Professional Development

“Jeff and Staney emphasize that small acts of creativity can have huge consequences and that ordinary people can do extraordinary things if they can see the opportunities in front of them.”
-Mitch Jacobson, Executive Director, Austin Technology Incubator, UT Blackstone LaunchPad, University of Texas at Austin

Nearly all of today's major innovation workshops and programs call on organizations to drive innovation. What they miss is that innovation comes from the personal creativity of individuals. And creativity doesn't require an advanced education or technical skills-all employees can be creative. Often, all they lack is a fitting mindset and the right tools.

The Creative Mindset brings how-to advice, tools, and techniques from two master innovators who have taught and worked with over half of all Fortune 500 companies. Jeff and Staney DeGraff introduce six essential creative-thinking skills that can be easily mastered with limited practice and remembered as the acronym CREATE: Concentrate, Replicate, Elaborate, Associate, Translate, and Evaluate. These six skills, sequenced as steps, simplify and summarize the most important research on creative thinking and draw on over thirty years of real-world application in some of the most innovative organizations in the world. It's time to rethink the way we make innovation happen. As the spirit of chef Gusteau proclaims in the Pixar classic Ratatouille, “Anyone can cook.”

Eternally fascinating, Julius Caesar was a leader ahead of his time whose grassroots, front lines leadership still has much to teach us 2000 years after his death.


History is littered with examples of tyrants, hopelessly out of touch with the plight of the commoners, ruthlessly pursuing their own ambitions or hedonistic whims. But Caesar was a different kind of leader. Despite some bad press, in fact he never saw himself as above the average Roman citizen. Although he certainly knew he was an extraordinary human being, he also regarded himself as fundamentally one of the people, and acted like it. In his life and in his career, he created a new paradigm of leadership, and along the way, created the path to success for any leader in a complex organization.

In a book that Doris Kearns Goodwin has called “brilliantly crafted to draw leadership lessons from history,” Philip Barlag uses dramatic and colorful incidents from Caesar's career to illustrate what modern leaders can learn from him. Central to Barlag's argument is the distinction between power and force. When leading his own organization, Caesar never used brute force to motivate his followers. Time and again he exercised a power rooted in his demonstrated personal integrity and his essentially egalitarian relationship with the Romans. People followed him because they wanted to, not because they were compelled to. Over 2000 years after Caesar's death this is still the kind of loyalty every leader wants to inspire. Barlag shows how anyone can lead like Caesar.

Unresolved conflict is workplace kryptonite. Learn how to develop the mindset and skills to defuse disagreements, overcome division, and turn conflict into an opportunity for growth.

Unresolved conflict wastes time, inhibits productivity, hampers team performance, and negatively affects business outcomes. As a result, many leaders either mismanage conflict or avoid it altogether, putting their entire organization at risk.

The only way for leaders to productively manage conflict is to expand their capacity for it. Conflict capacity is about recognizing one's own mental and emotional limits, expanding a tolerance for discomfort, and skillfully navigating the complexities of conflict.

Three integral elements make up conflict capacity:

• culture (workplace support for leaders initiating accountability conversations)
• the inner game (tolerance for withstanding the conflict storm)
• the outer game (development of the skills and abilities necessary to mediate conflict to a desired end result)

This book teaches readers how to approach difficult conversations and work with high-conflict people while overcoming their internal and external barriers to give them better emotional integrity and a clearer vision for the future of their organization.

This is the first authoritative book on building employee resource groups (ERGs) to empower underrepresented employees and positively impact diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts within organizations and in society at large.

Employee resource groups (ERGs) have been present for decades. Originating out of affirmative action policies, they have evolved into powerful sources of employee activity and engagement that organizations have leveraged to support business goals. But ERGs can help create a more inclusive and just world at the same time that they serve company interests.

The focus for this book is on both how to manage ERGs effectively and why organizations should pay close attention to these groups as a source for engagement, innovation, belonging, feedback, and direction on tough issues. Farzana Nayani provides foundational tools and frameworks for starting and supporting an ERG. She also offers guidance for how ERGs can create impact in diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and can motivate action toward a more equitable society overall.

