Bob Nelson, author of the multimillion-copy bestseller 1001 Ways to Reward Employees, and human performance expert Mario Tamayo offer hundreds of practical, creative tips for helping employees-and their managers-make work more fun.


Every business needs happy, engaged, and motivated employees, whether it's a major corporation or one of the over thirty million small businesses in America today. Most elements in modern business work against this basic need: constant change and increasing stress from both the speed of business and its complexity, as well as the expansive application of technology to all aspects of business.

Work Made Fun Gets Done gives the reader simple, practical ideas for instantly bringing fun into the workplace. Based on examples from scores of real companies like Pinterest, Asana, Bank of America, Genentech, Zappos, Honda, General Mills, Microsoft, and many more, as well as the authors' collective experience, this book provides clear behavioral examples on exactly what managers can do to immediately lighten the tone of the work environment and excite their teams. The book, written in a fun style, contains lighthearted illustrations and callout boxes to highlight fun practices.

This book is the first practical, hands-on guide that shows how leaders can build psychological safety in their organizations, creating an environment where employees feel included, fully engaged, and encouraged to contribute their best efforts and ideas.



Fear has a profoundly negative impact on engagement, learning efficacy, productivity, and innovation, but until now there has been a lack of practical information on how to make employees feel safe about speaking up and contributing. Timothy Clark, a social scientist and an organizational consultant, provides a framework to move people through successive stages of psychological safety. The first stage is member safety-the team accepts you and grants you shared identity. Learner safety, the second stage, indicates that you feel safe to ask questions, experiment, and even make mistakes. Next is the third stage of contributor safety, where you feel comfortable participating as an active and full-fledged member of the team. Finally, the fourth stage of challenger safety allows you to take on the status quo without repercussion, reprisal, or the risk of tarnishing your personal standing and reputation. This is a blueprint for how any leader can build positive, supportive, and encouraging cultures in any setting.

Learn how to stop pouring vast sums of money into technology projects that don't have a lasting impact by closing the communication gap between IT and leadership.

Now in a second edition, this classic book shows how to make conversations generative and productive rather than critical and destructive so people, organizations, and communities flourish.



We all know that conversations influence us, but we rarely stop to think about how much impact they have on our well-being and our ability to thrive. This book is the first to show how Appreciative Inquiry-a widely used change method that focuses on identifying what's working and building on it rather than just trying to fix what's not-can help us all communicate more effectively and flourish in all areas of our lives.

By focusing on what we want to happen instead of what we want to avoid and asking questions to deepen understanding and increase possibilities, we expand creativity, improve productivity, and unleash potential at work and home. Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres use real-life examples to illustrate these two practices and the principles that underlie them.

The second edition includes a new chapter on establishing the right mindset for appreciative conversations and a free discussion guide download. This book demonstrates how the practices and principles of Appreciative Inquiry strengthen relationships and generate possibilities for a future that works for everyone.

Learn how to take the right risks for lasting success. Begin Boldly provides a framework for making the kind of bold moves that will get your career off to its best start!

Many women enter the workforce feeling like they can never make a mistake, and as a result, they don't take risks in the crucial early stages of their careers. Women, and BIPOC women especially, are disproportionally penalized for mistakes, so any risk begins to feel like a bad risk. A 2019 KPMG study found that fewer than 43 percent of women surveyed were willing to take “big” risks, including volunteering to do a major presentation or asking for a pay raise.

Christie Hunter Arscott equips readers with the ability to differentiate between reckless and intelligent risks using an actionable model built around three mindsets: a curious mindset, a courageous mindset, and an agile mindset. With a step-by-step method for taking risks, making refinements, and assessing rewards, Arscott's approach gives women a flexible and repeatable framework to guide them through this critical career skill.

Liftoff empowers women to take chances on themselves so that risk-taking becomes an enlightening and empowering antidote for self-doubt.

This book will include a discussion guide.

Bestselling author Ken Blanchard and leading psychologist Morton Shaevitz offer advice, based on both research and personal experience, for infusing the second half of your life with passion, energy, and excitement.

The ever-increasing complexity we face requires a new way to think and work. To effectively lead an organization, bestselling author Mark Miller says, you have to play chess, not checkers. He shows how this mentality enables you to marshal all your available resources, including every employee, to strategically address challenges and opportunities.

In his latest business fable, top leadership author Mark Miller tells the story of newly appointed CEO Blake Brown, who takes over a company distressed by poor performance and low morale. Nothing Blake learned from his previous job seems to help him deal with the bigger, more complex problems he now faces. The game has changed. As his new mentor points out, Blake is playing a simple game of checkers when he should be playing chess.

Miller uses this metaphor to show how leaders can encourage deep, strategic thinking throughout an organization and utilize the unique abilities of each employee (bishops move differently than knights). He explains how to apply the “chess not checkers” mentality in four critical areas: leadership development, employee engagement, organizational alignment, and execution. This is an appealing, accessible guide to helping all leaders think ahead, plan their moves, and avoid getting checkmated by circumstances or competitors.

