This book is a comprehensive guide to an exciting new approach that managers at any level can use to transform their corners of government.

Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones.

In their six-year, five-country study of seventy-seven government organizations-ranging from small departments to entire states-Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don't work well in the public sector, while practices that are rare in the private sector prove highly effective. The highest performers they studied had attained levels of efficiency that rivaled the best private-sector companies.

Rather than management making the improvements, as is the norm in the private sector, these high-performers focused on front-line-driven improvement, where most of the change activity was led by supervisors and low-level managers who unleashed the creativity and ideas of their employees to improve their operations bit by bit every day.

You'll discover how Denver's Department of Excise and Licenses reduced wait times from an hour and forty minutes to just seven minutes; how the Washington State Patrol garage tripled its productivity and became a national benchmark; how a K8 school in New Brunswick, Canada, boosted the percentage of students reading at the appropriate age level from 22 percent to 78 percent; and much more.

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 room
Listen to what is not said
Create 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.

Using a rigorous, straightforward scorecard as a guide, this book shows business leaders and innovators how to create breakthrough sustainable products and processes that are good for the planet, human health, and profits.

Natural resource inputs to business operations are getting scarcer and more expensive, while climate-change-related economic shocks pose a risk to seamless operations and, more importantly, threaten business continuity. How can organizations integrate sustainable design in their overarching operations and align it with profitability and corporate strategy?

Based on Paul Anastas's foundational Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry, the Sustainability Scorecard is the first scientifically rooted, data-driven methodology for creating inherently sustainable and profitable products and processes. By redesigning with sustainability as a key design element, firms open themselves to unexpected solutions, leapfrog innovations, and sources of value that simply don't occur when sustainability is leveraged purely as a risk-avoidance and compliance measure.

Urvashi Bhatnagar and Anastas offer dozens of examples of how sustainable operations can yield benefits such as expanding market share, creating new service lines, and transforming supply-chain and sourcing models to drive the most consistent and highest long-term value. With this comprehensive framework, your firm will be able to identify truly innovative, inherently sustainable products as opposed to less bad products and processes that don't provide the exponential value that only breakthrough products can.

Uncover the six blind spots that derail women's career paths and learn strategies to effectively overcome them for an impactful, sustainable career.

Professional women are subject to blind spots-obstacles that can minimize career potential, impact, or advancement. Some women end up drifting instead of driving through their careers, going it alone instead of building a posse, and leaving their reputationality (that special something we are known for) to chance.

Authors and executive coaches Brenda Wensil and Kathryn Heath have spent decades coaching more than 800 women and working with women executives, middle managers, and professionals across industries and age groups. In this book, they outline six challenges women commonly face on their professional journeys and map a way to accelerate through them for higher-impact careers. Readers will learn how to

Set a vision, strategy, and plan for their careers
Learn who they are, what they offer, and how to tell their stories
Seek and act on feedback to guide their paths
Prepare and practice for the best outcomes
Enlist help and support from others

Effective women leaders inspire innovation, sustain profitability, manage risk, and create environments for inclusion and diversity to increase. Chock full of strategies, stories, and practical skills, this book will hasten a woman's progress and impact as a professional woman and liberate her to excel in her career on her own terms.

Discover how the questions we ask ourselves and others can either expand our mindsets and open us up to exciting new possibilities or constrict our mindsets and limit our choices for successful change.

Change Your Questions, Change Your Life is an international bestseller that has sold over 400,000 copies in twenty-two languages. People have discovered that, when we're looking for answers, we often forget to take the time to ask the right questions. But, as Dr. Marilee Adams shows, intentionally using questions helps us make wiser choices, find solutions, and transform our personal and professional lives.

Dr. Adams uses a highly engaging fable to illustrate how great results begin with great questions. The book's hero, Ben Knight, learns such breakthrough insights and undergoes a transformative journey. As we read how his coach takes him step by step through the twelve powerful tools of Question Thinking, we also learn how to apply the same information and practical skills in our own lives. At the center of this work is the Choice Map, which provides a simple yet powerful image to predict the likely results of the questions we ask ourselves and others. It tells us how to change our questions and our mindsets for the most rewarding outcomes.

The book contains a new chapter delving into what neuroscience reveals about managing our stresses and fears more effectively using methodssuch as those described in this book. It includes powerful and practical tools that help readers switch from a constricting Judger to an expansive Learner mindset, achieve the results they desire, and foster breakthroughs.

Based on the bestseller Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, this workbook is a practical guide that helps readers ask the right questions for successful change.

In the bestselling classic, Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, Dr. Marilee Adams introduces Question Thinking, which shows how you can change your questions and your mindset for the most successful outcomes. This workbook puts those original ideas into action and makes them easy to implement.

In this workbook you get to choose an area of your life that you want to improve and then apply the principles and practices of Question Thinking to experience the benefits of this system firsthand. At the center of this work is the Choice Map, which helps you recognize the likely impact of the questions you ask. This book provides tools, warm-up exercises, somatic practices, and learning scenarios that bring the practical applications of Question Thinking into your professional and personal life. Thoroughly engaging, it includes how the Question Thinking protocols can help you switch from a controlling Judger Mindset to a flexible Learner mindset and learn how to facilitate more effective meetings and conversations.

Although this workbook can serve as a companion to the bestselling book, it has been designed to stand on its own. In the book, the fable's hero undergoes a transformative journey by using Question Thinking, and this workbook helps readers undergo a similar transformation.