Bøger udgivet af Berrett-Koehler

The lessons of Full Steam Ahead! are revealed through the inspirational story of two people who were able to create a vision for the place they worked and for their own lives. Jim Carpenter, president of a mid-sized insurance agency, didn't get the "vision thing." The agency was doing well, but Jim had a strong sense that things could be much better. Ellie Atkins offered a fresh perspective. Together they discover the three elements of a compelling vision: a significant purpose, clear values, and a picture of the future.They also discover how to ensure that the vision comes alive through understanding the principles of: how it is created, how it is communicated and how it is lived and demonstrate that vision is not only necessary, but also possible and achievable.

Most of us don't use our yesterdays very well. With our cultural obsession with "living in the moment," we neglect to engage in creative reflection on our personal histories. In The Power Of Your Past, John Schuster systematically demonstrates that our pasts are the biggest, most accessible, and most under-utilized of resources for anyone wanting to make positive changes. In contrast to other more technical, spiritual, or therapeutic guides that address working with one's past, he offers a balanced, practical and accessible approach through an actionable three-phase model: Recalling, Reclaiming, and Recasting. He provides exercises that link past events to achieving sounder interpretations and illustrates the process with inspiring histories of those who have experienced transformative results through embracing their own professional and personal pasts.Schuster provides insight, encouragement, and steps for essential professional and personal development. Readers who follow this model will make progress in careers short on heart and meaning, overcome obstacles that other methods can't address, and make decisions based on their truth, not the "versions" of truth they have inherited and not fully examined. They will enjoy the peace of mind that comes with the knowledge that all they need to grow insight, courage and persistence are the ingredients is already within.

At a time when most communities' resources are stretched past the breaking point, how is it possible to deal with the enormous challenges that families, neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations face today? This inspiring book takes readers to seven communities around the world where the people have walked out of limiting beliefs and practices that precluded solutions to major social problems, and walked on to discover bold new ways to meet their needs. This book is a true learning journey, filled with intimate stories and portraits of the people and places the authors came to know through years of working together to transform their communities. The journey begins in Mexico, then moves to Brazil, South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, Greece and the U.S. The authors' lives and ways of thinking have been transformed by these experiences and relationships - an experience they hope to recreate for the reader through vivid prose and photos. The reader will experience first hand how a change of beliefs about people results in new capacities and the possibility of a more healthy future.

We all want to live a life without regrets, but few of us succeed. Marc Muchnick, bestselling coauthor of The Leadership Pill, outlines thirty simple yet potentially life-changing actions that anyone can take to avoid regret and thereby live a happier, more meaningful life.   Whenever we do something we wish we hadn''t—or don''t do something we wish we had—we vow it won''t happen again. But do we ask ourselves why it happened in the first place?   Because we become prisoners of habit and circumstance, we take people in our lives for granted and fail to be true to ourselves. We stop growing and learning, become self-absorbed and judgmental, and lose touch with our innate goodness. Inspired by his final conversation with a dying friend, Marc Muchnick’s No More Regrets! is specifically designed to help you avoid these pitfalls.   Just one or two of the thirty ways to greater happiness and meaning outlined here could potentially change your life. Muchnick’s suggestions are straightforward, thoughtful, and easy to implement—often just a matter of shifting perspective and seeing the world differently. No More Regrets! will show you how to live in a way that allows you to confidently move forward rather than constantly look back.

Ever-expanding landfills, ocean gyres filled with floating plastic mush, endangered wildlife. Our garbage has become a massive and exponentially growing problem in modern society. Eco-entrepreneur Tom Szaky explores why this crisis exists and explains how can we solve it by eliminating the very idea of garbage. To outsmart waste, he says, we first have to understand it, then change how we create it, and finally rethink what we do with it. By mimicking nature and focusing on the value inherent in our by-products, we can transform the waste we can’t avoid creating from useless trash to a useful resource. Szaky demonstrates that there is value in every kind of garbage, from used chewing gum to juice pouches to cigarette butts. After reading this mind-expanding book, you will never think about garbage the same way again.

