Most of us put work first and leave fun for last, as an afterthought. But speaker, trainer, consultant, and bestselling author Dave Crenshaw (The Myth of Multitasking) says we've got it backwards. By putting fun first-working meaningful, enjoyable breaks into each day, week, month, and year-we will not only be happier, we'll be more productive too!


Fun is something you have to earn, right? You work hard, and then maybe once a year you get to enjoy yourself on a vacation. And after a lifetime of this, you retire and finally do what you want. Dynamic speaker and consultant Dave Crenshaw calls this the culture of WISH: you slave away and hope it will be Worth It Someday, Hopefully. And it's all wrong.

Crenshaw shows that by putting fun first-carefully scheduling enjoyable, meaningful, and refreshing breaks throughout your day, week, month, and year-not only will you be happier, you'll be a lot more productive too. Fun has the power to turn your life into a WIN-what you do will feel like it's Worth It Now. Using real-world examples, thought-provoking exercises, and a healthy dose of wit, Crenshaw details a five-stage process that has helped thousands of people discover their personal “oases”-specific actions and activities that they find renewing and energizing-and make them a priority. Readers will be delighted to find a book that lowers their stress, raises their results, and restores recess to their routine.

Mother Teresa's distinctive leadership style- based in absolute simplicity and practicality-helped her to build one of the word's largest and most successful global organizations. This book- the first to examine Mother Teresa in this context- shows readers how to apply her leadership principles and practices.

This new, data-driven book teaches managers and HR executives how to identify a comprehensive and integrated set of talent practices that fit the evolving workplace and that will dramatically improve the effectiveness of all organizations.

Many talent management principles and practices now being used in organizations are obsolete as a result of the fluid nature of work. Globalization, technological advances, automation, the diversification of the workforce, the push for sustainable practices, and the increasing pace of transformation have wrought dramatic changes in the world of work. And yet a recent study showed that from 1995 to 2013 there was no significant growth in the way HR spends its time.

Based on extensive research by Lawler and his colleagues, this book identifies the new strategies, policies, and practices needed for talent management today.

What used to be good or best practices with respect to how people are recruited, selected, trained, assigned, developed, rewarded, and evaluated no longer fit. Today's hierarchical, bureaucratic talent management needs to become agile, strategic, and performance based. This is the first book to identify a comprehensive integrated set of talent practices that fit the changing workplace and that will dramatically improve the effectiveness of organizations.

For some, projecting confidence and credibility is second nature. For others, it seems like a foreign language they'll never learn – until now. Rob Jolles delivers down-to-earth solutions for anyone looking to enhance the most basic need of all; to be believed. He leverages his over 30 years of experience to equip readers with empowering and practical tools for achieving business and social success.

Let's face it – there are some of us who are born with a natural ability to effortlessly communicate with others and be believed. Unfortunately, not everyone possesses this natural talent, and as a result struggle with the simple act of being believed. Frequently, this inability to get others to believe becomes a significant stumbling block affecting those we interact with, and the paths we choose in life. Expert author Rob Jolles has actively mentored and coached thousands who battle with long-term unemployment, and have a particularly acute problem with presenting themselves effectively. The problem, he says, is we rely far too heavily on our words to secure the belief of others, when in reality only seven percent of the emotional impact of our message comes from the words we use. The solution he offers here is building confidence through a series of process behaviors and techniques, and learning how to cope with fear, which can significantly impact how credible others perceive our message to be. Moving past the words, and applying acting and improv skills, along with improving pitch, pace, and tone, his programs have achieved astonishing results.

Through a beautifully written and engaging story about two people struggling to create visions-both for the company where they work and for their own lives-Ken Blanchard and Jesse Lyn Stoner detail the essential elements of creating a successful vision.

In a wonderfully readable and fun way, SEEING SYSTEMS (over 30,000 copies sold) presents a unique and innovative theory of power dynamics that provides the reader with a new way of looking at, understanding, surviving, and prospering in the many systems of which we are part.

The New Social Learning demonstrates how social media can transform the workplace by harnessing the brainpower and experiences of colleagues working across the globe as easily as if they were side by side. Together these emerging solutions create a new kind of value chain and new kind of knowledge building ecosystem, with people at the center. Co-authors Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner, widely respected leaders in the workplace revolution, have loaded this book with compelling stories from companies using social media to innovate, collaborate, and inform decisions in effective and innovative ways. The New Social Learning is the most authoritative guide available for leveraging these powerful new approaches to increase organizational IQ.

If you influence change in the lives of those around you, then you are engaged in an act of leadership. Your Leadership Legacy is the sum total of the difference you make in people's lives, directly and indirectly, formally and informally. The challenge is how to live in a way that creates a legacy that will make a positive difference in the lives of those around you. Your Leadership Legacy shows you how to leave a meaningful legacy.

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.

