This essential playbook shows how companies can scale success by coupling digital strategies with an investment in the health of their organizations and the people within.

To scale and grow, a company must get the organizational elements right. That begins with having the right strategy, the right leadership to drive it, and the right talent, culture, and organizational design to realize a company's potential. This is especially true in the AI era, where a company's most valuable assets are its people.

To begin with, leaders must rethink their value creation strategies. To hone their organizational edge, leaders must prioritize their organization's health in seven vital areas: strategic direction, culture, leadership, talent, organizational design, EID (equity, inclusion, and diversity), and well-being. No matter what type or size of business, those essential conditions must be leveraged for increased value and growth. Put simply: organizational matters matter. To hone their digital edge, leaders must understand AI, as advances in technology allow leaders to build organizations that can compete and win in the future. Finally, an investor mindset will enable leaders to invest wisely in the technology (and leverage that tech) that sets their organizations apart.

A leading expert on risk management describes how to steer your company through a risk hurricane-the extreme risk exposure that can lead to major disruption for your business.

Risk management has become a standard part of the strategic tool kit, providing senior leaders with a forward-looking radar to scan the future and give early warnings of approaching threats and opportunities. However, even best-in-class organizations can falter in the face of extreme risk exposure. Special circumstances demand special responses, and extreme risk exposure needs very careful handling. Routine risk management approaches will fall short, but businesses that demonstrate a high degree of flexibility and resilience will have the competitive advantage and the ability to thrive where others fail.

The causes and consequences of meteorological hurricanes have parallels in the way uncontrolled risk exposure can develop in organizations. Both are caused largely by predictable factors, but both are characterized by sustained uncertainty and severe impact once they develop. If we can learn to predict a risk hurricane, prepare for it effectively, and survive its effects, then our organizations will be well placed to address the challenge of extreme risk exposure, if and when we are unfortunate enough to face it.

Using a proven three-part framework, this book shows how anyone-from a CEO to frontline employee-can play a pivotal role in creating a diverse and welcoming workplace.

Creating a diverse workplace needs to be an ongoing effort, not just the subject of occasional training. As Celeste Warren says, needed change won't take place unless all employees feel that they have a role to play in creating the culture they would like to see in their organization.

Regardless of what position you hold, you have the ability to impact change and create a more inclusive environment. Anyone can commit to becoming an unofficial Diversity and Inclusion Ambassador in his or her organization. Warren offers a straightforward three-stage model:

Become aware of your strengths, weaknesses, and conscious and unconscious biases.
Take an inventory of your surroundings: what is getting in the way of there being an inclusive environment in your organization?
Develop a personal action plan.

Depending on your position, the actions you take can be as simple as consistently raising DEI-related issues in staff meetings or as far-reaching as leading an Employee Resource Group or developing a new hiring policy. In separate chapters, Warren offers specific advice for chief diversity and inclusion officers, C-suite leaders, first-line managers, human resources practitioners, and individual contributors. This book features examples, exercises, and practical tools that show you how to assess where your organization is at and develop a purpose and strategy that can make diversity a workplace reality.

The key to your career advancement is understanding how power works--who has it, where it hides, and how it's used. Please Sit Over There teaches Black women the career skills they need to navigate an uneven playing field and achieve long-lasting professional success.

Black women continuously navigate systems that were never intended for them while playing by a set of rules they never agreed to or were ever trained for.

In this book, Francine Parham shares her knowledge as a Black woman and a former global executive of two major corporations on how to move up in the workplace while maintaining a sense of sanity. The key skill--one that Black women are rarely taught--is understanding the power dynamics within your organization and learning how to shift the power to your advantage. Parham shows how to use your voice, strategically build the right relationships, and support others once you have achieved a powerful position--tools any woman can use to increase her power and ensure a successful, fulfilling career.

Parham says Black women are already empowered; there is no shortage of qualified professional Black women in the talent pipeline. But it does not feel empowering when organizations force Black women to work every day to overcome biases, discriminatory institutional practices, and unwritten rules of power at play that hinder their career development and professional advancement.

Please Sit Over There honors the painstaking work being undertaken to deconstruct broken institutions and demonstrates how Black women can achieve their goals while those institutions still exist-effectively opening doors for all women of color.

You don't have to betray yourself or your values to close stellar sales. This book introduces a simple formula for a personalized approach to building connections through alignment and problem-solving.

So many salespeople believe that they have to push themselves out of their comfort zones and compromise their values to sell products. But, as Stacey Hall shows, the comfort zone can actually be a power zone that leads to sales, satisfaction, and success.

Selling from Your Comfort Zone shifts away from pushy and spammy sales tactics and instead shows how you can bring meaning to your role as a salesperson. Hall teaches how to remain in alignment with your calling, with yourself, with what you are selling, with your prospects, and with what you are saying to your prospects. By being aligned with your core values and personality traits, you will have more confidence, energy, and courage to achieve your goals, which greatly increases the chances of success.

Studies reveal that while men generally rely on improving and driving outcomes to close sales, women tend to emphasize building connections, shaping solutions, and collaborating. Hall's Alignment Marketing formula combines both skillsets in an easy-to-follow process for gently expanding your comfort zone to the edge of its safe boundaries. By adopting this approach, you can stay flexible and resilient in the face of problems and objections that all salespeople encounter along the way.

This complete guide to effective, transformative diversity training provides an answer to the superficial, check-the-box DEI efforts that are undermining the entire field.

DEI work is getting a bad reputation. But that's because it's not being done right, say veteran diversity consultants James O. Rodgers and Laura Kangas. Too many organizations are treating diversity training as a quick-hit, low-cost, check-the-box activity.

Effective diversity training involves behavioral change based on adult learning theory. It is rigorous, deeply personal, experience based, and, if done well, life changing. Rodgers and Kangas offer a complete guide, from design to implementation to results. They show how to

• determine what specific, tangible outcomes an organization wants before it starts
• link diversity training to overall organizational strategy
• help all participants forge an individual, emotional connection to the training
• identify what skills a facilitator needs—the right facilitator makes all the difference
• create memorable learning experiences, not simply educational programs

The authors' goal is nothing less than to spark a worldwide revolution of informed practitioners, employees, and business leaders who will demand diversity training be given the same time, resources, and attention as any other critical enterprise initiative.

Reading group discussion guide available in book.