Leadership

This book, the first to treat workplace culture like a garden instead of a construction project, offers a proven framework that transforms toxic environments into thriving ecosystems where all talent flourishes.

Organizations fail when they treat culture like a construction project. They thrive when they treat it like a garden, cultivating conditions for growth rather than engineering behavior through rigid blueprints.

Award-winning consultant Abi Adamson introduces the SERN™ framework (Soil, Exposure, Roots, Nutrients) to guide sustainable cultural transformation. Drawing from her experience working with international clients, including Spotify, Sony Music, and Match Group, Abi shows how to do the following:

• Identify and detoxify the soil poisoning organizational foundations
• Expose who's hoarding the light while others wither in shadows
• Strengthen the root networks where real culture actually lives
• Distribute the nutrients people actually need to thrive (hint: it's not pizza Fridays)

Unlike traditional culture initiatives, focused on compliance and conformity, this framework reveals why expensive transformation efforts keep failing and how to spot “nutrient vampires” draining your best people.

For C-suite leaders, executives, people managers, and anyone who has ever felt invisible at work, this guide offers a sustainable alternative: treating culture as a living ecosystem requiring ongoing cultivation, not a one-time fix.

Because as Abi says, “We bloom together or we wilt alone.”™

Build organizations where employees feel truly safe to learn, contribute, and challenge the status quo.

The proven practical guide to psychological safety is now expanded with updated research and powerful new frameworks and tools.

Psychological safety—the belief that you can speak up without risk of punishment or humiliation—is crucial for high-performing teams and innovative organizations. This revised and expanded edition of Timothy Clark's groundbreaking framework provides leaders with a research-backed roadmap through four distinct stages that enable individuals to feel safe, valued, and empowered.

The four stages build progressively:

• Inclusion Safety (feeling included and accepted),
• Learner Safety (feeling safe to learn and ask questions),
• Contributor Safety (feeling safe to contribute and participate), and
• Challenger Safety (feeling safe to challenge the status quo and speak truth to power).

This new edition adds compelling quantitative evidence from Clark's global database of 1.2 million data points, validating the four-stage model across cultures and demographics. New chapters explore what psychological safety is not, the dangers of “nice” cultures, the relationship between psychological and physical safety, and practical measurement strategies.

Leaders will learn to banish fear, create performance-based accountability, and build environments where people thrive beyond expectations.

“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.

In a world of unprecedented disruption, mastering the art of change isn't just an advantage-it's essential for survival.

Drawing from decades of work with global organizations, military commanders, and NASA leaders, Jeff and Staney DeGraff reveal how true transformation emerges not from avoiding contradictions, but from embracing them.

This groundbreaking book, the third installation in their comprehensive innovation series, introduces a revolutionary framework for understanding and leveraging paradox. Through rich storytelling and battle-tested strategies, the DeGraffs unpack seven fundamental contradictions that define transformative growth:

How do we achieve more by doing less? Why does certainty often lead to failure, while embracing uncertainty paves the path to breakthrough? When does resistance become the catalyst for change? The Art of Change demonstrates how these seeming contradictions hold the key to profound transformation-both personally and professionally.

This isn't just another business book-it's a practical philosophy for navigating complexity in dynamic environments. Whether you're leading a Fortune 500 company, steering a non-profit through turbulent times, or seeking personal growth, you'll discover:

• A proven framework for turning obstacles into opportunities
• Practical tools for making better decisions in ambiguous situations
• Strategies for building resilience through embracing paradox
• Methods for driving innovation by challenging conventional wisdom
• Techniques for leading transformational change in any environment

The Art of Change completes a pioneering trilogy that establishes a comprehensive school of thought around innovation and transformation. Building on the foundations laid in their previous works, the DeGraffs provide their most sophisticated and nuanced exploration yet of how to drive meaningful change in complex systems.

Don't just manage change-master it. Learn how to transform paradoxes into breakthroughs and turn uncertainty into your greatest advantage. The Art of Change is your essential guide to navigating the contradictions that define our era and achieving lasting transformation in an increasingly fluid world.

