Bøger udgivet af Berrett-Koehler

“A valuable call to action for small shareholders to change the ways big corporations do business.” —Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor Want to make misbehaving corporations mend their ways? You can! If you own their stock, corporations have to listen to you. Shareholder advocate Andrew Behar explains how to exercise your proxy voting rights to weigh in on corporate policies—you only need a single share of stock to do it. If you’ve got just $2,000 in stock, Behar shows how you can go further and file a resolution to directly address the board of directors. And even if your investments are in a workplace-sponsored 401(k) or a mutual fund, you can work with your fund manager to purge corporations from your portfolio that don’t align with your values. Illustrated with inspiring stories of individuals who have gone up against corporate Goliaths and won, this book informs, inspires, and instructs investors how to unleash their power to change the world.

Leading with Character and Competence Moving beyond Title, Position, and Authority “Leadership is an applied discipline, not a foamy concept to muse about,” says three-time CEO, Oxford-trained scholar, and consultant Timothy R. Clark. “In fact, it’s the most important applied discipline in the world.” The success of any organization can be traced directly to leadership. And leadership can be learned. But too many books and development programs focus exclusively on skills. In reality, performance and ultimate credibility are based on a combination of character and competence. As Clark puts it, character is the core and competence the crust. He shows how greatness emerges from a powerful combination of the two, although in the end character is more important. A leader with character but no competence will be ineffective, while a leader with competence but no character is dangerous. Clark spotlights the four most important components of character and competence and offers a series of eloquent, inspiring, and actionable reflections on what’s needed to build each one. Fundamentally, he sees leadership as influence—leaders influence people “to climb, stretch, and become.” You need character to influence positively and competence to influence effectively. This is a book for anyone, no matter where he or she is on the organization chart. Because today employees at all levels are being asked to step up, not only can everyone be a leader, everyone has to be. Clark’s insights are profound, and his passion is infectious. “Leadership” he writes, “is the most engaging, inspiring, and deeply satisfying activity known to humankind. Through leadership we have the opportunity to progress, overcome adversity, change lives, and bless the race.”

Control, Conquer, and Prevail! Everybody’s biased. The truth is, we all harbor unconscious assumptions that can get in the way of our good intentions and keep us from building authentic relationships with people different from ourselves. Tiffany Jana and Matthew Freeman use vivid stories and fun (yes, fun!) exercises and activities to help us reflect on our personal experiences and uncover how our hidden biases are formed. By becoming more self-aware, we can control knee-jerk reactions, conquer fears of the unknown, and prevail over closed-mindedness. In the end, Jana and Freeman’s central message is that you are not the problem—but you can be the solution.

Flip Your Script! You’ve been promoted to leadership—congratulations! But it’s nothing like your old job, is it? William Gentry says it’s time to flip your script. We all have mental scripts that tell us how the world works. Your old script was all about “me”: standing out as an individual. But as a new leader, you need to flip your script from “me” to “we” and help the group you lead succeed. In this book, Gentry supports and coaches you to flip your script in six key areas. He offers actionable, practical, evidence-based advice and examples drawn from his research, his work with leaders, and his own failures and triumphs of becoming a new leader. Get started flipping your script and become the kind of boss everyone wants to work for.

Under Joe Solmonese’s leadership, the Human Rights Campaign became the model other organizations look toward to create effective social and political change. Against daunting odds, HRC was instrumental in passing landmark national legislation such as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act; repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; and passing marriage equality acts in eight states. How did Solmonese and HRC do it? What Solmonese reveals in this book is that for him, the key to success was learning to harness his anger. Essentially it’s just a form of energy. Channeled, it can keep you moving forward on a long journey. But uncontrolled, it can blow everything up. With this as his guiding principle, Solmonese uses stories from his work with HRC and his previous position as CEO of the powerful women’s organization EMILY’s List to share a series of often-surprising lessons. For example, empathize with your enemies instead of shaming them, find allies wherever you can, and ask for the doable, not the impossible (even when the “impossible” is your ultimate goal). Most striking in this book are the stories of Solmonese’s ability to draw some kind of win—however small—from seeming adversaries. But at every step of the way he emphasizes the importance of managing the yin-yang tension of anger. Particularly when one is dealing with irrational and offensive attitudes, the temptation is ever present to give in to righteous indignation. While it’s fine to feel it, Solmonese’s advice is to always be strategic with your outrage.