Leonardo da Vinci is celebrated as the archetypal Renaissance man. He made extraordinary discoveries in numerous fields and pioneered entire disciplines, among them fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, theoretical botany, and embryology. Leonardo's unique synthesis of art, science, and technology is not only fascinating intellectually but also very relevant to our time-it prefigures modern systems theory.Our sciences and technologies have become increasingly narrow in their focus, unable to understand our multi-faceted problems from an interdisciplinary perspective; and our business and political leaders are often incapable of "connecting the dots." This is exactly what we can learn from Leonardo. As the author shows throughout the book, Da Vinci practiced a science and technology that honored and respected the unity of all life, recognized the fundamental interdependence of all natural phenomena, and connected the microcosm (the human being) with the macrocosm (the living Earth). That is exactly the kind of science and technology we need today.

This short, easy-to-read fable reveals the five habits that underlie leadership character and that determine leaders' success - and teaches leaders how to develop these habits.Like Mark Miller's previous books, this one follows the life, learning, and influence of Debbie Bruster. Here she finds herself mentoring Blake Brown, the son of her former mentor. Rather than answer Blake's questions about leadership directly, Debbie introduces him to other leaders, each of whom shares a unique perspective on what really makes a leader successful. As Blake puts the pieces together, he discovers his problem is not one of skills but of character, that leadership is more about the heart of the leader than the head or hands. In fact, Miller summarized these traits with the acronym HEART: Hunger for Wisdom, Expect the Best, Accept Responsibility, Respond with Courage, and Think Others First. With the help of his new friends and mentors, Blake is able to build a plan to transform his heart. The good news for all of us: leadership is not just the purview of the few - it is within reach for millions of aspiring leaders around the world. This book is the road map they need to get their lives and careers on track.

This poetic, evocative book offers the meditations of an Anasazi tribesman at odds with his father and community. As he walks through the desert, he discovers the seven paths of the Anasazi way-each one based on a naturally occurring element in nature-that show him the roots of his conflict and the path towards reconciliation.Native American traditions consistently focused on nature's own wisdom as superior to that of man since nature has witnessed all aspects of human growth and setbacks. The idea presented here is that for maladies of both body and spirit, the ancient Anasazi pointed man towards seven paths found upon Mother Earth-seven elements among nature that combine to heal human hearts.

We are plagued today by a decline in ethical behavior. Scandals come so thick and fast that any attempt to list them is out of date in weeks if not days. But ethics isn’t just a matter of headlines; it’s a part of everyone’s life. We’re called on to make ethical decisions, large and small, all the time. This can be particularly tricky in the workplace, where our decisions can affect not just ourselves but coworkers, clients, customers, and even the entire company. Existing ethics books are of limited use. They generally feature one author’s opinions on very specific situations, which may well have nothing to do with the problems we’re facing. And anyway, we don’t need expert advice. Mark Pastin insists every one of us is qualified to resolve even the thorniest dilemmas ourselves, and in this profoundly practical book he gives us the tools to do just that. Pastin argues that we all have an innate ethical –he calls it “the ethics eye.” The problem is, we’re not aware we have it or how to develop it. Here he provides practical tools we can use to open up our ethics eye so that we can consistently see what is right and do it. Make an Ethical Difference shows how to apply these tools using actual ethical dilemmas drawn from Pastin’s decades of experience as an advisor to governments, corporations, and NGOs. The point is not to try to wedge your situation into one of the examples—it’s to show how a tool that can be applied to any situation is used in one particular instance. And once you’ve reached a decision, Pastin offers strategies for building consensus with those who might disagree with you. People often feel hopeless and skeptical that there is anything they as individuals can do to raise society’s ethical level or resolve long-standing impasses. By using the unique tools in this book, we will gain confidence in our innate ethical sense and take actions that will elevate the ethical level of the groups and organizations we belong to and society as a whole.

Theory matters in applied disciplines—fields that apply scholarly research to professional practice, such as management, social work, health care, human resource development, education, and many others. Because these disciplines deal with human beings in the real world, a flawed theory can result in actual harm to people and institutions. When faced with a professional problem, practitioners resort to the latest fad or simply throw everything and anything at it because of the lack of sound theory. Scholars deal with problems by slicing them into small segments to study them but fail to address the practical implications. What’s needed is a way to unite research and practice to create robust theory. This is exactly what Richard Swanson and Thomas Chermack offer here: a complete, five-step method for developing sound, field-tested theory in applied disciplines. Unlike many existing methods, which cover only the initial conceptualization of a theory, the authors offer a complete approach, from conceptualizing a theory to creating relevant assessment criteria, establishing a research agenda to test the theory’s validity, applying the theoretical concepts in the real world, and using that experience to further refine and improve the theory. The method is not restricted to any single discipline, nor is it beholden to any research ideology. Swanson and Chermack provide a set of tools for each phase of the process, making this book accessible and applicable to a wide audience. And in addition to examples in each chapter, they offer two extended case examples of complete theory building. With flawed theories impeding the development of many applied disciplines, this book is desperately needed.