A modern, feminist take on the classic choose-your-own-journey book, inspiring readers to embrace the fact that there is no singular right path-just your own!


So many women enter their adult lives believing that they should know where they are going and how to get there. This can make life decisions feel intimidating and overwhelming. While some choices that lie ahead are fairly predictable, such as those surrounding career, partnership, and motherhood, the effects of these choices can lead to more complicated and unexpected turns that are seldom discussed.

Rather than suggesting a rule book, Rebekah Bastian, vice president at Zillow and recognized thought leader, inspires you to Blaze Your Own Trail. “I have the benefit of being a living example of crooked paths, magnificent screw-ups, and shocking successes,” she writes. Through storylines and supportive data that explore workplace sexism, career changes, marriage, child-rearing, existential crises, and everything in between, you will learn to embrace and feel less alone in your own nonlinear journey. Even better, you can turn back decisions and make different ones. Blaze Your Own Trail includes nineteen possible outcomes and many routes to get there. You will find that you have the strength to make it through any of them.

Bill Torbert and associates illustrate how individuals and organizations can progress through more and more sophisticated "action-logics" -- strategies for analyzing the world and reacting to it -- until they will eventually be able to practice action inquiry continually. Offering action inquiry exercises at the end of the chapters, the book moves from junior managers beginning to practice action inquiry through CEO's transforming whole companies, to world leaders transforming whole countries, as exemplified by Czech president Vaclav Havel. Through short stories of leadership and organizational transformations, this groundbreaking book illustrates how action inquiry increases personal integrity, relational mutuality, company profitability, and long-term organizational and environmental sustainability.

Extensively revised and expanded, Future Search, which is the classic, definitive, bestselling book on one of most powerful methods for changing and improving all types of organizations and communities, includes a host of new tools, and three new chapters. If you want to do strategic planning, product innovation, quality improvement, organizational restructuring, or any other major change in a participative, whole system way, this book is your guide. Over 30,000 of the original edition sold.

Leaders have countless resources and books aimed at helping them discover their strengths–which is fantastic–but none of them address what happens when these strengths are inevitably overplayed and start to do more damage than good, or what to do to rectify that dilemma. Until now.

From one of America's most popular motivational speakers, comes a set of new and powerful rules for personal transformation that help you break through the invisible beliefs that are holding you back.

We all have times in our lives when the results of our behavior don't seem to be meeting our needs. These shortfalls may result in depression, anger, frustration, and relationship struggles, among a host of possible symptoms. It often seems difficult to see a clear path out of the problems.

In this new book Hyrum Smith does two things that are invaluable to people who wish to make their lives less painful. First, he reveals, through a clear and simple model, how we get to the place where our behaviors cause these kinds of problems. Then, with a simplicity that is impressive in itself, he describes the steps we must take to identify and rectify the beliefs leading to our painful behavior.

Through the use of the “Reality Model” and the concept of the “Belief Window,” illustrated through humorous anecdotes and a powerful experience at a high school, Hyrum not only lays out the intellectual framework of this model, he draws you in emotionally as well. When you are done, you will agree with him that the solution to our problems is simple. It's not easy, but it is simple.

The result is a powerful process for transforming your habits, relationships, and personal and career success.

Instead of being boring and time-wasting, meetings can be places where participants and leaders can get their work done productively, efficiently, and happily. It is not an impossible dream. This book shows how.

Constant, continuing, and cataclysmic change is causing a major crisis within business organizations today. Faced with constantly advancing technology, unpredictable market shifts, intense global competition, and an increasingly independent "free agent" workforce, the only way for an organization to adapt and succeed is to build a "culture of inclusion" that nurtures and draws on the talents of a diverse workforce.
Easy to say but hard to do; most organizations are mired in industrial revolution, static-world business models administered by monocultural, bordering-on-oppressive, "command and control" hierarchies. Organizations at risk include Fortune 500 giants, entrepreneurial start-ups, manufacturing and retail operations, government agencies, not-for-profits, educational institutions, and others.
Most organizational change efforts-whether labeled as diversity efforts, re-engineering, right-sizing, or total-quality-management-are a waste of time, money, and human effort. Most produce more cynicism than results, and they can poison the waters for future change efforts. The Inclusion Breakthrough cuts a path through this potential minefield, offering a proven methodology for strategic organizational change, including models for diagnosing, planning, and implementing inclusion-focused, culture-change strategies tailored to each organization's individual needs. It also describes the key competencies for leading and sustaining a culture of inclusion.
Offering real-world results of "before and after" surveys, including anecdotal and statistical reports of organizational change achieved using the methodologies described, The Inclusion Breakthrough presents an overview of current workplace conditions, attitudes, and policies based on interviews, surveys, and focus groups encompassing thousands of people in major organizations. The Inclusion Breakthrough demonstrates why the bottom line must be the central focus of any change strategy-and more importantly, how to carry that strategy out successfully.