Books like StrengthsFinder 2.0 have helped leaders discover their strengths-but tend to stop there. Thuy and Milo Sindell argue that focusing only on our best abilities neglects a vital development opportunity. Inside every leader are “middle skills,” hidden strengths that can be turned into full strengths with attention and focus.

Discover Your Strengths and the StrengthsFinder titles-has resulted in a very one-dimensional model for leadership growth, say Thuy and Milo Sindell. Their research and work have shown that, like everyone, you have hidden, undeveloped strengths that, if identified and worked on, can expand your repertoire of skills, make you a better-balanced leader, and significantly improve performance.

Everyone has what the Sindells call Default Skills, or obvious strengths; Deficient Skills, or weaknesses; and Hidden Strengths, or skills in the middle. Focusing only on Default Skills can lead to resting on your laurels. But trying to develop Deficient Skills isn't worth it. It takes too much time and effort to bring these skills up to speed-the ROI just isn't there. It's in the neglected middle skills that the most potent development opportunities lie. They're close enough to being strengths that working on them can offer a powerful payoff-they are Hidden Strengths.

Using assessments, exercises, and case studies, the Sindells help you identify your most promising middle skills-your Hidden Strengths-and create a plan to turn them into full strengths. In today's work environment, not growing and stretching yourself translates into lack of innovation, stagnation, and obsolescence. Relying upon strengths is like relying upon training wheels-at a certain point you need to take them off improve and grow.

This is the first book to address the specific needs and challenges faced by high-level consultants, who work on very complex projects and must win the confidence of the most senior leaders in organizations.


Advanced consulting requires both expertise and personal qualifications that are distinct from those needed in everyday consulting. Advanced consultants work with high-level executive teams on complex issues such as strategy, organizational design, merger integration, digital disruption, culture change, and system-wide transformation. While neophyte consultants are often given a playbook to follow, advanced consultants need to invent methods that take full advantage of the opportunities that their work with clients presents.

There is an art to advanced consulting as well as a science; who you are is as important as what you do. Bill Pasmore draws on his four decades of experience as a consultant and teacher of consultants to show readers how to see possibilities that are not evident, conduct analyses that support the value of more comprehensive work, build relationships that engender deeper trust, adapt to changing circumstances, and empower members of their team to take independent actions while maintaining overall control of an engagement. Illustrated with vivid real-world examples and including a self-assessment to measure your progress, this book equips you to advance to more senior positions in your firm or to build a successful independent practice.

A practical and irreverent guide to taking the sting out of feedback and reclaiming it as a motivating, empowering experience for everyone involved.


Feedback! Ugh. Say the word to a colleague, your spouse, or a friend, and watch the person's blood pressure rise and defenses go up. For most of us, it's a word loaded with experiences that may include bias, politics, pain, regret, and anger. However, if we take a step back and think about its true intent, we realize that feedback needn't be a bad thing. We humans want to improve, grow, and advance, and we need insights that can help us move in the right direction. If we close ourselves off from understanding how others experience us, then we close ourselves off to a life of learning and growth. The authors address how feedback got such a bad rap and how we can fix it. They provide three key Fs (focused, fair, and frequent) for positive feedback. They also include a slew of practical exercises and strategies to change how we view and experience feedback.

This compelling and inspiring call to action for leaders at every level helps them find their role and voice in affecting societal and workplace change.


In a world where women and communities of color were disproportionally impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, it's more important than ever for leaders to truly understand how to support inclusion in the postpandemic workplace.

Drawing on years of work with many leading organizations, Jennifer Brown shows what leaders at any level can do to spark real change and navigate uncharted waters. She guides readers through anti-racism using the Inclusive Leader Continuum, a set of four developmental stages: unaware, aware, active, and advocate. Brown describes the hallmarks of each stage, the behaviors and mindsets that inform it, and what readers can do to keep progressing.

This second edition includes a new introduction and addresses challenges posed by the pandemic-including remote work, flexibility, and mental health. It also gives increased attention to embedding equity, empathy, and anti-racism in the inclusive leader framework.

Ditch the negative mental habits that derail conversations and destroy projects, and discover a framework for forging authentic, enduring, and productive connections.

All too often, we find our conversations stuck in cyclical patterns of unproductive behavior. We listen half-heartedly, react emotionally, and respond habitually, or what Chuck Wisner calls “sleep talking.”

Conscious Conversations explores the way we can reframe our thoughts, emotions, reactions, and interactions so we form a connection from the very first conversation and keep our discourse positive and productive throughout any endeavor. Wisner identifies four universal types of conversations and offers specific advice on maximizing the effectiveness of each:

• Storytelling-Acknowledging and investigating the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others
• Collaborating-Exploring the way our stories interact with other people's stories
• Creating-Cocreating possibilities and discovering unforeseen solutions to sticky problems
• Committing-Coordinating our actions with others to get things done

These conversations unfold sequentially: our awareness of our stories transforms our ability to listen and collaborate, which opens our thoughts to creative possibilities, guiding us toward mindful agreements. This framework makes it possible to identify, understand, and deactivate disruptive emotional triggers; listen with empathy to people with opposing perspectives; and forge relationships built on trust.