Professional Development

Innovation within an organization is no longer sufficient; in a growing number of businesses, collaboration between companies and even industries is critical to success. A respected Harvard professor and a journalist team up to show how one creative startup exemplifies this new, intensely interactive form of leadership.


Niccolò Machiavelli famously wrote: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

Constructing a new order of things, which Edmondson and Reynolds call “building the future,” is the focus of this book. It explores how to bring complex new systems into being, particularly systems that transform human experience and make the world more livable and sustainable. Intense collaboration across professions and industries is vital to come up with new ideas and innovative solutions. This requires practicing new forms of leadership that enable complex, team-based, whole-system innovation.

To reveal how pioneers build the future, Edmondson and Reynolds study a startup's long and innovative journey in the smart-city industry, which uses digital, information and communication technologies to enhance the quality and performance of urban services, They follow the leaders in this company, Living PlanIT, through cycles of hope, exhaustion, disillusionment, pragmatism, and renewal in creating the city of the future.

Are you asking for what you want or just taking what you are given? Chances are, it's the latter. Linda Swindling will teach you how to ask outrageously-and get the results you want.


Not getting what you want or living with what someone decides you deserve is exhausting and dispiriting. Linda Swindling provides principles, tactics, and strategies to help you show up powerfully to negotiate for the best deals at work and in life with confidence and integrity.

Asking outrageously does not mean being obnoxious or taking advantage of others. It means making a big ask-if you're going to ask anyway, why not be bold? In her former life as an attorney, Swindling found she was doing this all the time for her clients but was puzzled to realize she rarely did it for herself. She describes a straightforward, three-step process: (1) determine what you want, (2) approach those who have the authority to grant your wish, and (3) feel the fear and ask anyway. With a wealth of practical tools-checklists, suggested questions, case studies, and an online assessment so you can evaluate how well you ask now-this book helps you overcome blockages and inhibitions to reach breakthrough results and ask for more than you believe is possible.

Looking back to the ancient knowledge of the Indian scripture the Upanishads, Ram Nidumolu finds the core philosophy of sustainable leadership that's needed today. In this remarkable book, he uses a powerful parable from these scriptures to create a business vision that our world desperately needs.

How can the world's nearly 3 billion who live on $2 a day or less be lifted out of poverty? Paul Polak (bestselling author of Out of Poverty) and the organizations he has founded have pioneered methods that have already helped nearly 20 million of the world's poorest people to get out of poverty without charitable or government handouts. Now Polak teams with social entrepreneur and author Mal Warwick (bestselling author of Values-Driven Business) to reveal the keys for entrepreneurs, businesses, and others to replicate this success and expand its scale to include hundreds of millions of the poorest of the poor around the world.

Traditional pathways to delivering health care to the global poor are failing. Five million children die each year before their fifth birthday due to lack of basic health education, services, or low-cost treatments. Bing and Epstein show how focusing micro-innovations at the level of care is the way to end these grim health statistics.

Based on the bestseller Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, this workbook is a practical guide that helps readers ask the right questions for successful change.

In the bestselling classic Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, Marilee Adams introduces the Question Thinking method, which uses questions to help people make wiser choices, find solutions, and transform their lives. This standalone workbook puts the ideas of the original book into action and makes them easy to implement.

Along with summarizing the concepts in Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, the workbook includes plenty of tools, warm-up exercises, and learning scenarios that help readers apply Question Thinking in their personal and professional lives. Readers will learn how to use the Choice Map, identify and switch from a Judger to Learner mindset, and facilitate effective meetings and conversations. Thoroughly engaging, the book has a strong narrative voice that makes the reader feel a deep connection to the author and is designed to deliver tangible benefits.

