The Transformational Consumer

They are the most valuable, least understood customers of our time. They buy over $4 trillion in life-improving products and services every year. If you serve their deeply human need to continually improve their lives, they will eagerly engage with your brand at a time when most people are tuning out corporate messages.

They are Transformational Consumers, and no one knows them like Tara-Nicholle Nelson. Her Transformational Consumer insights powered her work at MyFitnessPal, which grew from 40 million to 100 million users in her time there.

Nelson takes readers on a hero's journey to connecting with customers in ways both profitable and transformational. After going inside the brains, emotions, and behaviors of Transformational Consumers, Tara issues a call to adventure: a rallying cry to leaders to shift their focus from simply making products to solving their customers' problems.

Nelson uses stories and cases studies from every industry to guide readers through this journey in five stages, shedding light on how to rethink their customers, their products and services, their marketing, their competition, and even their culture.

The key to growing a business today is not building an app or getting new social media followers. The key is engaging people over and over again by triggering their deep, human desire for growth and transformation.

When a company reorients every initiative to serve Transformational Consumers, it kick-starts a lifelong love affair with its customers—a love affair that results in unprecedented revenue growth, product innovation, and employee engagement.

Leaders Made Here
Great leaders create great organizations. However, a scarcity of leaders today means a shortfall in performance tomorrow. Don't gamble with your company's future!

You don't need to hope that leaders emerge from the ranks or that search firms can find the leaders you need in a timely fashion. Hope is not a strategy! You can build an organizational culture that will ensure your leadership pipeline is full and flowing.

Bestselling author and Chick-fil-A executive Mark Miller describes how to nurture leaders throughout the organization, from the front lines to the executive ranks. Leaders Made Here outlines a clear and replicable approach to creating the leadership bench every organization needs.

To bring his ideas to life, Miller uses the story of Blake, a new CEO, and Charles and old friend and colleague, as they search for the best practices from around the world to ensure a continuous supply of their most precious asset – leaders. Blake and his team then translate their findings into a practical plan that any organization can use to create a leadership culture, sustained competitive advantage, and long-term success.

Self-assessment companion product to Leading with Character and Competence to address four corners of character and competence.

PRODUCT INFORMATION

Format: Online Subscription

Price: $9.95 for one-year subscription, or five tests, whichever comes first

Description: This instrument is intended to help you understand your strengths and weaknesses in leading with character and competence. It consists of 80 questions that address these eight characteristics: integrity, humility, accountability, courage, learning, change, judgment, and vision. The assessment will produce a graphic of your results and interpretation from the author. You take the test up to five times within a 12-month period and compare your results.

Author's Welcome

You are about to take the “Leading with Character and Competence Self-Assessment.” This assessment consists of 80 questions that address each of the four corners of character and of competence. It will take you about 15 minutes to complete the assessment.

Using a 5-point agree/disagree scale where 1 means “strongly disagree and 5 means “strongly agree,” simply indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with each statement as it relates to your own attitudes and behavior.

Remember, this is a self-assessment. Sometimes people are tempted to overrate themselves or to manipulate their answers. Taking that approach will invalidate your results and prevent you from gaining deep insight into your performance and helping you accelerate your development. Please complete the assessment as accurately and honestly as you can. If you do, your results will be actionable and will form the basis for the next stage of your personal growth as a leader.

Once you receive your results, carefully review them and identify no more than three development priorities for yourself. This will allow you to focus your efforts and energy and make sustainable behavioral change over time.

Sincerely,

Timothy R. Clark, Ph.D.

In this book, preeminent organizational scholar Edward Lawler identifies a comprehensive and integrated set of talent management practices that fit today's rapidly evolving workplace.

The world of work has changed dramatically, says Lawler. Organizations now operate in a global environment. New technologies continue to disrupt how, when, and where work is done and should be managed. The workforce is becoming more diverse. Sustainability has joined profitability as a key business goal. All of this has dramatically accelerated the pace of change, making recruiting the best talent—not simply filling positions—an overriding concern.

But too many organizations still use a job-based, bureaucratic talent management approach that doesn't take into account how the world has changed. Indeed, a recent study showed that from 1995 to 2016, there was no significant change in the way HR spends its time.

Lawler says that talent management has to be reinvented. It needs to be closely linked to the organization's overall strategy. Recruitment and talent management should be driven by the skills and competencies the organization needs for long-term growth. This means talent management requires agile systems that can respond quickly to changing conditions and that take a more individualized approach to evaluating and rewarding performance. And everything talent management does has to be based on evidence, not tradition.

Lawler looks at attracting, selecting, developing, rewarding, managing, and organizing talent through this new lens. In today's world, organizations have to constantly reinvent themselves—and talent management must do the same.

When leaders learn how to manage the emotions and drama in their organizations, conflict can be made healthier. Nate Regier uses the Drama Triangle Model and the Compassion Cycle to show leaders how to exercise compassion, not passion, and turn the negative energy of conflict into a positive energy for increased productivity and growth.
When leaders learn how to manage the emotions and drama in their organizations, conflict can be made healthier. Nate Regier uses the Drama Triangle Model and the Compassion Cycle to show leaders how to exercise compassion, not passion, and turn the negative energy of conflict into a positive energy for increased productivity and growth.


Conflict without Casualties fills a gap by showing leaders at any level how to leverage positive conflict. Practical, insightful, challenging, relevant.
-Dan Pink, New York Times bestselling author

Most organizations are terrified of conflict in the workplace, seeing it as a sign of trouble. But Nate Regier says conflict is really just a kind of energy and can be used in positive or negative ways. Handled incorrectly, conflict becomes drama, which is costly to companies, teams, and relationships at all levels. Avoiding, managing, or reducing conflict is a limited alternative. Instead, Regier explores the interpersonal dynamics that perpetuate drama in organizations through a concept called the Drama Triangle and offers an alternative: the Compassion Cycle. The Compassion Cycle allows leaders to balance compassion and accountability, transforming conflict into a growth experience that enables organizations to achieve significant gains in energy, productivity, engagement, and satisfaction in relationships. Provocative and illuminating, the concepts Regier shares will turn conflict from an experience to be avoided into a partner for positive change.

Peter Georgescu arrived in this country as a penniless Romanian refugee and rose to become the CEO of Young & Rubicam. This is why he's so heartsick that with flat wages, disappearing jobs, and a shrinking middle class, his kind of rags-to-riches story doesn't seem possible now. But he has a message for his fellow CEOs: we're the ones who must take the lead in fixing the economy.

Marshaling deeply sobering statistics, Georgescu depicts the stark reality of America today: a nation with greater wealth inequality and lower social mobility than just about any other country in the developed world. But the problem isn't that free-market capitalism no longer works—it's that it's been hijacked by shareholder primacy. Where once our business leaders looked to the needs and interests of a variety of stakeholders—employees, community members, the business itself—now they're myopically focused on maximizing their shareholders' quarterly returns.

Capitalists, Arise! shows how the short-term thinking spawned by shareholder primacy lies at the root of our current economic malaise and social breakdown. But Georgescu offers concrete actions that capitalists themselves can take to create a better future. The irony is that if businesses do this, shareholders will do even better. In the long run, businesses can thrive only when society is healthy and strong. This book is a manifesto calling on capitalists to heal the nation that has given them so much.