Professional Development

One of the most provocative and revolutionary books written on leadership, business, and organizational design, Stewardship remains just as relevant, even twenty years later, to transforming our organizations for the common good of the wider community.

One of businesses greatest modern challenges is navigating the inevitable culture clashes that come with a global workplace. Michael Landers says the solution is deceptively simple: by becoming aware of your own culturally conditioned beliefs and practices, you can more easily recognize and adapt to those other cultures.


In an era when people and money are flowing fast across international boundaries, physically and virtually, culture crashes have become increasingly frequent, says international business consultant Michael Landers. A culture crash is what happens when someone unwittingly offends, frustrates or mystifies a person from a different culture. This can lead to lost business, hurt feelings, damaged relationships, even international incidents, as when Bill Gates shook his South Korean host with one hand when he was supposed to use two (very disrespectful).

So are culture crashes inevitable? No! All cultures fall into certain broad categories, and if you can figure out what kind of culture you're dealing with you can avoid committing a major faux pas. Landers first helps you become aware of your own culturally conditioned behaviors, perceptions and values, which seem so “normal” you don't even notice them (kind of like thinking you're not the one with an accent). Then he shows you how to figure out where a culture lies along continuums like individualistic vs. collectivist, direct vs. indirect, punctual vs. relaxed, and formal vs. informal. Filled with dozens of instructive and entertaining stories, this book will point you in the right direction as you navigate through the new global era.

Many new ways of changing organizations have become popular, replacing the old top-down change methods with methods that engage everyone in the organization. This is an extensively revised, updated, and expanded edition of one of the original and leading guides to the core principles that underlie all of these new change methods and make them successful. Over 25,000 of the original sold.

You are more than a mouse in someone else's maze. In this business fable, Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Deepak Malhotra encourages readers to control your own destiny rather than chase blindly after it.

Leaders all have stories-the events, perspectives, and behaviors that constitute who they are-but few are aware of what that story is or what is says about them. Leadership development expert Tim Tobin show how, by thinking of themselves as literally writing a story -with a plot, theme, characters, and an arc-leaders can take control of their story and become more effective, insightful, and inspiring.

Crafting agreements with others is a fundamental life skill. Unfortunately, we were never taught how to do it. The agreements most people make are incomplete and ineffective-they usually focus on protecting against what might go wrong instead of figuring out how to make things go right. The Book of Agreement offers a new approach. Stewart Levine demonstrates the superiority of "agreements for results" versus "agreements for protection" and outlines ten principles for creating agreements that explicitly articulate desired outcomes and provide a roadmap to achieving them. He includes over thirty specific templates that can be used to create this new type of agreement for results in a variety of organizational and personal contexts.

You are more than a mouse in someone else's maze. In this business fable, Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Deepak Malhotra encourages readers to control your own destiny rather than chase blindly after it.

Performance reviews don't work--they demotivate and drag performance. Chandler presents the answer with the Performance Management Reboot process, an employee-driven solution that powers people up.

Most people associate performance management with the annual performance review, which is universally dreaded by employees and HR alike. No evidence exists that such reviews do anything to improve performance, and yet they endure. Tamra Chandler wants to replace them with something that actually works.

This means more than just a little tweaking. As Chandler explains in vivid detail, the present process is completely broken and outdated. It's a cookie-cutter, fear-based, top-down approach that emphasizes negatives over positives, pits people and departments against each other, and has never motivated anyone to do anything but try to avoid it.

Her alternative, the Performance Management Reboot, is designed for the way people actually work today, and is grounded in the latest scientific findings about motivation. It's a customized, transparent, employee-driven process that values collaboration over competition, and rewards people for acquiring new skills and increasing their contribution instead of hitting some arbitrary benchmarks.

Chandler's illustrated guide cracks the code to building high performance and engaged employees, while optimizing performance management for today's increasingly connected, volatile, and multi-generational business world.

Leading futurist Bob Johansen shows how a new way of thinking, enhanced by new technologies, will help leaders break free of limiting labels and see new gradients of possibility in a chaotic world.

The future will get even more perplexing over the next decade, and we are not ready. The problem is that we're restricted by rigid structures that do not serve our larger goals-we think they inform us, but in fact, they tend to limit us. Simplistic stories of what's going on will be alluring but dangerous. Just in time, new technology and media tools will make it much easier to think beyond the categories, buckets, slots, and boxes that people use today to prepare for threats and imagine new opportunities.

Full-spectrum thinking is the ability to seek clarity and understanding across gradients of possibility. Utilizing successful examples of spectrum-thinking, such as gender fluidity and the autism spectrum, noted futurist Bob Johansen reveals how a spectrum unifies us rather than divides us by seeing each individual as inhabiting various points on the same landscape. By recognizing technology as an integral part of creating this spectrum, Johansen demonstrates that we can apply full-spectrum thinking to achieve breakthroughs in business, leadership, innovation, politics, community relations, and many other domains.

