Bøger udgivet af Berrett-Koehler

If you are in middle management, to get anything done you must present your ideas to decision makers, and those presentations can be brutal. The stakes are high—one presentation can make or break a career—but the rules are utterly unclear. Tactics and techniques that work well with peers, subordinates, and immediate supervisors can actually work against you when presenting up the chain. Speaking Up is an indispensable resource for anyone who needs to know how to present to those at the highest levels. Psychologist and coach Frederick Gilbert offers revelatory insights into the minds of the men and women at the top—information that is crucial to understanding what they’re looking for from presenters. Based on ten years of research and hundreds of interviews, Speaking Up features extensive comments from executives explaining exactly what they want and don’t want in a presentation and includes nine chapters containing QR codes for free videos on the chapter topics. This is a must-read book for surviving high-stakes meetings.

No More 16-Hour Days! Running your own business—the American dream—can be daunting: long days, none of the freedom you envisioned, no time for family and friends, and the unrelenting pressure to keep up the pace. Worse, all this hard work can only take you so far. To get to the next level, you need to stop being “Super-Employee” and become a leader who sets direction, operationalizes goals, monitors and controls results, and involves others. You need to run your business using an integrated professional management system. Clay Mathile, who grew the Iams Company from $500K to $1 billion in sales, discusses proven management fundamentals applied in a practical way, one that has been used by thousands of business owners. You’ll get real-world details that academic courses don’t teach—true stories from those who, like Mathile, implemented these fundamentals and thrived. Read this book and discover how to make your business more successful and sustainable and your life more fulfilling!

We all want to change something about ourselves: lose weight, quit smoking, improve our finances, and so on. But change is hard, even painful, and it’s our nature to avoid pain. In this inspiring how-to guide, Terry Hawkins provides exactly what we need: a straightforward way to break free of old habits that hold us back and adopt new ones that move us forward. It’s a process Hawkins herself used to rise above poverty, abuse, and serious health problems. Two fictional characters—Pitman and Flipman—demonstrate two possible ways of being. As Pitman, we’re trapped in the Pit of Misery, chained to our past, a helpless victim of circumstance. As the superhero Flipman, we are powerful, courageous, loved, successful, and able to flip negative thoughts and habits into positive ones. Hawkins illustrates precisely what feelings, thoughts, and behaviors send us to the pit and provides a detailed action plan for getting out of it. This wonderfully human and honest book will help you create the life you want once and for all.

A huge part of our economy is invisible, invaluable, and under siege. This is “the commons,” a term that denotes everything we share. Some parts of the commons are gifts of nature: the air and oceans, the web of species, wilderness, and watersheds. Others are the product of human creativity and endeavor: sidewalks and public spaces, the Internet, our languages, cultures, and technologies. Jonathan Rowe illuminates the scale and value of the commons, its symbiotic relationship with the rest of our economy, its importance to our personal and planetary well-being, and how it is threatened by privatization and neglect. He unifies many seemingly disparate struggles—against pollution, excessive development, corporate marketing to children, and more—with the force of this powerful idea. And he calls for new institutions that create a durable balance between the commons and the profit-seeking side of our economy.

Persuade, Don’t Push! Surely you know plenty of people who need to make a change, but despite your most well-intentioned efforts, they resist because people fundamentally fear change. As a salesman, father, friend, and consultant, Rob Jolles knows this scenario all too well. Drawing on his highly successful sales background and decades of research, he lays out a simple, repeatable, predictable, and ethical process that will enable you to lead others to discover for themselves what and why they need to change. Whether you hope to make a sale or improve a relationship, Jolles’s wise advice—illustrated through a bevy of sometimes funny, sometimes moving, always illuminating stories—will help you ensure that changing someone’s mind is never an act of coercion but rather one of caring and compassion.

Your people might be your organization’s greatest assets, but their interactions with one another are what determine the quality and the quantity of their contributions. Few organizations know how to generate the sense of excitement, energy, and shared mission that occurs when people truly join together. This book shows how, describing four simple behavioral keys that fundamentally change how people work together — building greater trust, understanding and collaboration.

Everyone knows that yoga helps reduce stress and increase the body’s flexibility and strength. But the physical aspects barely scratch the surface of yoga’s transformative powers. The poses are only one part of a larger philosophy offering profound insights for confronting the complexities of daily life. Yoga can help you remain centered, compassionate, positive, and sane every hour of the day—especially those between nine and five. This unprecedented guide shows how practicing the full range of yogic concepts—the traditional “Eight Limbs of Yoga”—leads to a productive, creative, and energizing work environment and features examples from professions like law enforcement, teaching, banking, filmmaking, medicine, and many more. But beyond that, this book is an invitation to use all of yoga’s teachings to cultivate the spark of the divine that dwells within each of us.

