Workplace Culture

This approach to remote facilitation makes virtual meetings powerful means of collaboration using proven techniques to accommodate a diversity of cultures, locations, and personalities.


Many people struggle with remote meetings: a cocktail of factors, such as technical barriers and invisible group norms, increase the uncertainty and risk of the already vulnerable task of collaborating and sharing ideas. When remote meetings go badly, they go really badly. Few things feel as lonely and intimidating as speaking to a screen with unreadable faces staring back in silence. This book will help you improve the quality of your remote meetings. With a little awareness, some planning, and some practice, you can make your remote meetings an effective, engaging, and powerful mechanism for collaboration within your organization. This little guide is chock-full of practical, down-to-earth remote facilitation techniques built to accommodate all cultures and personality types. Apply a few of them judiciously and you'll be surprised to be hearing more from your far-flung employees than you ever heard even from your in-person team.

“Eileen delivers a new perspective on the burnout crisis with humor, good sense, and unique ideas on how to manage our brains. I owe my daily well-being to her. Keep this book at your side to help you glide through your workday.” -Marcia Reynolds, PsyD, author of The Discomfort Zone


It's official. For the first time, the World Health Organization has classified burnout as a health problem. Renowned motivational speaker Eileen McDargh proposes that to tackle it, we must learn to break out of energy-draining thoughts and behaviors.

Resilience, she argues, is strictly a matter of energy management-by better managing your energy, you can both build resiliency and overcome burnout. Breakthrough happens when our energy is consciously distributed to what matters most in our lives. So after a short survey that will tell you where you fit in a burnout and resiliency profile, McDargh helps pinpoint the causes of your burnout and examine the energy demands that keep you from refueling and recharging. She provides an in-depth energy analysis and gives you the keys to master the four dimensions that can give you a resilience breakthrough: head, heart, hands, and humor.

McDargh guides the reader through the process of identifying energy drains and implementing strategies for handling them, whatever phase of life you are in. Her intention is to help you not only to successfully manage work and life demands but also make even larger strides in understanding how to put together a life by design and not by default.

Leaders as Teachers chronicles Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) 8-year journey to create and deploy a leadership development program that relies on all top leaders (even its CEO) to train other leaders. The initiative produced dramatic results including; measurable business results; a stronger, more supportive learning environment; improved communications and strengthened organizational culture; a more adaptive, change receptive leadership team; and direct cost saving. The book includes complete implementation guidance including detailed plans, worksheets, exercises, complete sample training outlines, and other useful tools.

Without a deep understanding of your company's culture, any change effort you undertake will fail. Bestselling author Jon Katzenbach and his coauthors identify the four most critical cultural elements leaders need to focus on.

Every organization has a unique culture, but they all have one thing in common. Whenever they have a big change to make, powerful emotional forces in their culture appear, at first, to resist it. But there are other culture forces under the surface that can be potential sources of catalytic strength. The best leaders succeed by tapping those “critical few” sources. Using an unusual, dialogue-based approach, Jon Katzenbach, author of the seminal The Wisdom of Teams (over 400,000 sold) shows how a sharp focus on just these elements reduces complexity and enables leaders to create profound cultural transformation and positive, lasting impact on performance.

The critical few elements are:

The critical few traits: the shared characteristics that are at the heart of people's emotional connection to what they do.
The critical few behaviors: people's actions that would lead a company to succeed if they were replicated at greater scale.
The critical few informal leaders: individuals whose emotional intuition and institutional trust make them valued guides for transformation, wherever they are on the org chart.

Corporate culture is critical to any organizational change effort. This book offers a proven model for identifying and leveraging the essential elements of any culture.


If you're going to make any significant change in an organization, you have to deal with the organizational culture. Because as Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” But there can be a big difference between the official culture as described in the company handbook and how work really gets done. This book, written by a unique team of two culture-change experts and a business anthropologist, is about solving this “culture puzzle.” The authors describe the four forces that shape every organization's-or, as they put it, every tribe's-culture from hunter-gatherers in the Amazon to corporate executives at Amazon. Interest: what the organization does to fulfill members' needs and earn their loyalty. Habit: which behaviors and ideas constitute “the way we do things around here.” Vision: where the organization came from and where it's going; and Innovation: how the organization adapts and changes. The authors provide detailed advice and analytic tools for understanding and strengthening these four forces in your organization, and for using that understanding to more your organization forward.

Mother Teresa's distinctive leadership style- based in absolute simplicity and practicality-helped her to build one of the word's largest and most successful global organizations. This book- the first to examine Mother Teresa in this context- shows readers how to apply her leadership principles and practices.