In a world where businesses often create more harm than healing, this transformative guide shows leaders how to heal themselves first—because only whole leaders can build truly healthy organizations.

Leadership shouldn’t cost us our souls, yet too many leaders find themselves spiritually and emotionally exhausted, leading organizations that drain rather than nurture human potential. This book offers a different path—one where personal transformation becomes the foundation for positive organizational change.

Written by conscious business pioneer Raj Sisodia and personal transformation expert Nilima Bhat, this book guides readers through seven essential steps of inner healing that ripple out to create healthier organizations:

• Know Yourself—Strip away the masks you wear as a leader to discover who you truly are.
• Love Yourself—Learn to embrace all parts of yourself, even the shadows you try to hide.
• Be Yourself—Find the courage to lead authentically, not just effectively.
• Choose Yourself—Take back authorship of your leadership story.
• Express Yourself—Channel your unique gifts into meaningful impact.
• Complete Yourself—Bring together all parts of yourself into wholeness.
• Heal Yourself—Transform your wounds into wisdom that serves others.

Through vulnerable personal stories, practical exercises, and real-world applications, this book provides a road map for leaders who are ready to begin their healing journey—not just for their own sake but also for the healing of the organizations and communities they serve.

Build real trust in the remote workplace by mastering proven strategies for leading employees who work from home, the corner coffee shop, or the downtown office.

The shift to remote work has fundamentally changed how we build and maintain trust in organizations. Drawing on extensive research and experience, trusted leadership expert David Horsager and communication scholar Dr. Peggy Kendall present the seven essential strategies that create strong virtual and hybrid workplace relationships.

Readers will learn to do the following:

• Amplify communication
• Clarify direction
• Build predictability
• Redefine accountability
• Create connections
• Equip their people
• Leverage in-person experiences

Trust at a Distance addresses common remote-work challenges, such as unclear communication, lack of information, and weakened relationships. This guide is perfect for leaders navigating hybrid and remote teams. By the time readers are finished reading, they will be inspired and confident that trust really can be built at a distance!

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.

Take ownership of your work and unleash the power of agency in your organization!

To help give employees the power, influence, and voice necessary to truly excel in their workplace, organizational development experts Miller and Katz reveal the importance of agency and offer practical advice on how to achieve it.

With more knowledge workers entering the workplace, many are being stifled by traditional employee-manager relationships that hamper their ability to fully contribute and feel engaged at work. And in a constantly changing and competitive world of work, organizations must evolve to keep up with worker satisfaction or else face a decrease in performance and loss in talent.

The solution? Enabling your employees to exercise their individual agency in the workplace. Through an actionable roadmap that highlights common pitfalls and practical steps necessary for establishing a culture of greater agency, this book will provide individuals, teams, managers, and leaders with concrete ways to clarify their current level of agency and identifies specific actions they can take to exercise greater agency.

This guide shows readers how to transform a traditional organization into an evolutionary one with a framework and mindset that offer a new way of leading and approaching change.


The key to surviving organizational change is sorting through the truths, half-truths, and lies-beginning with the ones you tell yourself. That way you don't end up overpromising and underdelivering, and you can weather troubling times in your organization. Truth, including inner truth, is key to surviving organizational change and achieving truly agile leadership.

Using case studies from the most successful companies, Michael and Audree Sahota demonstrate how creative, collaborative, and adaptive thinking can ripple from the leader outward. If you can change your own mindset, you can change your organization. This holistic approach bridges the gap between traditional management and agile ways of working. If you can truly understand the reasons people resist new ways of working, you will no longer meet passive resistance, and an authentic transformation will result.

“This inspiring book belongs on the desk of every CEO and politician. With eye-opening case studies and recommended behaviors in every chapter, it's an indispensable user guide for servant leaders.”
-Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The New One Minute Manager and coeditor of
Servant Leadership in Action

On the most fundamental level, leaders must bring divergent groups together and forge consensus on a path forward. But what makes that possible? Leadership educator Marilyn Gist says what is most important is far too often overlooked: humility, which she defines as a deep regard for others' dignity.