Discover What Makes Family Businesses Beat the Odds and Thrive over Generations Families are complicated; family businesses even more so. Like other companies, family-run enterprises must develop leadership and entrepreneurial skills. But they must also manage family dynamics that rarely mirror the best practices in the latest Harvard Business Review. Allan Cohen and Pramodita Sharma, scholars with deep professional and personal roots in family businesses, show how enterprising families can transmit the hunger for excellence across generations. Using examples of firms that flourished and those that failed, they describe the practices that characterize entrepreneurial individuals, families, and organizations and offer pragmatic advice that can be tailored to your unique situation.

Low Cost, High Impact! Public relations is a make-or-break factor for all organizations, especially those that are small or mission driven. While it can be tempting to think that PR is a luxury only larger organizations can afford, PR expert Jennifer R. Farmer shows how her CCRR framework—being credible, creative, responsive, and relentless—is the silver bullet for even cash-strapped organizations. Farmer emphasizes that effective public relations is in fact an essential component of organizational development—people need to know about you for your organization to have maximum impact. Her CCRR framework leverages tools everyone has access to, from social media to brand transparency, and requires attentiveness more than money. Farmer shows you that, no matter how modest your budget, you can build a cost-effective communications strategy that will help you break through the noise in an information-overloaded world.

Ready for the Future or Stuck in the Past? Millennials have been condemned as lazy, entitled, disloyal, and disrespectful and needing constant hand-holding. But Crystal Kadakia—a Millennial herself as well as an organizational development consultant and two-time TEDx speaker—shows that not only are these negative stereotypes dead wrong, but each one conceals a positive workplace practice that forward-looking companies must adopt if they are to endure. She illuminates how the advent of digital technology is the crucial root cause of many Millennial behaviors and offers a guide for what our traditional workplace needs to do to attract, engage, and retain modern talent.

Think about the last time you tried to talk with someone who didn't already agree with you about issues that matter most. How well did it go? These conversations are vital, but too often get stuck. They become contentious or we avoid them because we fear they might. What if, in these difficult conversations, we could stay true to ourselves while enriching relationships and creating powerful pathways forward? What if our divergent values provided healthy fuel for dialogue and innovation instead of gridlock and polarization? Jason Jay and Gabriel Grant invite us into a spirit of serious play, laughing at ourselves while moving from self-reflection to action. Using enlightening exercises and rich examples, Breaking through Gridlock helps us become aware of the role we unwittingly play in getting conversations stuck. It empowers us to share what really matters – with anyone, anywhere – so that together we can create positive change in our families, organizations, communities, and society.

The People Equation Every business leader knows that the key to growth is innovation—if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. Deborah Perry Piscione and David Crawley argue that ultimately the key to innovation is people. After all, creativity is a uniquely human function, something that can’t be automated. So how do you design an organization so that it provides the elements that will bear new thinking and bring forth bold ideas? Through The People Equation. Based on examples from their consulting work and research into successful business practices, Perry Piscione and Crawley’s The People Equation enables leaders to create a culture where psychological safety is a given, risk taking is embraced, and collaboration between highly competent people is nurtured. When experiments and new initiatives look promising, Perry Piscione and Crawley’s Improvisational Innovation process provides a road map to quickly develop ideas and bring them to market. All this requires upending the usual organizational pyramid and instilling a completely new mindset throughout the organization. Perry Piscione and Crawley show that in our rapidly changing world, the top is not where the really disruptive ideas are going to come from. And if people are afraid to take chances, even fail, you’re never going to get those ideas—playing it safe means you’ll be out of the game. The People Equation provides you with a formula for exponentially increasing out-of-the-box thinking in your organization and multiplying your chances for greater growth and success.

