-and how to make better use of them.

Cutting through the confusion and disinformation about the fastest-growing corporate learning methodology, EXECUTIVE COACHING FOR RESULTS offers human resources and leadership development practitioners the definitive guide to making effective-and cost-effective-use of the crucial training tool of executive coaching in their corporations.

Everything that we've been told about women succeeding in the workplace-from leaning in to throwing out the idea of being “nice girls”-misses the true key that puts women ahead: influence. Leadership experts Kathryn Heath, Jill Flynn, Mary Davis Holt, and Diana Faison create an airtight case for the importance of the influence effect.


It's pure myth that women need to be more aggressive to succeed. Since the time when Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In was first published in 2013, one thing has become strikingly clear: leaning in simply isn't enough to turn the tide. To the contrary, studies show that imitating male behavior doesn't translate to professional advancement for women. The distinctive missing link is influence.

In every industry, from private equity investing to network television, women are underrepresented at the top and underpaid across the board and throughout their careers. The gap in the literature about what puts women ahead is influence-the capacity to have an impact on agendas and outcomes. Influence is more important to the women we work with than power itself.

The Influence Effect focuses on building influence that will enable women to gain traction in their careers and to achieve the advancement they deserve. The tools in this book are geared to help women rise above the politics of business and succeed on their own terms by achieving greater influence. Women have goals they want to achieve and ideas they can champion through change, and influence is the currency they need to make that happen.

National radio personality and bestselling author Thom Hartmann tells a compelling, can't-put-it-down story that tracks the history of the loss of democracy in America, culminating in the ultimate theft of human rights before the Supreme Court in 1886 the ascendance of "corporate personhood" in the US and worldwide by moneyed interests and the politicians they own.

Transform your leadership. Unlock your team's potential.

In today's rapidly evolving workplace, traditional management is no longer enough. Drawing from three decades of global executive coaching expertise, Damian Goldvarg offers a proven approach to leadership that creates trust, engagement, and measurable results.

This valuable guide breaks down essential coaching competencies, inspired by the International Coaching Federation, into actionable frameworks you can implement immediately. Discover how to accomplish the following:

• Create psychological safety that empowers innovation
• Master the art of active listening and powerful questioning
• Transform conflict into productive collaboration
• Lead virtual teams with confidence and clarity
• Develop strategic thinking that prepares your organization for the future

Through real-world examples from global organizations, Goldvarg provides a roadmap for evolving from manager to coach-leader. Whether you're a seasoned executive or emerging leader, these proven techniques will help you build the collaborative, high-performing teams needed to thrive in our complex business landscape.

Don't just manage. Coach. Lead. Transform.

Executive director of the Government Accountability Project Beatrice Edwards makes this bold and saddening claim: the American Bill of Rights and Constitution are no longer the law of the land. Focusing on shocking revelations from whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, she documents the rise of the “Corporate Security State” in America.

Bestselling authors and renowned diversity consultants Fred Miller and Judith Katz bring their long-awaited new book that shows any manager or member of a team how to create safe environments for everyone in their company.


Do you feel safe enough at work to share your ideas, thoughts, and experiences? Raise tough issues? Deal with conflicts? Do your best work?

Many people feel unsafe in work interactions. They hold back, hesitate, and make themselves smaller out of fear of ridicule or retribution. The lack of safety is why new ideas and new people often have such a hard time succeeding in today's organizations, and directly contribute to why stress levels are so high. Many people have the skills they need to do their best work and the ideas to solve problems but lack the safety to apply them. This book describes what constitutes a safe environment and the actions-by both leaders and team members-necessary to create collaborative, inclusive workplaces in which people feel safe enough to be their best selves. Written in plain, everyday language, Safe Enough to Soar identifies the default mindsets and behaviors that create hostile work environments and block collaboration, engagement, partnership, and the acceptance of new ideas and new people. Expert authors Fred Miller and Judith Katz chart a simple, step-by-step process that will enable organization's individuals, work-groups, and teams to skip past the dysfunctional mire of defensiveness, micro-aggressions, cover-your-ass compromises, and judging, and launch them into the innovation-inspiring, collaboration-fostering zone of organizational bravery. When people feel safe enough to act and interact, they step up, speak up, and fully engage…and they and their organizations spread their wings and soar.