They Just Don't Get It! explores an all-too-common dilemma: when people around us just don't "get" our ideas. Through a charming illustrated fable, it tells the story of Julie Buffet, a hard-charging advertising executive with what she thinks is a fantastic idea for a new campaign. But nobody gets it-not the client, not her boss, and not her coworkers. And Julie can't understand why.
We have all found ourselves in this situation at one time or another, and we typically see this problem as a failing on the part of the other party. They Just Don't Get It! shows that when they don't get it, the problem is really with ourselves. And it shows how we can finally really get it.
If you've ever wondered why your ideas haven't been received or acted on in the way you expected, this book will reveal your own personal responsibility in helping others understand your intentions. Examining the root source of the problem, it details five keys to "getting it"-Take Responsibility; Practice Humility; Begin with Questions; Remain Open; and Believe They Can. These five simple steps will enable you to overcome the problem, and prevent it from happening in the future.
They Just Don't Get It! will teach you how to communicate your ideas better, and how to motivate others to pull together and achieve your highest goals in any situation.

Our economic crisis has shown that we need a fundamentally new kind of business leader-able to make ethical decisions in the face of strategic unknowns, serve the environment and society while also serving the needs of investors and shareholders, and understand how their personality and the social context in which they operate impacts their leadership. This book lays out a compelling model for creating and developing these new entrepreneurial leaders.

Most companies put values statements on their websites and in their annual reports, but as recent scandals and financial crises have shown, the practice of values is dying in organizations. Edward Freeman and Ellen Auster argue that the problem is values are imposed from the top down and offer a process for involving employees in values creation through ruthlessly honest organization-wide conversations.

Studies have consistently shown that employees are deeply cynical about corporate values statements. (Enron had a great one.) The reason, argue top scholars and consultants Edward Freeman and Ellen Auster, is that most companies' values are handed down from on high with no employee input. This practically invites disconnects between intention and reality-and the results are disengagement, lower productivity, less innovation, and even outright corruption.

Freeman and Auster here offer a process, Values through Conversation, that makes values living, dynamic, and evolving, not just static words nobody really believes in. Based on scrupulous research and experience, VTC gives employees a safe space to speak honestly and freely about what's happening in the organization, what is important to them, and what values would have real meaning and impact. The book focuses on four core values areas: introspective (who we are), historical (what we've stood for), connectedness (how we lead and work together), and aspirational (why we do what we do), offering questions, exercises, and examples for developing values in each area. VTC allows companies to explore and create values authentically, not impose them from without.

Picking up where he left off in his bestselling book Synchronicity (over 150,000 copies sold), Joseph Jaworski tells the story his and his colleagues' discovery of the ultimate Source of visionary leadership, transformation, and breakthrough innovation.

Current books on influence usually show how to get what YOU want-that's actually manipulation, according to Rob Jolles. Jolles paints the dividing line between influencing for good and manipulating for selfish reasons and shares the questions and trust exercises that make influence the key to creating positive change.

A much-needed revised edition of the only book that presents a multicultural leadership model integrating eight practices from African-American, American Indian, and Latino communities-an alternative to the heavily or exclusively Anglo-American based concepts of leadership presented by most leadership books. The first edition has sold 20,000 copies, was the winner of the International Latino Book Award, Best Business Book, and was on the Rocky Mountain News Bestseller list.

This career development tool kit is for people who want to take charge of their own professional futures.


This book is for employees who want to take charge of their own professional development. Many organizations have eliminated employee career development programs in favor of DIY efforts-and, even if this is not the case, there is more to be gained than lost in taking responsibility for your own career.

Elaine Biech offers practical guidelines for keeping your career on track and mapping it beyond your current job; overcoming personal roadblocks and finding your passion at work; and initiating talent conversations with your manager. Over 100 skills are outlined, including networking, handling pressure, prioritizing, showing political savvy, being a team player,, and selling your ideas. For each skill, Biech offers actions you can take immediately, ongoing practices, and long-term strategies.
Full of tools, tips, and resources, this book is written for the development of all employees. In addition, a short chapter offers advice to managers who want to bring out the best in their people.

Continuing his groundbreaking work in Positive Organizational Scholarship, Robert Quinn (bestselling author of Deep Change) offers a clear path and concrete actions for creating extraordinarily high-performing organizational cultures.