This is not just a handbook or a reference guide. It also serves as a deeper call to action around how, with more effective ERGs, we can truly progress toward the DEI goals that we are all setting out to accomplish.

Smart machines are replacing more and more jobs. Edward Hess and Katherine Ludwig show how to develop abilities that machines don't have so we can thrive in this Smart Machine Age. Underlying them all is a sense of personal humility: honestly recognizing our limitations and working to mitigate them.


In nearly every industry, smart machines are replacing human labor. It's not just factory jobs-automated technologies are handling people's investments, diagnosing illnesses, and analyzing written documents. If we humans are going to endure, Edward Hess and Katherine Ludwig say we're going to need a dose of humility.

We need to be humble enough to let go of the idea that “smart” means knowing the most, using that information quickest, and making the fewest mistakes. Smart machines will always be better than we are at those things. Instead, we need to cultivate important abilities that smart machines don't have (yet): thinking critically, creatively, and innovatively and building close relationships with others so we can collaborate effectively. Hess and Ludwig call this being NewSmart.

To develop these abilities, we need to practice four specific behaviors: keeping our egos out of our way, managing our thoughts and emotions to curb any biases or defensiveness, listening to others with an open mind, and connecting with others socially and emotionally. What all these behaviors have in common is, again, humility-avoiding self-centeredness so we can learn from and work with other humans. Hess and Ludwig offer a guide to developing these NewSmart abilities and to creating organizations where these qualities are encouraged and rewarded.

Bestselling author Brian Tracy teams up with Christina Stein to show how to find true balance-when all your actions and choices are guided by a profound knowledge of what is most important to you. You'll not only feel less stressed, but you'll accomplish more, and more efficiently, that you ever thought possible.

People's lives become unbalanced because they're not clear on what's really important to them. As a result, they make thoughtless and impulsive choices, and up feeling exhausted and unfulfilled without understanding why. What bestselling author Brian Tracy and Christina Stein offer is a way to find true balance.

With true balance, you feel clear and focused, and everything in your life feels like it is in perfect harmony. You go through your day with courage, confidence, and purpose-you accomplish more of what really matters to you. People experience true balance when they find and operate from their own unique balance point.

Tracy and Stein show how to find your personal balance point-the place where you have a thorough understanding of your deepest personal values, vision, purpose, and goals. They illustrate how using your balance point to set priorities and manage your time can both energize and simplify every aspect of your life. The result is a new, active approach to integrating life balance, work achievement, and time management.

Holding the Calm is a practical and immediately useful guide that meticulously lays out twenty concrete, easy-to-use tools for defusing tension, settling cases, resolving disputes, and rechanneling arguments.

How do you stop conflict? Settle disputes? Handle someone who is yelling at you, crying, or just won't speak? How do you find a solution when a solution seems impossible? Holding the Calm shares the secrets that enable everyone to avoid, minimize, or resolve conflict.

Popular master mediator Hesha Abrams has tens of thousands of hours in the trenches mediating human conflict, and she shares her pragmatic wisdom in digestible bites that detail how to improve situations and solve difficult problems between human beings, from family and workplace disputes to complex commercial and global conflicts. Learn how to

Speak into the ears that hear you Be the grown-up in the roomListen to what is not saidCreate small, winnable victories
Practical, inspirational, and full of accessible tools you can use right now, Holding the Calm proves that you don't need an advanced degree or certification to minimize challenges and defuse tension between real people, businesses, and countries.

This guide shows readers how to transform a traditional organization into an evolutionary one with a framework and mindset that offer a new way of leading and approaching change.


The key to surviving organizational change is sorting through the truths, half-truths, and lies-beginning with the ones you tell yourself. That way you don't end up overpromising and underdelivering, and you can weather troubling times in your organization. Truth, including inner truth, is key to surviving organizational change and achieving truly agile leadership.

Using case studies from the most successful companies, Michael and Audree Sahota demonstrate how creative, collaborative, and adaptive thinking can ripple from the leader outward. If you can change your own mindset, you can change your organization. This holistic approach bridges the gap between traditional management and agile ways of working. If you can truly understand the reasons people resist new ways of working, you will no longer meet passive resistance, and an authentic transformation will result.