The health of business is inextricably linked with the health of humanity and nature. But our current approaches to leadership treat business as entirely separate—and the result has been recurring economic, environmental, and human crises. In this extraordinary book, Ram Nidumolu uses evocative parables and stories from the ancient Indian wisdom texts, the Upanishads, to introduce Being-centered leadership. This new kind of leadership is anchored in the concept of Being, the fundamental reality that underlies all phenomena. Being-centered leaders are guided by an innate sense of interconnection—the good of the whole becomes an integral part of their decisions and actions. Using the experiences of over twenty trailblazing CEOs, as well as those from his own life, Nidumolu describes a four-stage road map every aspiring leader can use to reconnect business to the wider world—to the benefit of all.

Right now the number of people living on $2 a day or less is more than the entire population of the world in 1950. These 2.7 billion people are not just the world’s greatest challenge—they represent an extraordinary market opportunity. By learning how to serve them ethically and effectively, businesses can earn handsome profits while helping to solve one of the world’s most intractable problems. The key is what Paul Polak and Mal Warwick call Zero-Based Design: starting from scratch to create innovative products and services tailored for the very poor, armed with a thorough understanding of what they really want and need and driven by what they call “the ruthless pursuit of affordability.”Polak has been doing this work for years, and Warwick has extensive experience in both business and philanthropy. Together, they show how their design principles and vision can enable unapologetic capitalists to supply the very poor with clean drinking water, electricity, irrigation, housing, education, healthcare, and other necessities at a fraction of the usual cost and at profit margins attractive to investors. Promising governmental and philanthropic efforts to end poverty have not reached scale because they lack the incentives of the market to attract massive resources. This book opens an extraordinary opportunity for nimble entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate executives that will result not only in vibrant, growing businesses but also a better life for the world’s poorest people.

EMPLOYEES TODAY are actively searching for more meaning in the workplace, for work that resonates with their being. How does one dare yearn for something more, when so many workplaces seem aligned solely with financial survival and profit making? How do we get work done amidst the demands and tugs on our soul? Bringing Your Soul to Work addresses these troubling questions in a way that provides a pathway for readers who want to bridge the gap between their spiritual and work lives. It honors readers' unique experiences and challenges them to think differently, aligning their actions with their hearts. Engaging, inspiring, and poetic, yet grounded in real life, this book is written by consultants who see the contradictions of the workplace firsthand. Using case examples, personal stories, inspirational quotes, visual images, reflective questions, and specific applications, it shows readers how to use their own experience to grapple with the gritty realities of the workplace. Throughout the book, readers are invited to consider the book's concepts in relation to their own unique situations and, in the case of the applications, to record their responses in writing. They then learn to construct meaning from their own experience, drawing on imagination and practice, as well as the specific circumstances of their work lives. Addressing what many feel but cannot say out loud, Bringing Your Soul to Work links ideas about soul to the realities of work in a unique way. For all those looking to increase their effectiveness at work and bring more feeling, imagination, and heart into their efforts with others, it will serve as a guide for creating something new and lasting.

This booklet gives an overview of the Search Conference, a change strategy which uses open systems principles in strategic planning, thereby creating a well-articulated, achievable future with identifiable goals, a timetable, and action plans for realizing that future. Here, in their own inspiring words, over 100 CEOs, board chairs, and company presidents share their insights in one-page letters focusing on the qualities necessary for effective leadership and career success. The men and women featured in Pathways to Success come from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their companies range from small entrepreneurial firms to large corporations. Organized by topic, these letters provide practical and encouraging insights on: o Hard work o Imagination o Tolerance o Honesty o Self-knowledge o Team-building, and more Each letter is self-contained and to-the-point, capturing the personal experience and positive convictions of these distinguished business leaders. A biographical sketch accompanies each letter, describing the career path of the contributor as well as the major challenges and obstacles that person has overcome to achieve success. The book also contains thought-provoking exercises for individual use or group discussion. Written for young people who aspire to successful business careers and leadership roles, this book will also be valuable for executives and managers, entrepreneurs, academics, consultants, and those who work with young people-counselors, teachers, mentors, and parents.