Gist offers a model of leader humility derived from three questions people ask of their leaders: Who are you? Where are we going? Do you see me? She explores each of these questions in depth, as well as the six key qualities of leader humility: a balanced ego, integrity, a compelling vision, ethical strategies, generous inclusion, and a developmental focus. Much of this book is based on Gist's interviews with a dozen distinguished leaders of organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, Costco, REI, Alaska Airlines, Starbucks, and others. The foreword and a guest chapter are written by Alan Mulally, the legendary leader who brought Ford back from the brink of bankruptcy after the 2008 financial collapse and who Gist sees as an exemplar of leader humility.

Learn how to lead in uncertain times, build resilience, and generate credible hope when chaos threatens-using practical faith-based leadership tools and AI-powered imagination to navigate the future with confidence.

You're facing unprecedented chaos. Faith and hope are collapsing worldwide. The institutions, norms, and alliances that once felt stable are fracturing. As a leader—in business, government, nonprofits, or faith communities—you're struggling to inspire confidence in any future at all. Your people can't work toward futures they can't imagine or trust futures they haven't been invited to shape.

What you need is a new path forward. This book gives you practical tools to generate credible hope when everything feels uncertain:

• The Credible Hope Compass—a practical framework for making leadership decisions when faith has been weaponized and hope feels naive
• Methods to use generative AI to envision alternative futures and expand your team's imagination
• Faith-enhanced leadership practices that move you beyond denial or despair into action

Following two personas navigating leadership in chaos, Johansen, Doyle, and Kirshbaum show you how to treat imagination as a leadership practice and make repair something visible, communal, and real. You'll learn to generate and share calm trust in futures worth striving for—giving your people the credible hope they desperately need.

The rules of business are changing dramatically. The Aspen Institute's Judy Samuelson describes the profound shifts in attitudes and mindsets that are redefining our notions of what constitutes business success.



Decades of teaching and reinforcing shareholder return as the single objective function of a well-run business has resulted in corporations focused entirely on quarterly profits and rewarding short-term-oriented investors. This has been at the expense of employees, long-term vision, and stewardship of natural resources. But we are now starting to see social forces and public expectations giving shape to a new kind of business ethic, as reflected in the Business Roundtable's 2019 Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.
Judy Samuelson, vice president at the Aspen Institute, lays out six new rules that can help a business free itself from the tyranny of shareholder primacy and become an active force for solving the world's problems:
1. Reputation, trust, loyalty, and other intangibles drive real business value
2. Businesses serve many objectives beyond shareholder value
3. Corporate responsibilities extend far outside the business gates
4. Employees are allies, not expenses
5. Culture is king and talent rules
6. Co-create with your competitors to win
These new rules create real value and have the staying power to reverse decades of value-destroying decisions in business.

Management icon Henry Mintzberg dismantles twenty dangerous business myths in this essential guide for thoughtful leaders.

Henry Mintzberg, legendary management thinker and recipient of the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent decades challenging conventional wisdom about how organizations work. In this powerful distillation of his life's work, Mintzberg tackles the most persistent and damaging myths in business—from “if you can't measure it, you can't manage it” to the blind worship of “strategic planning.”

With characteristic wit and clarity, Mintzberg offers refreshing alternatives that will transform how you think about leadership, structure, and organizational effectiveness. He replaces tired maxims like “managing is controlling” with more nuanced approaches that embrace “controlled disorder” and suggests that “ordinary creativity” often matters more than exceptional genius.

Drawing from his extensive body of work across sixty years, Mintzberg provides a masterclass in critical thinking for anyone who leads teams or organizations. His irreverent style makes complex ideas accessible without sacrificing depth, making this book as intellectually stimulating as it is practically valuable.

