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.

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.

Master the essential actions that create lasting trust in any relationship, from the world's leading experts in workplace trust.

Trust is essential to all relationships, but knowing how to build and maintain it remains elusive. Drawing from three decades of research and consulting, trust experts Dennis and Michelle Reina provide a comprehensive roadmap for creating lasting trust in any relationship.

Through actionable frameworks, tools, and stories, readers will learn:
- Essential behaviors that build trust in character, communication, and capability
- How to foster an environment of openness where people feel heard and valued
- Ways to rebuild trust after breaches or betrayals
- Techniques for strengthening self-trust as the foundation for trusting others
- The role of gratitude in nurturing reciprocal trust

With the groundbreaking Reina Individual Trust Scale Assessment and concrete strategies for implementation, this essential guide equips readers to forge powerful bonds of trust that endure through uncertainty and change.

DEI needs a reset. Discover how to achieve real social change in the workplace that puts everyone ahead through the groundbreaking FAIR framework.

The demand for inclusive workplaces is stronger than ever, with most employees seeking a sense of belonging and fairness at work. Yet traditional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies have faced backlash and stagnation, leaving organizations at a crossroads.

Where common DEI initiatives have failed, this book instead offers a results-based, systems-focused, all-inclusive, and universally beneficial framework to help bring about real social change in the workplace. This can be achieved through the FAIR framework:


- Fairness-Promote equitable treatment by addressing systemic barriers and ensuring transparent, just practices for all.
- Access-Expand opportunities by removing obstacles and creating pathways for underserved and underrepresented groups.
- Inclusion-Foster a sense of belonging where diverse voices are valued, heard, and integrated into decision-making.
- Representation-Reflect the diversity of society at all levels, ensuring visibility and participation across demographics.

This book isn't about the next acronym or rebranding; it's a call to action for a more effective and resilient approach to social progress. The DEI industrial complex failed to make real change through unchecked growth and performative practices, and far-right antagonists only offer regressive “solutions.” With clarity, urgency, and practicality, Fixing Fairness offers a third option and charts a path forward for those committed to creating better outcomes for all.

“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.

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.

“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.

An instant New York Times bestseller!

Do you want the key to driving equity and skyrocketing profits? It's simple: hand over control to your workers.

Discover 9 strategies to create better, healthier workplaces, grounded in evidence-based research.

This revolutionary guide aims to revolutionize the workplace for justice, equity, and profitability by handing the reins over to the real drivers of success: the workers.

Based on research from over 1,200 companies, including WalMart, Google, and JPMorgan Chase, this book follows real-world cases from companies where employees evolved from silent contributors to masterminds steering corporate strategies. These cases are the vanguard of a vibrant era in which workers will be the architects of their destinies, shaping not just their own careers but the entire trajectories of their organizations. Her work has quantified the financial impact investing in people can have on an organization-the first reliable calculation in the literature of talent retention.

From this research, 9 key strategies emerged:
• Centering employee voices
• Mutualistic working relationships
• Intersectional inclusion strategies
• Reimaging employee benefits
• Frontline leader drive DEIJ strategies
• Hire STARS
• Develop deep talent benches
• Human capital reporting as a competitive strategy
• Distributed leadership

This book goes deeper to show how these strategies are working in the real-world today. When workers have stakes, everyone scores: businesses surge, and teams ride a high they've never felt before. This is a win-win proposition: both management and labor win when you put people first.

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.

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.

As a millennial herself, Crystal Kadakia gives baby boomers and Gen Xers an inside look into the true value of their millennial colleagues in the workplace. She shows that the key to managing millennials is understanding that they are a product of their fast-paced, technology-driven environment.


Despite the countless books written on the subject of managing millennials (most often authored by nonmillennials), no one has until now diagnosed the real issue of generational differences in the workplace: generations do not define themselves; their environment defines them.

The five main traits attributed to millennials-entitled, lazy, disrespectful, and disloyal-are misguided assumptions that Kadakia argues are actually positive attributes that every business and industry should internalize. The five “faults” are in fact give qualities of the evolved workplace and worker. Millennials are simply reflecting the fast-changing environment around them. Therefore, understanding millennials is not just about managing a generation; it is about seeing the future of business as changing at an exponential rate and making the necessary adjustments to remain vital and competitive.

Kadakia's mindset shift details the ways in which businesses can evolve their thinking to include technological advances as well as support the technological thinker, otherwise known as the millennial. This book not only is a guide to managing millennials but can also influence the development of business as a whole.

Celebrated AIDS activist and nonprofit CEO Dr. Pernessa Seele demands that it's time to stop stigmatizing others. She outlines a way to move beyond shaming, drawing from experience working in church communities where love is the operating principle.


“Stigma” is a simple two-syllable word yet a powerful expression that conjures up a variety of feelings for many people based on an array of social factors. We all have the tendency to sit on our high horses and proclaim how progressive and civilized we've become. However, the reality is that we experience the burden of stigma in the United States in our public and private lives every day.