In today's highly networked and competitive global economy, mounting social and environmental problems are forcing corporations to focus on more than just their stockholders' interest in meeting bottom line profitability. More and more companies are recognizing the value of identifying and building relationships with all of their organization's stakeholders-employees, customers, suppliers, and even communities. In fact, recent research has shown that companies that treat their employees well, create jobs in the local economy, develop innovative products and services, take care of the environment, and contribute to the community, are often more profitable.
In The Stakeholder Strategy, sociologist Ann Svendsen presents an effective and practical step-by-step guide that companies can use to forge a network of powerful and profitable collaborative stakeholder relationships.
While some forward-thinking corporations have tried limited collaborative approaches-focusing on one stakeholder group at a time-few have taken a comprehensive and strategic approach to building relationships with all of their stakeholders, notes Svendsen. And, while considerable commitment to the idea of stakeholder collaboration exists, there is a lack of knowledge and understanding about how to develop these relationships. The Stakeholder Strategy is the first book to show business leaders and managers how to establish and maintain positive, mutually beneficial stakeholder relationships. Based on a synthesis of ideas from community relations, corporate philanthropy, stakeholder management, organizational change, sustainability, and the corporate social responsibility literature, it offers an integrated framework, as well as the practical tools for developing new kinds of collaborative relationships.
Svendsen uses easy-to-grasp concepts from everyday life, such as the process we go through in finding a mate or developing a long-term friendship, to illustrate these relationship-building strategies. She lays out the steps a company should take to create a collaboration-friendly organization: establishing a social mission, values, and ethical guidelines; assessing corporate readiness for collaboration; and making changes in communication, information and reward systems to support internal and external collaboration. Featuring case study examples from companies in North America and Europe who are working to build collaborative relationships with their stakeholders, The Stakeholder Strategy is the first book to provide a detailed explanation of how to conduct stakeholder audits and social audits so that companines can evaluate their relationship-building success and keep on track.

In this entertaining parable, bestselling authors Harry Paul, John Britt, and Ed Jent tell how to give and be your best in five critical work dimensions-passion, flexibility, communication, competency, and ownership-and foster excellence in your organization.

World-record endurance athlete and professional leadership coach Jason Caldwell draws on his amazing experiences to show how anyone can build and lead teams that accomplish incredible things.

As an adventurer who undertakes incredible challenges, such as rowing across the Atlantic or crossing the Namib Desert on foot, Jason Caldwell noticed how much of a pivotal role mistakes made in his record-breaking pursuits. The path to an ambitious goal is never a straight line. When mistakes inevitably happen, they can open up new options and choices. This book relays the crucial questions to ask when faced with any setback:

1. Is the failure something I have control over?
2. Is my goal still possible?
3. Do I want to keep going?
4. Is there another way to my goal?
5. Am I better, tougher, or smarter for this?

Caldwell draws on his amazing experiences to illustrate how these questions have helped him in literally death-defying situations. This is the first book to build a powerful business and personal success method out of the riveting and transformative failures of a true adventurer.

We are collectively creating results nobody wants, and most change efforts address the symptoms rather than the source.

Presencing offers a different approach—one that bridges inner development with outer systems change through 7 concrete practices built for this moment.

From Otto Scharmer, MIT senior lecturer and creator of Theory U, and Katrin Kaufer, MIT researcher, cofounder of the Presencing Institute, and author of Just Money (MIT Press), this field guide draws on more than twenty years of global work with the Theory U framework, now used by thousands of organizations across climate, finance, education, and social innovation.

Inside this book:

• The Wheel of Deep Change — a framework mapping 7 societal sectors and specific leverage points where transformation takes hold
• Social Fields theory — a deeper layer of systems thinking that accounts for the quality of consciousness from which collective action emerges
• Seven step-by-step practices covering generative listening, dialogue, co-sensing, presencing, co-imagining, co-creating, and ecosystem governance
• Real-world stories of “islands of coherence”—communities already demonstrating regenerative ways of working together across the globe
• Reflection questions and dialogue prompts for individual readers, leadership teams, and classroom or workshop settings

Readers new to Theory U will find a self-contained entry point, and those already familiar will find significant new depth and updated methods.

Lying can cause irreparable financial, psychological, and emotional damage in an organization, yet liars also know that we're terrible at recognizing their deceit. Goman's book is a simple primer to help anyone spot lies before they do harm.

Lies aren't good in general, but in the workplace they're especially poisonous. They can destroy employee engagement and productivity, undermine teamwork, increase stress, ruin people's livelihoods, and even bring down entire companies.

It's critical to catch workplace lies before they snowball into something catastrophic, but most of us have no clue about how to spot a liar. And the workplace setting adds another layer of complexity. At what point do you report a liar? If you decide to take action, what exactly should you do? And what if the liar is your boss?

In this entertaining and needed book, leading workplace body language expert Carol Kinsey Goman combines her own experiences with the latest research to provide a comprehensive guide to spotting, exposing, and minimizing workplace lies. Goman looks at the high cost of workplace deception for individuals and organizations, why people tell lies at work, and the kinds of lies they tell. She offers fifty ways that body language and vocal cues can help you spot a liar and explains how our own vanities, desires, self-deceptions, and rationalizations allow us to be duped.

Once you spot a lie, she provides tactical advice on how to respond, whether the liar is above, below, or on the same level as you. And Goman explains how to make sure your own body language doesn't inadvertently make you seem untrustworthy and what leaders at all levels can do to reduce lies and encourage candor.

Some workplace lies are a polite and positive part of professional life (“I'd be delighted to come to that meeting”). But Goman focuses on truly destructive lies and shows how you can prevent them from wreaking havoc on individuals and organizations.