If You Want People to Read Your Book, Writing It Is Only the Beginning There has truly never been a better time to be an author. For the first time, authors have direct access to the public via the Internet—and can create a community eagerly awaiting their book. But where do new authors start? How do they sort through the dizzying range of online options? Where should they spend their time online and what should they be doing? Enter Fauzia Burke, a digital book marketing pioneer and friend of overwhelmed writers everywhere. She takes authors step-by-step through the process of identifying their unique personal brand, defining their audience, clarifying their aspirations and goals, and setting priorities. She offers advice on designing a successful website, building a mailing list of superfans, blogging, creating an engagement strategy for social media, and more. By following Burke’s expert advice, authors can conquer the Internet and still get their next manuscript in on time.

Some negotiations are easy. Others are more difficult. And then there are situations that seem completely hopeless. Conflict is escalating, people are getting aggressive, and no one is willing to back down. And to top it off, you have little power or other resources to work with. Harvard professor and negotiation adviser Deepak Malhotra shows how to defuse even the most potentially explosive situations and to find success when things seem impossible. Malhotra identifies three broad approaches for breaking deadlocks and resolving conflicts, and draws out scores of actionable lessons using behind-the-scenes stories of fascinating real-life negotiations, including drafting of the US Constitution, resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis, ending bitter disputes in the NFL and NHL, and beating the odds in complex business situations. But he also shows how these same principles and tactics can be applied in everyday life, whether you are making corporate deals, negotiating job offers, resolving business disputes, tackling obstacles in personal relationships, or even negotiating with children. As Malhotra reminds us, regardless of the context or which issues are on the table, negotiation is always, fundamentally, about human interaction. No matter how high the stakes or how protracted the dispute, the object of negotiation is to engage with other human beings in a way that leads to better understandings and agreements. The principles and strategies in this book will help you do this more effectively in every situation.

United Parcel Service (UPS) is a household name that customers and investors alike hold in high regard. Who hasn’t been delighted by a right-on-time delivery, one of the 18 million UPS makes every day? Founded over a hundred years ago, UPS has moved steadily up the Fortune 500 while so many other corporations have disappeared. What’s the company’s secret? Just ask a driver! Ron Wallace was a UPS delivery driver for six years before he began rising through the ranks, ultimately becoming president of UPS International. In other companies, that might be extraordinary, but at UPS it’s par for the course. UPS has a unique corporate culture. It’s like a family. Package loaders call executives by their first names and vice versa. The company almost always promotes from within. Lifetime employment is common. Most employees own UPS stock. Wallace credits the company’s success—and his own—to its culture of “we, not me.” As he puts it, working at UPS gave him a PhD in teamwork. Instead of writing a typical business memoir that celebrates the leader as celebrity, Wallace shares vivid stories that focus on the people he worked with, the challenges they overcame, and the simple principles and practices that make up the UPS way. He exhorts his readers to grow their people, not just their business plans. The leadership style described in this book is simple and direct—and it works. The straightforward and easy-to-understand lessons provide a blueprint for an individual or company to build on past successes and adapt to future challenges. This is a must-read for anyone aspiring to become a great leader.

If you want to make the drive for quality, productivity, and profit improvement a permanent feature of your organization, the concept of "partnering"--building alliances among employees, suppliers, and customers--must become an integral part of every activity, write Charles Poirier and William Houser. Every employee must see every other employee as a partner instead of a competitor. Similarly, every supplier and customer must be recognized as a potential ally for improvement, not just a source of goods or income. Poirier and Houser give detailed action studies of companies that have made the transition, and provide the tools to make similar changes in your own organization.

Risks are a part of a fully-lived life—and are essential for personal and professional advancement. Right Risk draws on the experiences and insights of successful risk-takers (including the author’s own experiences as a daredevil high diver) to detail ten principles you can use to take risks with greater intelligence and confidence. Right Risk is about taking more deliberate and intentional risks. It will teach you how to determine which risks to take and which to avoid, how to balance the need to take more risks with the need to preserve your safety, and how to confront all those people who tell you what a mistake it would be to take the risk. Right Risk will teach you to make wise and courageous choices—to confidently face life’s challenges and take advantage of life’s opportunities. It will help you become more comfortable with the uncomfortable, more courageous in facing fear, and more prepared to take the risks you’ve always wanted to take. It will help you take the giant leaps you’ve been dreaming of.