Conventional beliefs and cultures all too often create work groups, departments, and even entire organizations that are full of unengaged, underperforming people. Drawing on his decades of pioneering research, Robert Quinn shows how to create organizations where people flourish and exceed expectations.

Using many compelling stories and examples Quinn describes how to replace an outmoded and limiting conventional mindset with a new, more positive and affirming “mental map.” He explains how, with this as your foundation, you can clarify the highest purpose of your organization, help others access their own excellence, communicate honestly and authentically, and much more. The book includes the Positive Organization Generator, a tool any leader can use to develop a custom action plan for turning an organization positive. At its heart, Quinn's book helps leaders transform organizations by changing themselves and others from being comfort-centered to being results-centered, from being self-focused to being other-focused, and from being internally closed to being externally open.

Leading scholars Ryan W. Quinn and Robert E. Quinn marshal both scientific research and personal experience to show how you can achieve the fundamental state of leadership-lifting up both yourself and those around you. This second edition (first edition had sold over 10,000 copies) has been revised throughout and includes two new chapters.

Just as the Wright Brothers combined science and practice to finally achieve the dream of flight, Ryan and Robert Quinn combine research and personal stories to demonstrate how we can elevate ourselves and the situations and people around us to greater heights of integrity, openness, and achievement-the psychological equivalent of aerodynamic lift, and the fundamental state of effective leadership.

Lift identifies four questions that, when asked in any situation, will instantly give rise to a positive outlook, and explores the profound implications of each of these questions in-depth. The second edition includes two new chapters highlighting surprising applications of the fundamental state of leadership to situations on the job and off, as well as new stories, examples, supportive studies, and techniques for applying the lessons of Lift. Each person who learns these principles will lift themselves, lift others, and inspire others to spread that lifting as far as they can.

This book teaches leaders how to focus on people development rather than product development. Innovation comes from people, not products or technology. Deborah Piscione's twelve-step process is a comprehensive guide to success for leaders that shows them how to harness the creative energy in their organization, thereby bringing better products to market.


For too long, companies and their leadership teams focused primarily on their products or services. Leaders are deeply dialed in to the minutiae of their companies' operations. But veteran Silicon Valley consultant Deborah Perry Piscione says investments in new technologies or operations do not create innovations-people do. For innovation to happen, organizations need to be people-centric. In this breakthrough book she shows how, by following her People Equation, every organization can develop a mindset, an organizational structure, and a product development process that will maximize creativity and innovation.

Using examples from her consulting work and from her research into successful business practices, Piscione shows how to create a culture where risk taking is rewarded, mavericks are encouraged, collaboration between highly competent people is nurtured, and, when experiments and new initiatives are proposed, the response is to ask how rather than question why. This requires upending the usual organizational pyramid, giving more decision-making power to frontline workers and less to the C-level executives traditionally at the top. Once this is all in place, you can take advantage of Piscione's twelve-step Improvisational Innovation process for bringing new products and services to market. This is a comprehensive guide to harnessing the creative energy in every organization.

There is a crisis of meaning in our lives, work, and society. The solution is to begin the search for deeper meaning. The authors summarize the universal and timeless wisdom of Viktor Frankl and provide new insights based on their work leading the Meaning Movement.



World-renowned psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning was named by the Library of Congress as one of the ten most influential books of the 20th century. Dr. Frankl's story of finding a reason to live in the most horrible circumstance imaginable-Nazi concentration camps-continues to inspire millions.

Drawing on the entire body of Frankl's work, Alex Pattakos and Elaine Dundon elaborate seven Core Principles and demonstrate how they can be applied to everyday life and work in the 21st century. These principles include the ultimate freedom to choose our attitude no matter the situation-the idea most closely associated with Frankl-but his ageless wisdom goes well beyond this. The third edition is revised and updated throughout and includes four new chapters: looking at meaning in a holistic, integrated way; envisioning what a meaning-centered world would look like; and exploring Frankl's legacy in the 21st century. Prisoners of Our Thoughts opens up new opportunities for finding personal meaning through living an authentic life.