You already know why your company should go green. This comprehensive guide tells you how to do it profitably. It details every step of the process—from getting employee buy-in and conducting a current sustainability audit to developing a plan of action and measuring progress. Nuts-and-bolts guidance helps you make continuous, cost-effective improvements and shift the prevailing business culture by infusing green practices into your organization’s very DNA. Through illustrative examples from a wide variety of industries, this book shows how to • Design sustainable products • Green your facilities • Find green vendors • Use renewable energy • Reduce harmful emissions • Recycle waste products, and more The emphasis is on practicality—stand-alone chapters you can read when you need them and tools you can use to implement change in any area of your organization.

We all have a natural tendency to focus on what we don't want to happen, rather than on what we do want to happen., All this time and energy spent on worrying about avoiding pain and loss dominates far too many organizations, suppressing employee engagement and crippling growth. To escape this workplace culture-killer companies need their employees to look forward and focus intentionally on what they do want to happen. In Seeing Red Cars, expert trainer and speaker Laura Goodrich draws an enduring metaphor to show managers and their employees how to make the shift. It's a well-known truism that if you buy a red car, you suddenly start noticing red cars everywhere. By extension, if we make a conscious decision to focus on positive desired outcomes at work (and commit to a plan of conscious practice), we experience dramatically positive effects. The transition to affirmative thinking begins one person at a time and then grows, spreading virally through local teams and eventually the entire organization. Once a critical mass of employees has made this change, the Seeing Red Cars mentality becomes a part of the organization's core engine, driving growth, innovation, and bottom-line results.Seeing Red Cars provides a process that helps readers craft affirming "I Want" statements and a plan for taking monthly, weekly, and daily steps in the desired direction. Animated throughout by the popular "red cars" metaphor, the book's three-stage methodology raise awareness, turn insight into action, turn action into outcomes enables readers to both shake destructive habits and achieve personal and organizational goals. Throughout, Goodrich draws on well-documented research on the brain and human behavior and provides entertaining and enlightening stories culled from her 15 years of coaching and advising hundreds of leaders and organizations through change and transition.

In this inspiring and beautifully illustrated book, bestselling author Margaret Wheatley offers guidance to people everywhere for how to persevere through challenges in their personal lives, with their families, at their workplaces, in their communities and in their struggles to make a better world. She provides hope, wisdom and perspective for learning the discipline of perseverance.Wheatley does not offer the usual feel-good, rah-rah messages. Instead, she focuses on the situations, feelings and challenges that can, over time, cause us to lose heart or lose our way. Perseverance is a day-by-day decision not to give up. We have to notice the moments when we feel lost or overwhelmed or betrayed or exhausted and note how we respond to them. And we have to notice the rewarding times, when we experience the joy of working together on something hard but worthwhile, when we realize we've made a small difference. In a series of concise and compassionate essays Wheately names a behavior or dynamic - such as fearlessness, guilt, joy, jealousy - that supports or impedes our efforts to persevere. She puts each in a broader human or timeless perspective, offering ways to either live by or transcend each one. These essays are self-contained - you can thumb through the book and find what attracts you in the moment. Perseverance helps you to see yourself and your situation clearly and assume responsibility for changing a situation or our reaction to it if it's one that troubles us. There deliberately are no examples of other people or their experiences. You are the example - your personal experiences are the basis for change.In addition to Wheatley's graceful essays there are poems and quotations drawn from traditions and cultures around the world and throughout history. The book is deeply grounded spiritually, accessing human experience and wisdom from many sources. This grounding and inclusiveness support the essential message - human being throughout time have persevered. We're just the most recent ones to face these challenges and we can meet them as those who came before us did. As Wheatley quotes the elders of the Hopi Nation: "We are the ones we have been waiting for."