This book teaches leaders how to focus on people development rather than product development. Innovation comes from people, not products or technology. Deborah Piscione's twelve-step process is a comprehensive guide to success for leaders that shows them how to harness the creative energy in their organization, thereby bringing better products to market.


For too long, companies and their leadership teams focused primarily on their products or services. Leaders are deeply dialed in to the minutiae of their companies' operations. But veteran Silicon Valley consultant Deborah Perry Piscione says investments in new technologies or operations do not create innovations-people do. For innovation to happen, organizations need to be people-centric. In this breakthrough book she shows how, by following her People Equation, every organization can develop a mindset, an organizational structure, and a product development process that will maximize creativity and innovation.

Using examples from her consulting work and from her research into successful business practices, Piscione shows how to create a culture where risk taking is rewarded, mavericks are encouraged, collaboration between highly competent people is nurtured, and, when experiments and new initiatives are proposed, the response is to ask how rather than question why. This requires upending the usual organizational pyramid, giving more decision-making power to frontline workers and less to the C-level executives traditionally at the top. Once this is all in place, you can take advantage of Piscione's twelve-step Improvisational Innovation process for bringing new products and services to market. This is a comprehensive guide to harnessing the creative energy in every organization.

Leading scholars Ryan W. Quinn and Robert E. Quinn marshal both scientific research and personal experience to show how you can achieve the fundamental state of leadership-lifting up both yourself and those around you. This second edition (first edition had sold over 10,000 copies) has been revised throughout and includes two new chapters.

Just as the Wright Brothers combined science and practice to finally achieve the dream of flight, Ryan and Robert Quinn combine research and personal stories to demonstrate how we can elevate ourselves and the situations and people around us to greater heights of integrity, openness, and achievement-the psychological equivalent of aerodynamic lift, and the fundamental state of effective leadership.

Lift identifies four questions that, when asked in any situation, will instantly give rise to a positive outlook, and explores the profound implications of each of these questions in-depth. The second edition includes two new chapters highlighting surprising applications of the fundamental state of leadership to situations on the job and off, as well as new stories, examples, supportive studies, and techniques for applying the lessons of Lift. Each person who learns these principles will lift themselves, lift others, and inspire others to spread that lifting as far as they can.

Continuing his groundbreaking work in Positive Organizational Scholarship, Robert Quinn (bestselling author of Deep Change) offers a clear path and concrete actions for creating extraordinarily high-performing organizational cultures.

Conventional beliefs and cultures all too often create work groups, departments, and even entire organizations that are full of unengaged, underperforming people. Drawing on his decades of pioneering research, Robert Quinn shows how to create organizations where people flourish and exceed expectations.

Using many compelling stories and examples Quinn describes how to replace an outmoded and limiting conventional mindset with a new, more positive and affirming “mental map.” He explains how, with this as your foundation, you can clarify the highest purpose of your organization, help others access their own excellence, communicate honestly and authentically, and much more. The book includes the Positive Organization Generator, a tool any leader can use to develop a custom action plan for turning an organization positive. At its heart, Quinn's book helps leaders transform organizations by changing themselves and others from being comfort-centered to being results-centered, from being self-focused to being other-focused, and from being internally closed to being externally open.

Offers a fundamentally new conceptual model for the human resource function to meet the challenges of the knowledge economy
Provides concrete suggestions for implementing this model, including numerous examples of effective practices from leading-edge firms
Synthesizes current thinking on knowledge management and intellectual capital and identifies how human resource management can make a value-added contribution
As more organizations recognize the importance of intellectual capital and knowledge management to competitive success, you would expect human resources (HR) to move to the forefront of organizational leadership. Yet, to the contrary, HR continues to be criticized for its operational and bureaucratic focus and its inability to keep up with changes in the environment.
Human Resource Management in the Knowledge Economy examines how human resource management must change if it is to remain a vital part of the organization. The Lengnick-Halls show how HR departments can move beyond a simple operational focus on attracting, selecting, developing, retaining, and using employees to a more strategic focus on managing human capital and managing knowledge.
The book identifies the most important features of the knowledge economy and details four new roles HR must adopt in order to help organizations succeed in this new environment: human capital steward, knowledge facilitator, relationship builder, and rapid deployment specialist. Each of these roles is defined and described in detail using examples from leading-edge businesses. Human Resource Management in the Knowledge Economy describes how human resource management has evolved and continues to evolve to meet the increasing demands of organizations for sources of competitive advantage.