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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.
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.
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.
This first comprehensive guide to helping mentors and mentees bridge gaps between and among cultures—a growing issue in today's diverse workplace—is coauthored by the founder and CEO of the Center for Mentoring Excellence.
As the workplace has become more diverse, mentoring has become more challenging. Mentors and mentees may come from very different backgrounds and have limited understanding of each other's cultures and outlooks. But mentoring remains the most powerful tool for creating meaningful relationships, furthering professional development, and increasing engagement and retention. Younger workers and emerging leaders in particular are demanding it.
Lisa Z. Fain and Lois J. Zachary offer a timely, evidence-based, practical guide for helping mentors develop the level of cultural competency needed to bridge differences. Firmly rooted in Zachary's well-known four-part mentoring model, the book uses three fictional scenarios featuring three pairs of diverse mentors and mentees to illustrate how key concepts can play out in real life. It offers an array of accessible tools and strategies designed to help you increase your self-awareness and prepare you to embrace and leverage differences in your mentoring relationships. But beyond tips and techniques, Fain and Zachary emphasize that authenticity is the key—the ultimate purpose of this book is to help the mentor and mentee make a genuine connection and learn from each other. That's when the magic really happens.
As the workplace has become more diverse, mentoring has become more challenging. Mentors and mentees may come from very different backgrounds and have limited understanding of each other's cultures and outlooks. But mentoring remains the most powerful tool for creating meaningful relationships, furthering professional development, and increasing engagement and retention. Younger workers and emerging leaders in particular are demanding it.
Lisa Z. Fain and Lois J. Zachary offer a timely, evidence-based, practical guide for helping mentors develop the level of cultural competency needed to bridge differences. Firmly rooted in Zachary's well-known four-part mentoring model, the book uses three fictional scenarios featuring three pairs of diverse mentors and mentees to illustrate how key concepts can play out in real life. It offers an array of accessible tools and strategies designed to help you increase your self-awareness and prepare you to embrace and leverage differences in your mentoring relationships. But beyond tips and techniques, Fain and Zachary emphasize that authenticity is the key—the ultimate purpose of this book is to help the mentor and mentee make a genuine connection and learn from each other. That's when the magic really happens.
As President of the Giraffe Heroes Project, which since 1982 has been recognizing people who "stick their necks out for the common good," John Graham has seen what hundreds of average citizens around the world have done to bring about constructive change. He's drawn on their experiences, his own as a veteran environmental activist, and that of a hand-picked group of seasoned activists to produce an accessible, eminently practical, inspiring guide on how to work effectively for change in any environment.
Stick Your Neck Out covers every aspect of working for change, from choosing an issue to mapping out a strategy, getting a team together, building alliances, working with the media, and more. Each chapter contains a series of practical tips as well as inspiring examples of real people--artists, truck drivers, doctors, waitresses, and others--who have made a difference on issues like poverty, racism, gang violence, environmental pollution, and many more. Everything in this book has been honed and practiced; nothing is untested theory.
This is a comprehensive guide to the skills, qualities, and strategies you need to make a difference on any issue. But it's also about becoming fully alive--about the meaning and passion you can add to your own life by getting involved. Active citizenship and personal growth are linked. The information in this book can change your world--and it can change your life.
Stick Your Neck Out covers every aspect of working for change, from choosing an issue to mapping out a strategy, getting a team together, building alliances, working with the media, and more. Each chapter contains a series of practical tips as well as inspiring examples of real people--artists, truck drivers, doctors, waitresses, and others--who have made a difference on issues like poverty, racism, gang violence, environmental pollution, and many more. Everything in this book has been honed and practiced; nothing is untested theory.
This is a comprehensive guide to the skills, qualities, and strategies you need to make a difference on any issue. But it's also about becoming fully alive--about the meaning and passion you can add to your own life by getting involved. Active citizenship and personal growth are linked. The information in this book can change your world--and it can change your life.
There is too much to do in too little time. But bestselling author Devora Zack says multitasking is a phony solution. It's stressful, inefficient, unnatural, and even dangerous. Through this book-which is the answer to many people's prayers-she shows how you can singletask your way to success and tranquility.
We have become a nation-one of many-addicted to the popular, enticing, and dangerously misleading drug of multitasking. Author Devora Zack was hooked once herself. We hope by doing several tasks at once we can accomplish more-but Zack marshals a host of neuroscientific research to show that the opposite is true. The fact is, your brain is simply not built to multitask. In any situation we're most efficient focusing on one task at a time. But with all the information and interruptions that bombard us, how is that possible?
Singletasking explains exactly how to clear and calm your mind, arrange your schedule and environment, and gently but firmly manage the expectations of people around you so that you can accomplish a succession of tasks, one at a time-and be infinitely more productive and effective. This book flies in the face of long-standing rhetoric glorifying multitasking. Elegantly simple methods are presented on how to tackle an insurmountable list of to-dos with less effort and greater ease. Only clowns should juggle. Singletasking is the key to success and sanity.