Every four minutes, over 50 children under the age of five die. In the same four minutes, 2 mothers lose their lives in childbirth. Every year, malaria kills nearly 1.2 million people, despite the fact that it can be prevented with a mosquito net and treated for less than $1.50. Sadly, this list goes on and on. Millions are dying from diseases that we can easily and inexpensively prevent, diagnose, and treat. Why? Because even though we know exactly what people need, we just can’t get it to them. They are dying not because we can’t solve a medical problem but because we can’t solve a logistics problem. In this profoundly important book, Eric G. Bing and Marc J. Epstein lay out a solution: a new kind of bottom-up health care that is delivered at the source. We need microclinics, micropharmacies, and microentrepreneurs located in the remote, hard-to-reach communities they serve. By building a new model that “scales down” to train and incentivize all kinds of health-care providers in their own villages and towns, we can create an army of on-site professionals who can prevent tragedy at a fraction of the cost of top-down bureaucratic programs. Bing and Epstein have seen the model work, and they provide example after example of the extraordinary results it has achieved in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This is a book about taking health care the last mile—sometimes literally—to prevent widespread, unnecessary, and easily avoided death and suffering. Pharmacy on a Bicycle shows how the same forces of innovation and entrepreneurship that work in first-world business cultures can be unleashed to save the lives of millions.

This latest edition of the classic Managers as Mentors is a rapid-fire read that guides leaders in helping associates grow in today’s tumultuous organizations. Thoroughly revised throughout with twelve new chapters, this edition places increased emphasis on the mentor acting as a learning catalyst with the protégé rather than simply handing down knowledge. As with previous editions, a fictional case study of a mentor-protégé relationship runs through the book. But now this is augmented with interviews with six top US CEOs. New chapters cover topics such as the role of mentoring in spurring innovation and mentoring a diverse and dispersed workforce accustomed to interacting digitally. Also new to this edition is the Mentor’s Toolkit, six resources to help in developing the mentor-protégé relationship. This hands-on guide teaches leaders to be the kind of confident coaches integral to learning organizations.

You Deserve Your Success! Joyce Roché rose from humble circumstances to earn an Ivy League MBA and become the first female African-American vice president of Avon, president of a leading hair care company, and CEO of the national nonprofit Girls Inc. But despite these accomplishments, she felt like a fraud. She worked more and more, had less and less of a personal life, and was never able to enjoy her success. In this deeply personal memoir, Roché shares her lifelong struggle with what she now recognizes as “the impostor syndrome,” a condition that plagues successful people in all walks of life. Based on her own experiences and those of top executives from organizations such as Eileen Fisher, Citigroup, BET, Pepsi, and Tupperware, she offers practical advice and valuable coping strategies that can help you embrace your own worth and live a life of joy, zest, and fulfillment.

Leaders struggle every day to have influence, battle stress, and create the future. Each day seems to spawn three problems for every one that gets solved. New initiatives fail, senior managers and investors grow impatient, and direct reports can chafe at feedback. Steven Snyder has a message for junior leaders and CEO's alike - this is all perfectly normal and part of the job. The myth of the perfectly confident, unflappable, and poised leader is just that - a myth. Snyder builds on more than 30 years as an executive, CEO, and academic to provide a blueprint for growing through adversity. He has studied nearly 100 senior executives to distill what really matters most in becoming a great leader. His main takeaway is that the struggle never goes away, and real growth only becomes possible when leaders become willing to learn. Snyder then digs into fifteen key strategies for mastering the art of struggle, from understanding the inevitable tensions, to practicing accountability and emotional centering.To be sure, Snyder does not promise any magic pill or quick fixes - the process of becoming a great leader is a lifetime journey. There may be no perfect leaders - but readers of this book will learn how to achieve greatness in the struggle.

In today's busy world of schedules and information overload, the Forces of Chaos are at an all-time high. Professionals everywhere desperately want to zip through tough tasks, jammed inboxes, and never-ending interruptions - but despite their best efforts they increasingly fall behind and often fail big time. After running in place at work for years like rodents on a wheel, some professionals even tragically morph into hamsters!This is the story of Z - a productivity super hero who helps business hamsters regain their humanity. Using his simple, superhuman-strength, not-so-secret weapon, ZIP! (TM) Tips, Z helps his friend Harold morph back into a human being. A small number of high-impact tech tips, ZIP! is, as Z describes it, lightning in a bottle - a hurricane in a can. ZIP! is rocket fuel for careers and a spa day for the stressed-out soul. And best of all, ZIP! Tips get the hamster in all of us off the wheel once and for all.

Lying in the workplace happens every day. People tell inconsequential lies, substantive lies, little lies, big lies, social lies and malicious lies. They tell lies of omission, lies that obscure facts, and lies that are blatant misrepresentations of the truth. Some lies - "white" lies - smooth the way for workplace interactions ("That's a nice tie you're wearing." "I'd be happy to serve on your committee.") Other lies poison business relationships, destroy employee engagement, and kill workplace productivity. The latter - destructive lies - is what Lies in the Workplace focuses on. This book looks at the high cost of workplace deception (for individuals and for organizations), why people tell lies, and why we tend to believe some liars over others. It examines the role that our own motives, vanities, desires, self-deceptions and rationalizations play in allowing ourselves to be duped. It then covers the verbal and nonverbal cues that you can use to spot a liar at work (an expanded version of Goman's Forbes blog), and urges the reader to be aware of their nonverbal behaviors, so that feeling anxious, introverted, or shy doesn't inadvertently signal untrustworthiness. It ends with insights on how to reduce lies in the workplace.

