Higher Education

High-pressure situations can make us panic-but if we can change our perspective, what seemed impossible can suddenly become doable. Legendary pitching coach Rick Peterson is a master at this kind of reframing. He and bestselling author and leadership expert, Judd Hoekstra make this skill available to everyone.


Everybody faces high-pressure situations, and in today's fast-paced, hypercompetitive world it's arguably worse than ever. But ace pitching coach Rick Peterson and organization and leadership expert Judd Hoekstra say our ineffective response to pressure often causes us to perform far below our capabilities.

Peterson has less than a minute to help a struggling athlete performing in front of millions and flip from butterflies to boldness. His breakthrough is to use “reframing” to recast any situation from a perceived threat or crisis to a positive opportunity. Using dozens of stories from his long career, he and Hoekstra offer six different ways anyone can get a new perspective that will keep them from striking out when the heat's on. These techniques are explicitly made applicable far beyond the pitching mound-anyone can learn to outthink their brains with the power of reframing.

In this thoroughly revised and updated edition of one of the most popular change methods in the world, Cooperrider et al. track the recent changes in the field and explain how AI can contribute to sustainability and the triple bottom line.

One of today's most popular change methods, Appreciative Inquiry (AI) has been used to undertake transformational initiatives in dozens of organizations, ranging from McDonalds to the U.S. Navy to Save the Children.

The assumption of AI is simple. Every organization has things that work right-things that give it life when it is vital, effective, and successful. AI begins by identifying this positive core and connecting organizational visions, plans, and structures to it in ways that heighten energy and inspire action for change.

This book presents all of the concepts, examples, and aids necessary to engage groups of all sizes in Appreciative Inquiry. The authors provide background information on what AI is and how it works and offer sample project plans, designs, agendas, course outlines, interview guidelines, participant worksheets, a list of resources, and more.

This second edition has been extensively revised, updated, and expanded, including new case studies, new tools and supplemental articles, an expanded bibliography and resource list, and an entirely new chapter on case applications. And throughout, the authors focus on how AI can support an organizational focus on sustainability and the “triple bottom line” of people, prosperity, and planet.

Sustainable company growth isn't just a pipedream. This 3-part blueprint is your guide to avoiding the traps that cause growth to stall.

As companies mature, their underlying growth naturally slows-this is called the ‘growth curse'. It's a pervasive problem that plagues companies, CEOs, and board members alike. In order to safeguard a company's future, a strategic form of governance in which the board plays a more active role on behalf of all stakeholders, must be activated.

This book is comprised of 3 parts. First it shows companies how to identify the traditional traps that hinder growth. The second part provides companies with a blueprint for building their board, defining long-term strategy, and adjustments necessary to serve continued growth. The final part delves into the specific ways that the board and executives must collaborate in relation to strategic renewal.

Reimagining the limits of growth and how companies are run as a consequence provides an escape from the ‘growth curse' at last.

This essential playbook shows how companies can scale success by coupling digital strategies with an investment in the health of their organizations and the people within.



To scale and grow, a company must get the organizational elements right. That begins with having the right strategy, the right leadership to drive it, and the right talent, culture, and organizational design to realize a company's potential. This is especially true in the AI era, where a company's most valuable assets are its people.

To begin with, leaders must rethink their value creation strategies. To hone their organizational edge, leaders must prioritize their organization's health in seven vital areas: strategic direction, culture, leadership, talent, organizational design, EID (equity, inclusion, and diversity), and well-being. No matter what type or size of business, those essential conditions must be leveraged for increased value and growth. Put simply: organizational matters matter. To hone their digital edge, leaders must understand AI, as advances in technology allow leaders to build organizations that can compete and win in the future. Finally, an investor mindset will enable leaders to invest wisely in the technology (and leverage that tech) that sets their organizations apart.

It is time for an emotional reckoning on our path to racial healing, sustainable equity, and the future of DEI. Here's the tool to help us navigate it.