If you're one of the millions of people who are feeling overcommitted, overworked, and overtired, you've probably already learned that you can't juggle your way to a balanced life. With ever-increasing demands at work and at home, juggling only leads to exhaustion and frustration. Beyond Juggling presents five alternative strategies--Alternating, Outsourcing, Bundling, Techflexing, and Simplifying--that don't require either hyperactive time management or drastic career downshifting. Instead, it offers a collection of tools to help you craft a realistic rebalancing plan, tailored to your life needs and career situation. Extremely practical, Beyond Juggling details the five strategies, explains the rewards and drawbacks associated with each, and provides real-life case studies of people who have used each method successfully to rebalance their lives. Using the self-assessment instrument included in the book, you'll be able to pinpoint the work-life strategy (or strategies) you are currently using. Additional quizzes and checklists will help you take steps to reduce the dissonance between your professional and personal lives and achieve more of the balance you crave.

This deeply lyrical book offers perspective for those struggling to hear the quiet voice of the soul over the din of the contemporary workplace. Alan Briskin shows how the modern organization has gradually increased its demands on us-beginning with our bodies, then our minds, and now our souls. But through the moving personal stories of people fighting to reclaim their souls, he also sends a message that encourages individuals to keep their spiritual integrity and values alive. In The Stirring of Soul In the Workplace, Briskin weaves together lessons from history, psychology, and management theory, with numerous real-life examples, to tell the story of how the modern workplace has evolved to value technology and productivity over soulfulness and relationship. From the Industrial Revolution's marriage of mechanization and efficiency to the management theories of the early 20th century, Briskin traces the emergence of the quest for efficiency and control in the workplace. He questions the corporate concept of "individual personality" that asks us to check our emotions, fantasies, imaginations, and souls at the door. He describes the history of the soul as a dynamic force that continues to influence our behavior, and shows how excluding it from our work life actually flattens our potential and dampens our creativity. Rather than solve the conventional question organizations have been asking for years-how can we change people?-Alan Briskin examines how organizations can better reflect personal and human values in the workplace. For organizations that too often have sacrificed the well-being of the individual for the goals of the organization, the author suggests a more active way of taking up our work roles that can bring more of our experience and imagination into play. He points out that meaning cannot come from corporate mission statements or reengineering programs. Instead, it needs to be nurtured through dialogue and reflection, the courage to ask troubling questions, and a willingness to face the consequences of our collective and individual actions. When we learn to honor the contradictions, uncertainties, and interconnections inherent in the workplace, the energies of the soul will begin to stir with revitalizing results.

Purpose is fundamental and gives life meaning. It gives us the will to live and to live long and well. In this new edition of his bestselling classic, legendary personal coach Richard Leider offers brand-new tools and techniques for unlocking it.   Purpose is an active expression of our values and our compassion for others—it makes us want to get up in the morning and add value to the world. The Power of Purpose details a graceful, practical, and ultimately spiritual process for making it central to your life. This revitalized guide will help you integrate it into everything you do.   This third edition has been completely revised and updated. In addition to new stories, examples, and resources, it features four new chapters. “Purpose across the Ages” looks at how purpose can evolve during our lives. “The 24-Hour Purpose Retreat” includes seven mind-opening questions to help you unlock your purpose. “The Purpose Checkup” offers a new tool for periodically evaluating the health of your purpose. And in “Can Science Explain Purpose?” we learn what researchers are discovering about how an increased sense of purpose can improve our health, healing, happiness, longevity, and productivity.

Collaboration Begins with You Everyone knows collaboration creates high performing teams and organizations—and with today’s diverse, globalized workforce it’s absolutely crucial. Yet it often doesn’t happen because people and groups typically believe that the problem is always outside: the other team member, the other department, the other company. Bestselling author Ken Blanchard and his coauthors use Blanchard’s signature business parable style to show that, in fact, if collaboration is to succeed it must begin with you. This book teaches people at all levels—from new associates to top executives—that it’s up to each of us to help promote and preserve a winning culture of collaboration. The authors show that busting silos and bringing people together is an inside-out process that involves the heart (your character and intentions), the head (your beliefs and attitudes), and the hands (your actions and behaviors). Working with this three-part approach, Collaboration Begins with You helps readers develop a collaborative culture that uses differences to spur contribution and creativity; provides a safe and trusting environment; involves everyone in creating a clear sense of purpose, values, and goals; encourages people to share information; and turns everyone into an empowered self-leader. None of us is as smart as all of us. When people recognize their own erroneous beliefs regarding collaboration and work to change them, silos are broken down, failures are turned into successes, and breakthrough results are achieved at every level.