This new, data-driven book teaches managers and HR executives how to identify a comprehensive and integrated set of talent practices that fit the evolving workplace and that will dramatically improve the effectiveness of all organizations.

Many talent management principles and practices now being used in organizations are obsolete as a result of the fluid nature of work. Globalization, technological advances, automation, the diversification of the workforce, the push for sustainable practices, and the increasing pace of transformation have wrought dramatic changes in the world of work. And yet a recent study showed that from 1995 to 2013 there was no significant growth in the way HR spends its time.

Based on extensive research by Lawler and his colleagues, this book identifies the new strategies, policies, and practices needed for talent management today.

What used to be good or best practices with respect to how people are recruited, selected, trained, assigned, developed, rewarded, and evaluated no longer fit. Today's hierarchical, bureaucratic talent management needs to become agile, strategic, and performance based. This is the first book to identify a comprehensive integrated set of talent practices that fit the changing workplace and that will dramatically improve the effectiveness of organizations.

For some, projecting confidence and credibility is second nature. For others, it seems like a foreign language they'll never learn – until now. Rob Jolles delivers down-to-earth solutions for anyone looking to enhance the most basic need of all; to be believed. He leverages his over 30 years of experience to equip readers with empowering and practical tools for achieving business and social success.

Let's face it – there are some of us who are born with a natural ability to effortlessly communicate with others and be believed. Unfortunately, not everyone possesses this natural talent, and as a result struggle with the simple act of being believed. Frequently, this inability to get others to believe becomes a significant stumbling block affecting those we interact with, and the paths we choose in life. Expert author Rob Jolles has actively mentored and coached thousands who battle with long-term unemployment, and have a particularly acute problem with presenting themselves effectively. The problem, he says, is we rely far too heavily on our words to secure the belief of others, when in reality only seven percent of the emotional impact of our message comes from the words we use. The solution he offers here is building confidence through a series of process behaviors and techniques, and learning how to cope with fear, which can significantly impact how credible others perceive our message to be. Moving past the words, and applying acting and improv skills, along with improving pitch, pace, and tone, his programs have achieved astonishing results.

Through a beautifully written and engaging story about two people struggling to create visions-both for the company where they work and for their own lives-Ken Blanchard and Jesse Lyn Stoner detail the essential elements of creating a successful vision.

In a wonderfully readable and fun way, SEEING SYSTEMS (over 30,000 copies sold) presents a unique and innovative theory of power dynamics that provides the reader with a new way of looking at, understanding, surviving, and prospering in the many systems of which we are part.

The New Social Learning demonstrates how social media can transform the workplace by harnessing the brainpower and experiences of colleagues working across the globe as easily as if they were side by side. Together these emerging solutions create a new kind of value chain and new kind of knowledge building ecosystem, with people at the center. Co-authors Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner, widely respected leaders in the workplace revolution, have loaded this book with compelling stories from companies using social media to innovate, collaborate, and inform decisions in effective and innovative ways. The New Social Learning is the most authoritative guide available for leveraging these powerful new approaches to increase organizational IQ.

If you influence change in the lives of those around you, then you are engaged in an act of leadership. Your Leadership Legacy is the sum total of the difference you make in people's lives, directly and indirectly, formally and informally. The challenge is how to live in a way that creates a legacy that will make a positive difference in the lives of those around you. Your Leadership Legacy shows you how to leave a meaningful legacy.

Management icon Henry Mintzberg dismantles twenty dangerous business myths in this essential guide for thoughtful leaders.

Henry Mintzberg, legendary management thinker and recipient of the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent decades challenging conventional wisdom about how organizations work. In this powerful distillation of his life's work, Mintzberg tackles the most persistent and damaging myths in business—from “if you can't measure it, you can't manage it” to the blind worship of “strategic planning.”

With characteristic wit and clarity, Mintzberg offers refreshing alternatives that will transform how you think about leadership, structure, and organizational effectiveness. He replaces tired maxims like “managing is controlling” with more nuanced approaches that embrace “controlled disorder” and suggests that “ordinary creativity” often matters more than exceptional genius.

Drawing from his extensive body of work across sixty years, Mintzberg provides a masterclass in critical thinking for anyone who leads teams or organizations. His irreverent style makes complex ideas accessible without sacrificing depth, making this book as intellectually stimulating as it is practically valuable.

Whether you're a seasoned executive, an aspiring manager, or a student of organizational behavior, this concise volume will challenge your assumptions and provide a clear-eyed framework for more effective, humane management.