We have become a nation-one of many-addicted to the popular, enticing, and dangerously misleading drug of multitasking. Author Devora Zack was hooked once herself. We hope by doing several tasks at once we can accomplish more-but Zack marshals a host of neuroscientific research to show that the opposite is true. The fact is, your brain is simply not built to multitask. In any situation we're most efficient focusing on one task at a time. But with all the information and interruptions that bombard us, how is that possible?
Singletasking explains exactly how to clear and calm your mind, arrange your schedule and environment, and gently but firmly manage the expectations of people around you so that you can accomplish a succession of tasks, one at a time-and be infinitely more productive and effective. This book flies in the face of long-standing rhetoric glorifying multitasking. Elegantly simple methods are presented on how to tackle an insurmountable list of to-dos with less effort and greater ease. Only clowns should juggle. Singletasking is the key to success and sanity.
This is the first book on influencing others aimed squarely at introverts, who make up half of the U.S. population. Jennifer Kahnweiler, bestselling author of The Introverted Leader (20,000 copies sold) demonstrates precisely how introverts can be highly effective influencers when, instead of trying to act like extroverts, they make the most of their natural strengths.
This classic pioneering book provides keen insight into workplace diversity. With new tips, tools, and strategies for peacocks and penguins alike, your organization will flourish and take flight!
Management giant Henry Mintzberg turns his attention to health care, arguing that many of the massive issues facing health care stem from the fact that it is not a cohesive system. To heal itself, health care must become less distant and opaque and more engaging and collaborative.
Mintzberg begins in part 1 by confronting myths about health care, including the following:
• We have a system of health care.
• Health-care institutions can be fixed with more heroic leadership.
• The health-care system can be fixed by more administrative engineering.
• The health-care system can be fixed by more categorizing and commodifying to facilitate more calculating.
• The health-care system can be fixed with increased competition.
• Health-care organizations can be fixed by running them more like businesses.
Part 2 examines how health care is organized, in relation to what we know about differentiation, separation, and integration in organizations and systems in general. Mintzberg shows that in health care, the inclination has been to do an awful lot more differentiating than integrating. This has resulted in all sorts of excessive separations: curtains across the specialties, sheets over the patients, and walls and floors between the administrators. The favored form of organizing health care-the professional organization-is the source of its great strength as well as its debilitating weakness.
Part 3 then offers guidelines to reframe the core components of health care: strategy, organization, scale, ownership, management, and the “system” itself. For example, managing has to be about care more than cure, and organizing has to favor communityship over leadership, collaboration over competition.
Mintzberg begins in part 1 by confronting myths about health care, including the following:
• We have a system of health care.
• Health-care institutions can be fixed with more heroic leadership.
• The health-care system can be fixed by more administrative engineering.
• The health-care system can be fixed by more categorizing and commodifying to facilitate more calculating.
• The health-care system can be fixed with increased competition.
• Health-care organizations can be fixed by running them more like businesses.
Part 2 examines how health care is organized, in relation to what we know about differentiation, separation, and integration in organizations and systems in general. Mintzberg shows that in health care, the inclination has been to do an awful lot more differentiating than integrating. This has resulted in all sorts of excessive separations: curtains across the specialties, sheets over the patients, and walls and floors between the administrators. The favored form of organizing health care-the professional organization-is the source of its great strength as well as its debilitating weakness.
Part 3 then offers guidelines to reframe the core components of health care: strategy, organization, scale, ownership, management, and the “system” itself. For example, managing has to be about care more than cure, and organizing has to favor communityship over leadership, collaboration over competition.
Building on the success of her classic, bestselling book, Change Your Questions, Change Your Life (over 100,000 copies sold), Marilee Adams shows in this new book how teachers and other education professionals can change their own and their students' lives by developing an active, inquiring mindset and igniting a lifelong love of learning.
Combining the talents of a professor of religion and an expert on workplace dynamics, this book continues the tradition begun by its bestselling predecessor, What Would Buddha Do (more than 30,000 copies sold), as yet another perfect tool for bringing bite-size chunks of Buddhist wisdom to give meaning to and resolve common conflicts found in everyday work.
For many small organizations and businesses, it can be tempting to think that traditional PR is too expensive. Media relations and PR expert Jennifer R. Farmer shows that you don't need a big budget to make a big impact.
The success of an organization, whether it is a nonprofit or an entrepreneurial venture, depends on a proactive and robust public relations arm. According to author Jennifer R. Farmer, the key to breaking through in the media is to follow the CCRR framework: be credible, be creative, be responsive, and be relentless.