Wall Street Journal bestselling author David Horsager frequently hears executives lament that their hands are more than full trying to balance the barrage of tasks they face on a daily basis. While he never set out to be a productivity expert, Horsager realized that over the years he has developed and adopted dozens of extraordinarily practical time- and energy-saving techniques that could help today’s leader. The key objective is to become so effective in the little things that you have enough time for more meaningful interactions. In The Daily Edge, you’ll learn strategies such as identifying the key Difference-Making Actions on which to focus your efforts. Perhaps it is time to set a personal or even company-wide “power hour,” during which you do not attend meetings, answer the phone, or reply to emails, creating the time and space to really focus and get things done. The thirty-five high-impact ideas Horsager introduces in succinct, quick-read chapters are easily implemented and powerful on their own. Taken together, they form a solid wave of efficacy that enables you to get more done, keep your energy up, and make sure that you’re able to honor all your relationships, both personal and professional.

Entire service businesses have been built around the ideas of Heskett, Sasser, and Schlesinger, pioneers in the world of service. Now they test their ideas against the actual experiences of successful and unsuccessful practitioners, as well as against demands of the future, in a book service leaders around the world will use as a guide for years to come. The authors cover every aspect of optimal service leadership: the best hiring, training, and workplace organization practices; the creation of operating strategies around areas such as facility design, capacity planning, queue management, and more; the use—and misuse—of technology in delivering top-level service; and practices that can transform loyal customers into “owners.” Looking ahead, the authors describe the world of great service leaders in which “both/and” thinking replaces trade-offs. It’s a world in which new ideas will be tested against the sine qua non of the “service trifecta”—wins for employees, customers, and investors. And it’s a world in which the best leaders admit that they don’t have the answers and create organizations that learn, innovate, “sense and respond,” operate with fluid boundaries, and seek and achieve repeated strategic success. Using examples of dozens of companies in a wide variety of industries, such as Apollo Hospitals, Châteauform, Starbucks, Amazon, Disney, Progressive Insurance, the Dallas Mavericks, Whole Foods, IKEA, and many others, the authors present a narrative of remarkable successes, unnecessary failures, and future promise.

Accomplish what matters most Because we all have too much to do, it feels like our lives are out of balance. But Brian Tracy and Christina Stein argue that imbalance results not so much from doing too much but from doing too much of the wrong things. They provide a process that enables you to sort out what is most important to you from among the many activities you could focus on. When you can efficiently identify and accomplish what really matters to you, you’ve found your balance point.

Beholden to accepted assumptions about people and organizations, too many enterprises waste human potential. Robert Quinn shows how to defy convention and create organizations where people feel fully engaged and continually rewarded, where both individually and collectively they flourish and exceed expectations. The problem is that leaders are following a negative and constraining “mental map” that insists organizations must be rigid, top-down hierarchies and that the people in them are driven mainly by self-interest and fear. But leaders can adopt a different mental map, one where organizations are networks of fluid, evolving relationships and where people are motivated by a desire to grow, learn, and serve a larger goal. Using dozens of memorable stories, Quinn describes specific actions leaders can take to facilitate the emergence of this organizational culture—helping people gain a sense of purpose, engage in authentic conversations, see new possibilities, and sacrifice for the common good. The book includes the Positive Organization Generator, a tool that provides 100 real-life practices from positive organizations and helps you reinvent them to fit your specific needs. With the POG you can identify and implement the practices that will have the greatest impact on your organization. At its heart, the book helps leaders to see new possibilities that lie within the acknowledged realities of organizational life. It provides five keys for learning to be "bilingual"--speaking the conventional language of business as well as the language of the positive organization.  When leaders can do this, they are able to make real and lasting change.