This work supports a process called Predictive Evaluation (PE) which enables practitioners to provide executives with compelling training data around the success of training in the three areas of Intention, Adoption, and Impact. PE also works to determine whether success has been achieved, and provides lead indicators of future adoption (transfer of learning) along with recommendations for continuous improvement. The way to think about this model is that predicting is before-the-fact to decide if to train; evaluating is after-the-fact measurement against the predictions. There are four ways that the PE approach differs from other models in the field:Whereas traditional approaches focus on costs and numbers, not on forecasting financial return, PE focuses on the predicted impact and its value-add to the organizationWhereas traditional approaches view evaluation as after-the-fact with no measures of success, PE employs repeated measures that mirror employees' path to improved performance with predicted 'success gates'Whereas ROI and/or Cost-Benefit evaluations traditionally rely on subjective estimates, PE provides concrete, business-focused and evidence-based data on return on investment and does not use statistical averages based on subjective estimates of improved performance or productivityWhereas existing approaches work on an after-the-fact basis with one-off programs, PE offers a determined prediction of the extent of transfer and impact and works well with programs that have repeated deliveries over a period of timeWhen decision makers decide to spend large sums of money on training, they seek to evaluate their options as they evaluate other large investments - that is so on the basis on financial returns to the company. This work shows those decision makers how to accurately determine the potential ROI on such training programs before committing to them.

This bestselling work describes how the art and science of brand building is typically identified with businesses, products, and services, but that personal and professional relationships can also be seen and managed in this very practical and effective light. The authors present "personal brand management" as a real-life professional development tool that creates and reinforces strong, enduring relationships fueled by each individual's core values and beliefs. McNally and Speak show how to conceive, convey, and manage a distinctive, relevant, and consistent personal brand-an accurate reflection of who you really are.This revised edition leverages its past success (brand equity) to take advantage of the increased acceptance of personal brand as a personal and career development framework and for creating a competitive edge. Drawing on eight additional years of research and experience, the authors offer new information emphasizing the importance of relationship alignment; differentiating between a brand and a strong brand, and showing how social networks have impacted the branding process and how to use social networking to build a strong brand.

Many subject matter experts are just that, subject matter experts not experts in the art of teaching, facilitating, or designing. Thousands of authors, trainers, and speakers have great content, but they lack the skills required to convey their content in a way that inspires learners to unleash their brilliance and move the learning to practice.. They often spend 70% of their time on WHAT they are going to teach, and 30% of their time on HOW, when they should be spending 30% on WHAT, and 70% on HOW. Their instructional techniques often are at odds with their message of inclusivity, eagerness for people to learn, and hopes that their content will change lives and organizations. Brilliance by Design outlines how to design learning interactions (such as meetings and workshops) that enable people to do their best thinking. Using the tested, signature ENGAGE model, it helps anyone who brings people together for the purpose of learning, problem-solving, or innovating to develop a clear, high-impact training design that unleashes brilliance. It presents a model that enables teachers to analyze learner and teacher needs, create objectives that meet those needs, and incorporate interactive tools that "fire 'em up," ensuring all key outcomes are met. To help readers unleash the brilliance in others, this book provides the structure, tools, language, and models needed to create optimal learning experiences from their ideas, practices, models and books. In learning these techniques, readers will achieve powerful outcomes, building communities of learners who share best practices and communicate at a deep and profound level while doing real work.

For several years after graduating from college at USC, Daniel Seddiqui failed to find clarity about what he wanted to do with his life. To make matters worse, he couldn't seem to land a job - and failing to receive an offer after over 40 interviews, Daniel decided to try a new strategy. Following his dream to explore the diverse cultures and industries offered in America, he embarked on a seemingly impossible quest: to work at 50 jobs in 50 states in 50 weeks.This book tells how Daniel fulfilled this incredible dream. Working as a baseball scout in Massachusetts, a coal miner in West Virginia, a meteorologist in Ohio, and so on over the course of his life changing journey, he explains how he learned to adapt to each state's unique circumstances and challenges. With vivid stories of his experience across fifty jobs (and the long drives in between), Daniel shares the lessons he learned about perseverance, risk taking, adaptability, networking, and endurance. From tales of the extraordinary kindness of strangers to the uncomfortable reality of having to sleep in his car, Daniel's experience is an inspiration to anyone looking to break into the job market or to even just to follow their dream.