Professional Development

From diversity experts Judith Katz and Frederick Miller comes an illustrated guide to being your full-sized self in a very large workplace-world, Be BIG.

This is the 20th anniversary revised and updated edition of a classic in the field of human resources-over 70,000 copies were sold of the previous two editions. This book revolutionized the HR field by demonstrating the vital importance of linking HR solutions to achieving specific business goals.

This is a brand new edition of the classic book that introduced a concept that has since become a cornerstone of the human resource, learning, and organizational development fields: training and HR solutions do not take place in a vacuum but must be tied to an organization's business goals. This means partnering with clients to identify what specific kinds of solutions will help them achieve these goals. Performance consulting is a strategic process that produces measurable business results by maximizing performance of people and organizations.

This 20th anniversary edition features four new chapters as well as new examples and has been updated throughout. Much of the new material focuses on measuring the results of performance consulting-there is extensive treatment of two-sided accountability, data collection, development of precise objectives, measurement of success, and sustainable improvement. And this remains a profoundly practical book, filled with tips and techniques, as well as downloadable tools, checklists, and graphics at the end of every chapter.

From one of the founding executives of FedEx comes the first full inside story of how Fed Ex came to be one of the world's most successful, innovative, and admired companies. Frock reveals the details of how the company was conceived, launched, and kept afloat despite incredible obstacles.

A new and thoroughly revised edition of marketing and positioning genius Mark Levy, which helps readers unleash their inner creativity, problem solving skills, while also generating content. This is The Artist's Way for business people and social media people. Accidental Genius uses a similar methodology of freewriting to create business plan, find solutions, and generate new content. Over 10,000 of the original edition sold.

This bestselling conflict resolution book has helped thousands of people effectively collaborate across deep divides. Now it’s been updated with 50 percent new material for an increasingly polarized world.

“Adam Kahane worked with us on the future of our country. The four scenarios we built have come to life one after another, and today we are living the best one....Kahane explains how scenario planning can transform the future. In Colombia we can attest that such transformation is really possible.” —Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

In today’s fractured world, collaboration is increasingly difficult yet more crucial than ever. Often, to get something done that really matters, we need to work with people we don’t agree with, like, or trust. Drawing from thirty-plus years of experience working with leaders in over fifty countries, Adam Kahane shows why conventional collaboration—requiring harmony and agreement—is obsolete. Instead, he provides a groundbreaking approach that embraces discord, experimentation, and genuine cocreation.

Kahane introduces three key stretches to navigate difficult collaborations:

• Stretch to embrace conflict and connection
• Stretch to experiment and learn
• Stretch to step into the game

This substantially revised second edition adds multiple new chapters exploring how to work across deepening divides and with those we may never agree with. Using new case studies, a discussion guide, and frameworks for navigating permanent plurality in our polarized times, Kahane offers essential tools for transforming conflict into positive change.

In this capstone work of his career, the creator of open space technology applies his lifetime of knowledge and experience to showing how self-organization is the most powerful force in creating high-performing organizations and to detailing the steps to unleash and leverage this power.

Appreciative Intelligence provides a new answer to what enables successful people to dream up their extraordinary and innovative ideas; why employees, partners, colleagues, investors, and other stakeholders join them on the path to their goals, and how they achieve these goals despite obstacles and challenges. It is not simple optimism. People with appreciative intelligence are realistic and action oriented--they have the ability not just to identify positive potential, but to devise a course of action to take advantage of it.
Drawing on their own original research and recent discoveries in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, Thatchenkery and Metzker outline the evidence for appreciative intelligence, detail its specific characteristics, and show how you can develop this skill and use it in your own life and work. They show how the most successful leaders are able to spread appreciative intelligence throughout an organization, and they offer tools and exercises you can use to increase your own level of appreciative intelligence and so become more creative, resilient, successful, and personally fulfilled.

By bestselling author Ken Blanchard (whose 40+ books have sold over 18 million copies), KNOW CAN DO! tells the story of how a well known author learns to bridge the gap between what we all know-all the advice we've taken in from books, seminars, etc.-and how we actually use that knowledge.

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.

Whether for fear of an uncertain economy or reluctance to deal with the inevitable stresses of looking for work, many people feel unwilling or unable to change jobs. So they simply "quit on the job." They disengage, produce less, and bide their time in quiet dissatisfaction, making themselves, and often their coworkers, family, and friends miserable. But there is an alternative.

Love It, Don't Leave It provides readers with 26 ways to make their current work environment more satisfying. Presented in an appealing, accessible A-to-Z format, Love It, Don't Leave It includes strategies for improving communication, stimulating career growth, balancing work with family, and much more. Designed for workers at any age and at any stage, Love It, Don't Leave It helps people assume responsibility for the way their work lives work. Readers who try just a few of the strategies in this book may find that the job they want is the job they already have.

What leads to collective wisdom in groups, organizations, and communities? And what leads instead to collective folly? This foundational book on collective wisdom explores the sources of collective wisdom and folly, the ways of increasing our capacity for collective wisdom, and the means by which leaders and change agents can tap into this power in catalyzing innovation and change.

For every company like Zappos that has achieved the Utopia of an egalitarian business model, there are thousands that remain stuck on the corporate ladder. Self-management consultant Samantha Slade shares that the real secret to flattening a hierarchical organization is seemingly obvious: don't do it all at once.


Media is showing us that self-managing organizations, like Zappos, unleash human potential in ways we couldn't have imagined, but so often when we try to transition to a self managed organization, we get stuck. The task seems overwhelming and many organizations just give up. We find ourselves caught between the inspirational stories of these self-organizing companies and the deeply entrenched habits. It can be overwhelming to have such a sense of possibility and yet feel ill equipped in practical methods and strategy. Samantha Slade is the founder of Percolab, an international consulting firm in Quebec that has been helping organizations successfully transition to self-management for over a decade. Too many organizations try to change everything at the same time and fail, concluding that the method is out of their reach. With Seven concrete practices, Slade offers a new way: transition on thing in your organization at a time. The benefits of a self- managed organization- increased engagement, retention, and productivity- can be achieved even by transitioning only one or two areas of your organization. Even if you never become Zappos, your organization will see increased energy and thriving.

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.

How do project managers achieve spectacular results when they have no direct authority over their team members? Here's a foolproof process for engaging your team: one that begins with engaging yourself.


Project managers are frequently given the task of driving results without having any authority to back up their directives. This book helps project managers succeed when the deck is stacked against them. The secret to running spectacular projects is engaging and inspiring every person who's part of your project, so they feel responsible for the outcome. And that engagement starts with you-- you have to feel engaged and inspired yourself before you can inspire others. Ruth Pearce, "The Project Motivator" draws on principles from positive psychology, workplace engagement, and character strengths to come up with a foolproof methodology you can apply in your workplace today.