In this groundbreaking book, Esther Armah argues that the crucial missing piece to racial healing and sustainable equity is emotional justice-a new racial healing language to help us do our emotional work. This work is part of the emotional reckoning we must navigate if racial healing is to be more than a dream. We all-white, Black, Brown-have our emotional work that we need to do. But that work is not the same for all of us.

This emotional work means unlearning the language of whiteness, a narrative that centers white people, particularly white men, no matter the deadly cost and consequence to all women and to global Black and Brown people. That's why a new racial healing language is crucial.

Emotional Justice grapples with how a legacy of untreated trauma from oppressive systems has created and sustained dual deadly fictions: white superiority and Black inferiority that shape-and wound-all of us. These systems must be dismantled to build a future that serves justice to everyone, not just some of us. We are the dismantlers we have been waiting for, and emotional justice is the game changer for a just future that benefits all of us.

When physicians and nurses suffer from burnout, patients suffer as well. This book pinpoints the how and why and shows what healthcare providers and their organizations can do.



Burnout is among the most critical topics in healthcare as it deprives us of our most important resource-the talents and passion of those who perform the difficult work of caring for patients and their families. The purpose of this work is to provide not only a taxonomy of burnout within the landscape of healthcare but also to provide pathways for healthcare professionals to guide themselves and their organizations toward changing the culture and systems of their organization. An additional purpose is to summarize personal strategies to prevent and ameliorate burnout.

Practical tools, techniques, and case studies are used to illustrate specifically how to promote positive, proactive change. The book looks at healthcare workers' roles in promoting change within themselves and their organization and addresses solutions to change the culture and the systems of work. Both are presented with a pragmatic focus, with liberal use of examples and case reviews, including those from several nationally recognized healthcare systems.

Since the 1980s, Appreciative Inquiry has proven to be one of the most powerful and effective methods for organizational change. Now two top consultants show how leaders can adapt its principles to become more personally and professionally resilient.

Appreciative Inquiry is a venerable and widely used organizational change method that emphasizes identifying what's working and building on those strengths. It is the focus on the best of what is and using that to generate the future that makes it so powerful. In answer to numerous requests from their clients, consultants and scholars McArthur-Blair and Cockell show how to apply the lessons of AI to build resilience in leaders. Every leader has moments of despair, that "dark night of the soul" where there seems to be no clear path forward. The authors' ALIVE process (Appreciate, Love and Inquire in order to Venture and Evolve) helps leaders forgive themselves for their own failures and those of others, focus on their strengths in times of despair, and amplify and grow those strengths so that they are better able to build hope in themselves and throughout their organizations. In times of rapid change like ours, building resilience is a vital leadership skill.

“Dear Black Girl is the empowering, affirming love letter our girls need in order to thrive in a world that does not always protect, nurture, or celebrate us. This collection of Black women's voices… is a must-read, not only for Black girls, but for everyone who cares about Black girls, and for Black women whose inner-Black girl could use some healing.” –Tarana Burke, Founder of the ‘Me Too' Movement

“Dear #DopeBlackGirl,

You don't know me, but I know you. I know you because I am you! We are magic, light, and stars in the universe.” So begins a letter that Tamara Winfrey-Harris received as part of her Letters to Black Girls project, where she asked black women to write honest, open, and inspiring letters of support to young black girls aged thirteen to twenty-one. Her call went viral, resulting in a hundred letters from black women around the globe. In Dear Black Girl, Winfrey-Harris introduces and organizes a selection of these letters, modeling how black women can nurture future generations. Each chapter ends with a prompt encouraging girls to write a letter to themselves, teaching the art of self-love and self-nurturing.

Winfrey-Harris's The Sisters Are Alright explores how black women must often fight and stumble their way into alrightness after adulthood. Dear Black Girl continues this work by delivering personal messages of alrightness for black women-to-be-and for the girl who still lives inside every black woman, who still needs reminding sometimes that she is alright.