DISCOVER WHAT YOU’RE HERE TO DO It’s the end of work as we know it. Career paths look nothing like they did in the days before phones got smart. We work more hours at more jobs for more years than ever before. So it’s vital that we know how to find work that allows us to remain true to who we are in the deepest sense, work that connects us to something larger than ourselves—in short, our “calling.” We all have one, and bestselling authors Richard Leider and David Shapiro can help you uncover yours. Through a unique Calling Card exercise that features a guided exploration of fifty-two “natural preferences” (such as Advancing Ideas, Doing the Numbers, Building Relationships, and Performing Events), Leider and Shapiro give us a new way to uncover our gifts, passions, and values and find work that expresses them. Along the way, they mix in dozens of inspiring true stories about people who have found, or are in the process of finding, their own callings. Uncovering your calling enables you to experience fulfillment in all aspects and phases of your life. And here’s the even better news: you’ll never have to work again. When you choose to do what you are called to do, you’re always doing what you want to do. Work Reimagined offers an enlightening, effective, and entertaining approach to discovering what you were born to do, no matter your age or stage of life.

Most change efforts fail because most change methods are built to deal with single challenges in a nice, neat, linear way. But leaders know that today, pressures for change don’t come at you one at a time; they come all at once. It’s like riding a roller coaster: sudden drops, jarring turns, anxious climbs into the unknown. Drawing on his years of experience at the Center for Creative Leadership and Columbia University, Bill Pasmore offers a four-part model and four mindsets that allow leaders to deal with multiple changes simultaneously without drowning in the churn. The first step, Pasmore says, is to Discover which external pressures for change are the most necessary to address. The key here is to think fewer—step away from the buffet of possibilities and pinpoint the highest-impact options. Then you need to Decide how many change efforts your organization can handle. Here the mindset is to think scarcer—you have only so many people and so many resources, so how do you best use them? Once you’ve figured that out, it’s time to Do—and here you want to think faster. Streamline processes and engage in rapid prototyping so you can learn quickly and cost-effectively. The last step is to Discern what worked and what didn’t, so think smarter—develop metrics, identify trends, and make sure learnings are disseminated throughout the organization. For each stage of the process, Pasmore offers detailed advice, practical tools, and real-world examples. This book is a comprehensive guide to navigating change the way it happens now.

Unleash Commitment, Initiative, and Innovation In their decades of leading groups all over the world, Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff discovered they could get superior results by creating an unconventional approach to leadership. Leaders still need to get everyone aligned around the same goals. But to maximize energy, creativity, and productivity, they gain more by focusing on structure rather than behavior, enabling people to take responsibility and manage themselves.  Lead More, Control Less describes eight essential skills for establishing a culture of autonomy and self-leadership. Using examples and case studies, Weisbord and Janoff describe how leaders can share responsibility, defuse group conflicts, show everyone the big picture, and more. With this approach, leaders truly gain more control by giving it up.

NEW EDITION, REVISED AND UPDATED Harness the Science of Positive Influence Just as the Wright Brothers combined science and practice to finally realize the dream of flight, Ryan and Robert Quinn combine research and personal experience to demonstrate how to reach a psychological state that lifts us and those around us to greater heights of achievement, integrity, openness, and empathy. The updated edition of this award-winning book—honored by Utah State University’s Huntsman School of Business, Benedictine University, and the LeadershipNow web site --includes two new chapters, one describing a learning process and social media platform the Quinns created to help people experience lift and the other sharing new insights into tapping into human potential.

Better Together FDR and Eleanor. Mick and Keith. Jobs and Woz. There are countless examples of introvert-extrovert partnerships who make brilliant products, create great works of art, and even change history together. But these partnerships don’t just happen. They demand wise nurturing. The key, says bestselling author Jennifer Kahnweiler, is for opposites to stop emphasizing their differences and use approaches that focus them both on moving toward results. Kahnweiler’s first-of-its-kind practical five-step process helps introverts and extroverts understand and appreciate each other’s wiring, use conflicts to spur creativity, enrich their own skills by learning from the other, and see and act on things neither would have separately. Kahnweiler shows how to perform the delicate balancing act required to create a whole that is exponentially greater than the sum of its parts.