Whether you're a seasoned executive, an aspiring manager, or a student of organizational behavior, this concise volume will challenge your assumptions and provide a clear-eyed framework for more effective, humane management.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller
Winner, 2025 Good Business Book Awards (Business – Management)
Finalist, 2025 IAN Book Awards (Business/Leadership/Management)

What if the most powerful growth strategy in business today isn’t AI or cost-cutting—but your people?

In an era defined by talent shortages, employee disengagement, DEI backlash, and pressure for measurable ROI, this groundbreaking leadership book delivers a bold answer: share power to unlock performance.

Based on research from more than 1,200 companies—including Walmart, Google, and JPMorgan Chase—this data-driven business book reveals how employee empowerment, inclusive leadership, and human capital strategy drive profitability, retention, and long-term growth. For the first time, the research quantifies the financial impact of investing in people.

Jackson offers 9 proven strategies:

• Centering employee voice
• Building mutualistic, high-trust workplaces
• Advancing intersectional inclusion
• Reimagining employee benefits
• Activating frontline leaders
• Hiring STARs (Skilled Through Alternative Routes)
• Developing deep talent benches
• Using human capital reporting as competitive strategy
• Practicing distributed leadership

For CEOs, CHROs, HR leaders, and managers, this practical guide shows how equity and profits rise together—proving that people-first leadership is a competitive advantage.

Bias is real and we all have it, but there is good news: even though bias is part of the human condition, we are not powerless against it. The secret is building authentic, deep relationships across differences.


Everybody's biased. We all harbor unconscious assumptions that get in the way of our good intentions and keep us from working harmoniously and effectively with other people. In our increasingly diverse society this can be a real stumbling block.

Tiffany Jana and Matthew Freeman-consultants who also happen to be a biracial couple-argue that ultimately the only way to really overcome bias is to focus our energy on building relationships. We need to extend our circle of trust to include people who are different from us in many ways – race, religion, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education, socioeconomic class, and ability. These differences can enrich our lives and expand our perspectives.

Overcoming Bias doesn't advocate setting some kind of friend quota, merely that we seek out experiences that challenge our presuppositions and expose us to people, cultures, and ideas outside of our usual comfort zone. But this also requires some work on ourselves. Through vivid stories, soul-searching reflection, and fun (yes, fun!) exercises and activities Jana and Freeman help us become aware of our own biases, stereotypes, and unacknowledged privileges. This book will provide you with everything you need to understand bias, talk about it with increased fluency, and overcome it so you can build stronger relationships.

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.

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.

“Providing guidance throughout, Dabbs prompts the reader with questions. She believes a better understanding of past experiences and how society has established systemic barriers to entry can help people design their future.”-The Financial Times

In a world overcrowded with labels, don't allow your identity to be defined by other people. Learn how to take back your power, choose to feed the aspects of your identity that serve you, and let go of those that don't.

Everyone feels like an outsider at some point in their life-when we walk into a room and think to ourselves, “I don't belong here.” To avoid these feelings of exclusion, many of us hide our authentic selves and allow others to define our identity.

You Belong Here offers a new framework that allows each of us to define how we want to be seen, heard, and valued on our own terms so we feel a sense of belonging in any situation. Further, it serves as a launchpad for organizational leaders and culture builders to create safe spaces for individuals to show up as their authentic selves.

Readers will explore our four identities:
• Our Lived Identity is made up of the aspects of our identity we inherit when we are born into the world.
• Our Learned Identity includes the parts of our identity that we've chosen or claimed as we make our way through the world.
• Our Lingering Identity is the identity we default to when we feel like an outsider and fall back into as a survival mechanism.
• Our Loved Identity is where we find our authentic selves and see ourselves through a lens of empowerment.

In the journey to understand our past experiences and how society has established barriers to entry, we can design our own future, rooted in our Loved Identity. We learn to rewrite the stories that aren't serving us and embrace the ones that do. Rather than look for a seat at someone else's table, we find the tools to build our own.

When we fully leverage this and live with authenticity and purpose, we can be seen, heard, and valued in a way that gives us a sense of belonging at home, at work, and in society. Belonging is realized when we understand everyone is an outsider and it's the power to create space for those differences that unite us all.