The hardest part of a manager's job isn't staying organized, meeting deliverable dates, or staying on budget. It's dealing with people who are too comfortable doing things the way they've always been done and too afraid to do things differently—workers who are, as author Bill Treasurer puts it, too “comfeartable.” Such workers fail to exert themselves any more than they have to, equating “just enough” with good enough. By avoiding even mild challenges, these workers thwart forward progress and make their businesses dangerously safe.
To combat this affliction, Treasurer proposes a bold antidote: courage. In Courage Goes to Work, he lays out a comprehensive, step-by-step process that treats courage as a skill that can be developed and strengthened. He Treasurer shows how managers can build workplace courage by modeling courageous behavior themselves, creating an environment where people feel safe taking chances and helping workers deal with fear.
To make the concept of courage more concrete, Treasurer identifies what he calls the Three Buckets of Courage: Try Courage, having the guts to take initiative; Trust Courage, being willing to follow the lead of others; and Tell Courage, being honest and assertive with coworkers and bosses. He illustrates each with a variety of vivid real-world examples and offers proven practices for helping your workers keep each bucket full.
Aristotle said that courage is the first virtue because it makes all other virtues possible. It's as true in business as it is in life. With more courage, workers gain the necessary confidence to take on harder projects, embrace company changes with more enthusiasm, and extend themselves in ways that will benefit their careers and their company. Courage Goes to Work is the first book to take a systematic approach to developing a vital but overlooked component of business success.

Open your mind with the creative enigmas of Heraclitus. These innovation strategies-from "You Can't Step in the Same River Twice" to "Dogs Bark at What they Don't Understand"-are as relevant today as they were 2,500 years ago when this provocative Greek phoilosopher wrote them.

Roger von Oech breathes fresh life into these ancient ideas to produce a treasury of useful creativity insights including "Appreciate Turbulence," "Practice Forgetting," "Ask a Fool," "See the Obvious," "Connect the Unconnected," "Find a Pattern," "Use What's not There," and "Reverse Assumptions."

Whether you read it from start to finish as a creativity workbook, or consult it as a daily oracle, Expect the Unexpected or You Won't Find It offers a welcome jolt to the imagination!

• Written by the bestselling creativity author of all time-von Oech's A Whack on the Side of the Head has sold more than 1.5 million copies
• Provides new approaches to problem solving that anyone can use: managers, students, artists, writers, teachers, and others
• Draws on science, business, history, popular culture, and literature to provide novel solutions to even the most intractable problems

From Chip R. Bell, the bestselling author of Customers as Partners , Managers as Mentors , and Managing Knock You rSocks Off Service , partnering with Heather Shea, the former president of The Tom Peters Group's training and consulting company
Provides invaluable insights into the changing world of powerful partnering
Offers tools, details techniques, and provides activities and resources to help you develop successful partnerships in every enterprise
Partnerships are fast becoming the primary structure of contemporary business, as organizations partner with vendors, unions, customers, and even competitors to take advantage of short-term market opportunities, leverage intellectual capital, and create more flexible and innovative enterprises. In this important guide, authors Chip Bell and Heather Shea offer an in-depth look at how we can successfully manage partnerships and build them with substance-passion, quality, heart, and soul.
While many other books have examined the rational, logical, analytical sides of partnership, none has fully explored the irrational, illogical, emotional sides, which are most often what cause partnerships to falter or fail. Dance Lessons is a comprehensive guide to the interpersonal side of partnerships, revealing exactly how the champions choreograph their partnership dances for show-stopping performances. It features:
new perspectives to help you decide if partnership is right for you
exciting tools for selecting the right form of partnership
important techniques to help you get emotionally prepared to partner
smart ways to accurately pick good partners
engaging activities to help you practice your partnership skills
effective methods for dealing with difficult partners and partnerships
vital cues that let you know when the partnership is ready to end, and helpful tips on how to end it
insights on how to manage external factors that effect partnership success
practical resources to help you continue to learn about effective partnering
Dance Lessons shows how to develop meaningful, ethical, and soulful partnerships in every interaction throughout your work and your life.