Dr. Pernessa Seele teaches readers that with practical stigma management, beginning with exposing the problems, we can transform the public conversation to be guided by accepting others and reserving our negative judgments. If we are honest and committed to exposing the problems, each of us can vividly see how we privately mark people who are and have been incarcerated, those addicted to drugs, people who live in low-income neighborhoods, same-gender loving people, and individuals suffering from certain diseases. It is in such conversations that we can educate ourselves and engage with others we have stigmatized in the past, ultimately leading us to change our language from a negative outlook to that of inclusion and the mending of social divides.

Supported by her wealth of knowledge and decades of experience, Dr. Seele imagines a world that few people can. She envisions that in eliminating stigmas about people different from us, we can change representations in the media, get rid of laws and policies targeting stigmatized groups, and set an example for future generations.

A poor relationship with the boss is the leading cause of dissatisfaction at work. Steve Arneson (bestselling author of Bootstrap Leadership, over 11,000 copies sold) says it's time to stop complaining about the boss and take charge of the relationship. When you understand what makes your boss tick, you can begin to put the focus where it belongs: on yourself.

Women see, understand, and value what goes on in their workplaces and organizations in dramatically different ways than do men. This book shows how women and organizations typically squander these female gifts. And it unlocks the keys to leveraging women's true potential so that they achieve success and satisfaction in their work and organizations.

The billion-dollar employee engagement industry has failed workers. This guide shows the data-driven alternative: measuring and improving employee well-being for lasting results.

For years, companies have trumpeted employee engagement as the lifeblood of success, weaving grand promises of thriving workplaces and soaring performance. Yet, Gallup's data shatters this façade: a mere 30 percent of US workers and 21 percent globally are engaged today, dismal figures essentially unchanged for over a decade. This rather damning reality exposes a commitment not just half-hearted but utterly disingenuous. Perfunctory surveys, dusted off once or twice a year, vanish into the void, sparking no meaningful change, while ineffective or toxic managers sidestep accountability with ease. The fallout is a workforce drowning in disillusionment, tethered to a metric that's broken beyond repair. In The Power of Employee Well-Being, Mark C. Crowley unveils a revolutionary vision, proving well-being ignites fierce commitment, unleashes boundless productivity, and forges workplaces where people and profits thrive.

Why Well-Being Matters
Drawing on a University of Oxford study of 17 million workers, Crowley urges leaders to abandon flawed engagement metrics and champion well-being. Far from a soft idea, it drives results. Gallup, Harvard, and London School of Economics studies show organizations prioritizing well-being gain 27 percent higher profitability, lower turnover, and better customer satisfaction. Yet, with three-quarters of US professionals facing burnout and a 74 percent surge in mental health–related leave (2023–2024), the crisis is urgent. Crowley highlights belonging-feeling valued, respected, and connected-as well-being's core, yet 94 percent of leaders overlook this vital driver.

A Practical Roadmap
Building on his trailblazing book Lead from the Heart, Crowley delivers a concise, actionable guide for busy managers to cultivate well-being and unlock team potential. Through practical strategies, he equips leaders to meet workers' core needs: caring leadership, manageable workloads, emotional support, growth opportunities, and fair treatment. Unlike hollow wellness programs, debunked by Oxford research, Crowley's methods reshape daily team experiences. His insights, forged over decades as a leader and researcher, are anchored by formidable data, including a British Telecom study linking well-being to higher sales and customer satisfaction.

A Leadership Revolution
With a foreword by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, a four-time New York Times bestselling author, The Power of Employee Well-Being is a clarion call to reject superficial fixes and ignite a leadership revolution. Crowley brilliantly distills complex ideas into a vital guide for busy managers. With 52 percent of workers willing to take a 20 percent pay cut for better well-being, stakes are high. This is the essential playbook for leaders to build thriving workplaces where retention soars and teams excel.

Lying can cause irreparable financial, psychological, and emotional damage in an organization, yet liars also know that we're terrible at recognizing their deceit. Goman's book is a simple primer to help anyone spot lies before they do harm.

Lies aren't good in general, but in the workplace they're especially poisonous. They can destroy employee engagement and productivity, undermine teamwork, increase stress, ruin people's livelihoods, and even bring down entire companies.

It's critical to catch workplace lies before they snowball into something catastrophic, but most of us have no clue about how to spot a liar. And the workplace setting adds another layer of complexity. At what point do you report a liar? If you decide to take action, what exactly should you do? And what if the liar is your boss?

In this entertaining and needed book, leading workplace body language expert Carol Kinsey Goman combines her own experiences with the latest research to provide a comprehensive guide to spotting, exposing, and minimizing workplace lies. Goman looks at the high cost of workplace deception for individuals and organizations, why people tell lies at work, and the kinds of lies they tell. She offers fifty ways that body language and vocal cues can help you spot a liar and explains how our own vanities, desires, self-deceptions, and rationalizations allow us to be duped.

Once you spot a lie, she provides tactical advice on how to respond, whether the liar is above, below, or on the same level as you. And Goman explains how to make sure your own body language doesn't inadvertently make you seem untrustworthy and what leaders at all levels can do to reduce lies and encourage candor.

Some workplace lies are a polite and positive part of professional life (“I'd be delighted to come to that meeting”). But Goman focuses on truly destructive lies and shows how you can prevent them from wreaking havoc on individuals and organizations.