For small organizations, public relations may feel like a luxury to be indulged in at some point in the distant future. This book argues that you don't need a multimillion-dollar budget to have a powerful and influential public relations program. Instead, organizations as a whole should be as committed to public relations as they are to the work they are spearheading. Farmer offers sharp insights to better design and implement low- or no-cost PR strategies that can help any organization garner continual media attention and therefore support.
Extraordinary PR, Ordinary Budget makes the convincing case that small and mission-based organizations, in both the public and private sectors, must have a strategic PR apparatus that is central to their work. Effective PR is more than getting media hits and paid placement-it's a critical component of organizational development based on relationship building.
The success of an organization, whether it is a nonprofit or an entrepreneurial venture, depends on a proactive and robust public relations arm. According to author Jennifer R. Farmer, the key to breaking through in the media is to follow the CCRR framework: be credible, be creative, be responsive, and be relentless.
For small organizations, public relations may feel like a luxury to be indulged in at some point in the distant future. This book argues that you don't need a multimillion-dollar budget to have a powerful and influential public relations program. Instead, organizations as a whole should be as committed to public relations as they are to the work they are spearheading. Farmer offers sharp insights to better design and implement low- or no-cost PR strategies that can help any organization garner continual media attention and therefore support.
Extraordinary PR, Ordinary Budget makes the convincing case that small and mission-based organizations, in both the public and private sectors, must have a strategic PR apparatus that is central to their work. Effective PR is more than getting media hits and paid placement-it's a critical component of organizational development based on relationship building.
Based on three years of study into the topic of transformational leadership, this is a definitive guide to becoming a leader for positive change. The best, most original thinking from psychologists, business leaders, religious leaders, organizational experts, and academics are brought together in this life-changing volume.
The most successful organizations add a healthy dose of play into their daily or weekly routines. In fact, research has shown that when people actually enjoy their jobs they're more creative, more productive, and more committed to doing their jobs well. Companies like the Colorado Health Sciences Center and Southwest Airlines attest to the positive effect of fun at work. Both trace increased job satisfaction and decreased employee downtime to concerted efforts to make fun a part of their corporate identity.
With 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work , Dave Hemsath and Leslie Yerkes offer a complete resource anyone can use to create a dynamic workplace that encourages and inspires fun-and-games camaraderie among employees. It combines thorough research with practical hands-on tools, and features hundreds of ideas real companies have used to lighten up the workplace.
The authors surveyed over 1,500 individuals from organizations around the world and received enthusiastic responses that yielded a broad range of ways to spice up the work day. The suggestions in 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work include humorous training films, dress-up and dress-down days, silly job titles, awards for people who go "above and beyond the call of duty" when a coworker is on vacation, "ritual dances" at the completion of a project, a fashion show when it's time to choose a new uniform-even foam dart fights after meetings.
Hemsath and Yerkes offer ideas for instilling an element of fun into various business functions-from office environment, to meetings, training, communication, hiring, recognition, team building, and "simple acts of fun." In addition to the fun ideas in these chapters, a series of side bars, called "fun facts," "fun quotes," and "fun resources" offer humorous and interesting facts and statements about the effects of fun on workplace performance and job satisfaction, and direct readers to useful sources for products and services to enhance workplace "funativity."
Hemsath and Yerkes show that creating a fun atmosphere in the workplace increases productivity and morale and has a positive effect on the bottom line. Most importantly, they give readers the tools to have more fun at work, no matter where they work, or what position they're in.
With 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work , Dave Hemsath and Leslie Yerkes offer a complete resource anyone can use to create a dynamic workplace that encourages and inspires fun-and-games camaraderie among employees. It combines thorough research with practical hands-on tools, and features hundreds of ideas real companies have used to lighten up the workplace.
The authors surveyed over 1,500 individuals from organizations around the world and received enthusiastic responses that yielded a broad range of ways to spice up the work day. The suggestions in 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work include humorous training films, dress-up and dress-down days, silly job titles, awards for people who go "above and beyond the call of duty" when a coworker is on vacation, "ritual dances" at the completion of a project, a fashion show when it's time to choose a new uniform-even foam dart fights after meetings.
Hemsath and Yerkes offer ideas for instilling an element of fun into various business functions-from office environment, to meetings, training, communication, hiring, recognition, team building, and "simple acts of fun." In addition to the fun ideas in these chapters, a series of side bars, called "fun facts," "fun quotes," and "fun resources" offer humorous and interesting facts and statements about the effects of fun on workplace performance and job satisfaction, and direct readers to useful sources for products and services to enhance workplace "funativity."
Hemsath and Yerkes show that creating a fun atmosphere in the workplace increases productivity and morale and has a positive effect on the bottom line. Most importantly, they give readers the tools to have more fun at work, no matter where they work, or what position they're in.