• From Chip R. Bell, the bestselling author of Customers as Partners , Managers as Mentors , and Managing Knock You rSocks Off Service , partnering with Heather Shea, the former president of The Tom Peters Group's training and consulting company
• Provides invaluable insights into the changing world of powerful partnering
• Offers tools, details techniques, and provides activities and resources to help you develop successful partnerships in every enterprise

Using a wealth of real-world examples, this breakthrough book offers a new freedom-based management paradigm that radically improves every aspect of business-from how we hire, compensate, and motivate people to how we address quality issues, serve customers, review employees, and more. Accountability tells the story of Pete Williams, a hard-charging CEO, who meets Stan "Kip" Kiplinger, a retired businessman, during a cross-country train trip. Pete's manufacturing business is in critical condition; productivity is falling. He's tried all the popular management approaches, but he can't get his people to be accountable for meeting their goals. Kip points out that every management system Pete has used is ultimately based on controlling people. Rather than encouraging people to be accountable, control-based systems discourage accountability by destroying people's sense of ownership of their job. Kip introduces Pete to a new way of leading people based on freedom-giving people the freedom to make their own choices and to do it their way. This doesn't mean anarchy; it means leadership expects everyone to act like an adult and take responsibility for his or her actions and their outcomes. Accountability details how this new approach yields a consistent flow of creative innovations and organizational improvements impossible under the old, coercive systems.

• Coauthored by Rob Lebow, author of the bestsellers A Journey into the Heroic Environment (over 220,000 copies sold) and Lasting Change (over 75,000 copies sold)
• Presents a more effective and humane alternative to "control-based" management practices-the only option that most organizations think they have
• Real-life examples reveal the benefits of this new approach to management

Top business leaders use more than data, facts, and information to make important decisions. When describing their decision-making process, they refer to gut, instinct, intuition, and judgment-- in other words, wisdom. This book traces one corporate executive's journey toward that most valuable commodity.

Would you like to find out how a terrible health care system transforms itself into a wonderful one?NEW EDITION, REVISED AND UPDATED Phillip Longman tells the amazing story of the turnaround of the Department of Veterans Affairs health-care system from a dysfunctional, scandal-prone bureaucracy into the benchmark for high-quality medicine in the United States. Best Care Anywhere shows that vast swaths of what we think we know about health, health care, and medical economics are just plain wrong. And the book demonstrates how this extraordinarily cost-effective model, which has proven to be highly popular with veterans, can be made available to everyone. New to this edition is an analysis of how the shortcomings of both so-called Obamacare and Republican plans to privatize Medicare reinforce the need for applying the lessons of the VA. Also included are completely updated statistics and research, as well as examples of how the private sector is already beginning to learn from the VA’s example.

• Tells the remarkable story of how the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health-care system transformed itself from a national scandal to a national model

• Explains the multiple advances and innovations that have enabled the VA to provide an unparalleled level of service

• Recommends how to adapt and expand the VA model to the entire country

 

Expanding health-care coverage to uninsured Americans is a laudable goal, but the problems in our system go much deeper than that. The way that health care is delivered in this country is deeply flawed. Studies consistently show Americans spend more per person on health care than the people in any other country with far poorer outcomes. For example, Costa Ricans spend a fraction of what we do and live a year longer.

But a solution to Americas health-care crisis does exist. Its not a theoretical alternative thats never been implemented. And you dont have to go to a foreign country to see it. Its already up and running, with hospitals and clinics located in every state. Its the VA health-care system, the largest integrated system in the United States.

In Best Care Anywhere, Phillip Longman tells the full story of the VAs amazing turnaround. Once a regular source of nationally reported scandals, the VA system is now hailed for its exceptional safety record, its use of evidence-based medicine, its health promotion and wellness programs, and its unparalleled adoption of electronic medical records and other information technologies. And its the only health-care provider in the United States whose cost per patient has been holding steady as others skyrocket.

The story of how and why the VA became the benchmark for quality medicine in the United States suggests that vast swaths of what we think we know about health, health care, and medical economics are just wrong. Longman suggests ways that this extraordinarily cost-effective model can be adapted so that a VA level of health care could be available to everyone.

New to this edition are an analysis of so-called Obamacare and the Ryan proposal to privatize Medicare. It also describes the results achieved when the VA electronic record system was implemented in West Virginia and Texas and features completely updated statistics and research, including 2011 cancer studies by Harvard University that prove VA cancer patients outlive cancer patients in traditional health care.