In the latest fruit of a brilliant career, Michael Nagler argues that nonviolence-not just as a tactic but as a way of being-is the only way to unite deeply divided people and enable progressive movements and leaders of all stripes to fulfil their promise and potential.

That the world needs to take a substantially new direction, and quickly, is no longer controversial for any thoughtful person. A whole new way of seeing the world and our role in its destiny is called for. It's what Michael Nagler and others call the New Story. It rejects the mechanical, capitalist narrative that pits humans against each other and instead turns to a connected and collaborative vision of the future. The final missing piece of the New Story is what Nagler has termed the Third Harmony in human nature: nonviolence. Nonviolence is the only method compatible with the New Story's content and the only power strong enough to move the heart toward this deep and revolutionary change. This book focuses on how a shift to a nonviolence mind-set can be integrated into the very foundations of our understanding of humanity and community, not just on how nonviolence works as a protest tactic.

Great ideas don't matter if you can't execute-bestselling leadership expert Mark Miller offers a proven, research-based method for creating workplaces where everyone performs at the highest level.


All high performance organizations have one thing in common: execution. The men and women who work there sustain performance at seemingly otherworldly levels of precision, accuracy, and consistency. In the fifth and final book of Mark Miller's High Performance series, he uses his trademark business fable format to show how any organization can cultivate the kind of everyday habits that yield extraordinary results.

Miller tells the story of Blake Brown, a CEO who learns how to help his team to consistently excel at execution from a perhaps unlikely source: his son's high school football coach. The story is fictional, but the principles and practices are very real, derived from years of research led by a team from Stanford University. Miller and his team interviewed leaders and employees from numerous world-class organizations, including the Navy SEALS, Starbucks, Apple, Southwest Airlines, the Seattle Seahawks, Mayo Clinic, Cirque du Soleil, and more. The lessons learned were then field-tested with over seventy businesses employing over 7,000 people. Miller gives you proven tools to release the untapped potential in your people, create a strong competitive advantage, and win not just on game day but every day.

Win the talent wars! The groundbreaking research that informs this new book by leadership expert and bestselling author Mark Miller will help leaders hire, retain and nurture the kind of top talent that will make their businesses thrive.

There is a long-standing truth in the world of organizations: those with the most talented people have the greatest chance of winning. But based on extensive research Mark Miller conducted with Aon, one of the world's largest and most respected human resource consulting practices, he discovered that what keeps and attracts top talent is different than what attracts and keeps typical talent. In Talent Magnet, Miller uses a business fable about Blake Brown, a CEO struggling with winning the war for talent, and his 16 year old son who is trying to help a village in Africa secure clean water, to reveal what top talent really want:
A Better Boss
A Brighter Future
A Bigger Story
This book pulls back the curtain on what leaders can do to attract the very best talent--a strategic need virtually every leader faces

A fast and engaging read, Equity helps leaders create more inclusive organizations using human-centered design and behavior change principles.

Even the most passionate advocates for diversity, equity, and inclusion have been known to treat equity as the middle child – the concept they skip over in order to get to the warm, fuzzy feelings of inclusion. But as Minal Bopaiah shows throughout this book, equity is critical if organizations really want to leverage differences for greater impact.

Equity probes the unconscious biases that blind us to seeing systems, making explicit what is often unseen. This slender book introduces us to leaders who have overcome the obstacles to equity and led transformative change. Managing partners at a consulting firm who learn to retell their story of success by crediting the system that supports them. News managers at NPR who discover how they can create systemic support for diversifying sources on the air. A philanthropic foundation that collaborates with grantees to better communicate the importance of equity in healthcare to policy-makers. And creative professionals who have begun weaving inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility into the content they create, thereby transforming how customers and audiences view the world.

Filled with humor, heart, and pragmatism, Equity is a guidebook for change, answering the question of “how?” that so many leaders are asking today.

This is the first book to offer detailed guidance on how scenarios can be used to help organizations make their toughest decisions in a world of ever-escalating crisis and opportunity.

