Showing results by publisher "Berrett-Koehler Publishers" in All Categories

Effective leadership comes down to implementing everyday, common-sense practices to help organizations thrive - and yet so many leaders are still missing these fundamental principles from their personal and professional lives. Renowned business experts Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley disclose the simple truths about leadership they have gathered over their long and distinguished careers to help bring common sense into common practice.

Like any established profession, coaching is full of unexamined assumptions. These need to be regularly questioned and tested to keep the profession vital and valuable. Coaches need to engage in the same kind of scrutiny and self-examination that offers such powerful benefits to their clients.

The Change Cycle offers a tested, six-stage approach for successfully navigating common work-life transitions so that you not only get through them but emerge stronger and better able to face the next challenge.

Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide is just what the name implies: a hands-on, detailed description of facilitating Open Space Technology (OST). OST is an effective, economical, fast, and easily repeatable strategy for organizing meetings of between 5 and 2,000 participants that has been used in thousands of organizations in 134 countries and just keeps growing in popularity. Written by the originator of the method, this is the most authoritative book on the rationale, procedures, and requirements of OST.

Would you rather get a root canal than face a group of strangers? Does the phrase “working a room” make you want to retreat to yours? Devora Zack, an avowed introvert and successful consultant who gives presentations to thousands of people at dozens of events annually, feels your pain. She found that other networking books assume that to succeed, you have to act like an extrovert. Not at all. There is another way.

This new edition of a classic, best-selling guide addresses the soft project management skills that are so essential to successful project, program, and portfolio management. Mastering leadership, negotiation, conflict resolution, change management, and organizational politics has always been key to project manager success. This book demonstrates the why and how of creatively applying soft project management skills in these areas and shows how to develop, adjust, and hone these skills given the forces and trends in today’s business world.

Time management remains a huge challenge for most people. This book shares the habits and processes used by top leaders worldwide to minimize distractions and maximize accomplishments. Drawing on their 40 years of leadership research, this book offers three powerful habits that the top 10 percent of leaders use to do what matters most.

"Innovation is an act of love—or at least it should be. Always. It is a gesture of empathy, respect, generosity, of one human being’s devotion to another,” writes Mauro Porcini at the beginning of this extraordinary book. It is in part a memoir by one of the world’s leading designers—the first chief design officer at both 3M and Pepsi. But even more, it is a manifesto for a genuine, authentic, and deeply humanistic approach to design, one that aims to create personal and social value first and financial and economic value afterward.

Offering a new lens on leadership and living, this research-based guide shows how to design experiences that can touch hearts, provoke minds, and change lives in powerful ways.

If you have a great product, but don’t have the operations in place to efficiently and effectively support it—production, manufacturing, sales, finance, human resources—you won’t succeed. Product innovation is seen as flashier, getting far more attention, but you can create an enduring competitive advantage by revolutionizing business operations.

In his latest business fable, top leadership author Mark Miller tells the story of newly appointed CEO Blake Brown, who takes over a company distressed by poor performance and low morale. Nothing Blake learned from his previous job seems to help him deal with the bigger, more complex problems he now faces. The game has changed. As his new mentor points out, Blake is playing a simple game of checkers when he should be playing chess.

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.

In Radical Product Thinking (RPT), product development is led by the vision for the change it’s intended to create. This methodology helps leaders reimagine the problems they face and align their team to find creative solutions using five elements: Vision, Strategy, Prioritization, Execution, and Culture. R. Dutt guides listeners through these elements so they develop a clear process for achieving their desired change, incorporate it into daily activities, and turn RPT skills into muscle memory.

How can we solve the problem of persistent poverty in low-status communities? Majora Carter argues that these areas need a talent-retention strategy, just like the ones companies have. Retaining homegrown talent is a critical part of creating a strong local economy that can resist gentrification. But, too many people born in low-status communities measure their success by how far away from them they can get.

Now in a second edition, this classic book shows how to make conversations generative and productive rather than critical and destructive so people, organizations, and communities flourish. This edition has been revised throughout with new examples; updates on the latest supporting research in neuroscience, positive science, and positive psychology; and a discussion guide. It also features a new chapter on what the authors call tuning in: cultivating awareness of how our physical and mental state affect our perceptions, emotions, and thoughts as we engage in conversation.

A slew of harmful stereotypes continues to follow Black women. The second edition of this best seller debunks vicious misconceptions rooted in long-standing racism and shows that Black women are still all right. The latest edition of this best seller features new interviews with diverse Black women about marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more. Alongside these authentic experiences and fresh voices, Winfrey Harris explores the evolution of stereotypes of Black women, with new real-life examples.

Legendary organizational scholar Edgar Schein and former Silicon Valley executive Peter Schein say leadership today requires that people transcend their hierarchical roles and relate to each other as human beings—what they call humble leadership. In such relationships, new ideas can flow freely, mistakes can come to light immediately, and course corrections can be made in real time rather than “by committee” or by order of the lone heroic CEO.

The ultimate guide to naming your product or business has been updated throughout, with twice as many resources as before, new stories (of both hits and flops), and an entirely new chapter on the power of names in the workplace.

Discover eight powerful mindset shifts that enable leaders and those they lead to adapt and thrive in a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty. Being adaptable and flexible have always been hallmarks of effective leadership, but recent events have seriously stress tested this idea. How do you find calm in the midst of all this chaos?

It's people who make organizations great, so how can leaders best help their people achieve that greatness? As Ken Jennings and John Stahl-Wert show in this new edition of their best seller, you can't just demand greatness - you have to inspire it. The most effective leaders don't just stand in front of their people, they stand behind them too. As one of the characters in the book notes, "You qualify to be first by putting other people first."