To reap the full benefits of scenarios, you have to be able to apply them in the real world. This groundbreaking book goes beyond the theoretical to clearly explain different ways scenarios can be used in business decision-making-from strategic planning and financial modeling to crisis response. Connecting scenarios to strategy and action can have many benefits, including the abilities to react quickly, anticipate major changes in the environment, and identify major opportunities. Thomas Chermack, a top expert on scenario planning, offers seven specific ways organizations can use scenarios, and provides a wide variety of examples, along with proven processes, exercises, and workshops that have been used successfully in organizations across industries and countries for more than fifteen years.

“This inspiring book belongs on the desk of every CEO and politician. With eye-opening case studies and recommended behaviors in every chapter, it's an indispensable user guide for servant leaders.”
-Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The New One Minute Manager and coeditor of
Servant Leadership in Action

On the most fundamental level, leaders must bring divergent groups together and forge consensus on a path forward. But what makes that possible? Leadership educator Marilyn Gist says what is most important is far too often overlooked: humility, which she defines as a deep regard for others' dignity.

Gist offers a model of leader humility derived from three questions people ask of their leaders: Who are you? Where are we going? Do you see me? She explores each of these questions in depth, as well as the six key qualities of leader humility: a balanced ego, integrity, a compelling vision, ethical strategies, generous inclusion, and a developmental focus. Much of this book is based on Gist's interviews with a dozen distinguished leaders of organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, Costco, REI, Alaska Airlines, Starbucks, and others. The foreword and a guest chapter are written by Alan Mulally, the legendary leader who brought Ford back from the brink of bankruptcy after the 2008 financial collapse and who Gist sees as an exemplar of leader humility.

Award-winning entrepreneur and crowdfunding expert Jamey Stegmaier shares his inspiring lessons and practical guidance for building the business of your dreams by engaging with customers and investors online.

As a veteran of five successful Kickstarter campaigns and the proprietor of the Kickstarter Lessons blog, Jamey Stegmaier knows something about crowdfunding. In this book he goes beyond the nuts and bolts of how it works to the deeper level of what makes it work.

This book is filled with stories and examples of over 40 crowdfunding campaigns, some that succeeded wildly-like the high-tech cooler designer whose first campaign faltered but whose second raised 13 million dollars-as well as sobering disasters, like the board game maker whose project collapsed in two months and had to return over $100,000 to his backers. Stegmaier uses these stories to illustrate lessons about things like preparation, timing, what kind of offers to make and what kind to avoid, what to spend money on and when, and more. The book includes 125 Kickstarter lessons, in one sentence each (more or less).

But Stegmaier's overarching point is that you've got to see crowdfunding as more than just a cool way to raise money-it's a way to create a community that will offer you far more than just dollars. If you treat your backers as people-communicate with them, attend to their needs, ask for their opinions-your chances of you and your projects succeeding increase exponentially.

Nowhere else in the business world is communication more important than to consultants, moving between hundreds of communities every year. In an increasingly complex world, a new level of skill is required, but begins with a seemingly paradoxical skill for a consultant: how to ask rather than tell.

This new book reveals what it takes for consultants of all types, as well as organizational leaders, to be really helpful in dealing with the complex, systemic, constantly changing organizational problems of today. They need to rapidly create a relationship of trust and openness that enables clients, subordinates, and team members to reveal what is really on their minds and to jointly develop a sense of what is the problem and what kind of adaptive response could best deal with it.

Schein first introduced some of these concepts in his foundational 1969 book Process Consultation, which is still in use today. But now clients don't have the time or patience for the endless questioning that characterized much of process consultation. And clients still expect consultants to hand them answers. But Schein has come to realize that answers from outsiders are useless, because they're often working the wrong problem, don't understand the client organization's culture, or ignore the fact that constant change makes today's solutions obsolete tomorrow.

To achieve a joint sense of what to do requires consultants and other helpers to develop a different kind of relationship with clients-a set of attitudes and behaviors that Schein calls humble consulting. Schein shows how helpers can display from the moment of first contact a level of caring and curiosity to move from relationships of professional distance to relationships of personalized trust and openness. And he gives many illustrations of the profound changes in mindset, behavior, and daily actions that flow from this new helpful consulting model.