One insight can change your life, and the next can change your organization or even the world. Everybody has had the occasional insight-this book is a concise guide to simple actions that can help you have more consistent and timely insights. Put the ideas in these pages to good use and you will become a more effective thinker. Fresh ideas will abound. You will make better decisions quickly and confidently, find solutions to longstanding problems, and ultimately enjoy a more effortless and engaging life. The path to finding insights is simple once you know what to look for and how to listen. Kiefer and Constable's Insight Thinking Methods provide a guiding formula and practical steps to increase the frequency, strength, and quality of the insights that you experience each day. This is not a rigid set of rules-it's a creative pursuit. You'll find your own personal, individual approach to developing an insight state of mind and practicing insight listening, while having more insights on the topics that matter to you most. The book is supplemented with free web-based exercises, examples and illustrations (the draft website is at http://just-start.com/insight-thinking-book-landing-page-draft/ password: ArtOfInsight).

Once denigrated for shoddy care and antiquated systems, the VA health system has become a hallmark of excellence and technical innovation. Best Care Anywhere uses the VA turnaround to illustrate deeper lessons for the U.S. health care system. In particular, it shows how fee-for-service healthcare leads to more expensive, less comprehensive, and less effective healthcare. Takeaway: efficient electronic medical records are the secret key to better health outcomes.New to this edition is a particular focus on the trials and tribulations of "Obamacare," the Ryan proposal, and the fiscal crisis. It also includes new success stories of "exporting" the VA VistA system in West Virginia and Texas as well as completely updated statistics and research, including 2011 cancer studies by Harvard University that prove VA cancer patients outlive cancer patients in traditional healthcare.

How we view the creation of wealth and individual success shapes our choices on taxes, public investments in schools and vital infrastructure, regulations, the legitimacy of extravagant CEO pay, and more. America can't more forward if we don't have a clear understanding of how wealth is actually produced.This book challenges the by-bootstraps-alone narrative beloved by anti-government conservatives to offer a more holistic view of the success of America's business leaders and entrepreneurs. While acknowledging the importance of hard work, creativity, and leadership, it highlights several crucial, often unrecognized factors, with a particular emphasis on the ways government and society support and assists individuals: public education, research and development grants, social services, roads and highways, laws and regulations that establish a stable business environment, and many more. Miller and Lapham explore the historic roots of the self-made myth and offer profiles of business leaders who, in their own words, identify the kinds of government support and assistance that were crucial to their success. They also disprove the arguments of individuals like Donald Trump who have tried to perpetuate their own self-made myths of their success.

The Transforming Leader is written for people who strive to make a positive difference in the world. The book was conceived by the Fetzer Institute's Leadership for Transformation project in collaboration with the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership and the International Leadership Association. As part of the process that led to the book, the project's Stewardship Team held three retreats that brought together internationally known leaders, leadership educators, and theorists to sit in dialogue reflecting on three questions: How can we explore a variety of approaches to creating a bridge between our inner life and outer action for transformational effect? What is the commonality among these divergent approaches? And what of this can help you or me be an agent of transformation in a world on the edge of either destruction or renewal?The leaders and leadership experts contributing to the book, many of whom participated in the dialogues, consistently stress their own experience that it is not just what a leader does that matters, or what they know about human beings, their motivations and ways of behavior, but who that leader is inside: How alive they are, how balanced, how healthy, how passionate, how aware, how engaged, how compassionate, how energized - how they connect with their deeper and wiser selves. Based on cutting edge leadership thinking and practice, the 20 essays that make up the work explore the many paths and lessons leaders can take to access the best parts of themselves and meet the challenges of today's world.

Appreciative Intelligence provides a new answer to what enables successful people to dream up their extraordinary and innovative ideas; why employees, partners, colleagues, investors, and other stakeholders join them on the path to their goals, and how they achieve these goals despite obstacles and challenges. It is not simple optimism. People with appreciative intelligence are realistic and action oriented—they have the ability not just to identify positive potential, but to devise a course of action to take advantage of it. Drawing on their own original research and recent discoveries in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, Thatchenkery and Metzker outline the evidence for appreciative intelligence, detail its specific characteristics, and show how you can develop this skill and use it in your own life and work. They show how the most successful leaders are able to spread appreciative intelligence throughout an organization, and they offer tools and exercises you can use to increase your own level of appreciative intelligence and so become more creative, resilient, successful, and personally fulfilled.

The press-dubbed "Decade of the Woman" has concentrated on political and social achievements of American women. In a quieter, but equally vital arena, women have been wielding their influence in the business world for some time. Yet, their accomplishments go largely unnoticed by the press, robbing the public in general-and aspiring women in particular-of much needed role-models. On Our Own Terms fills the information vacuum by providing a look into the lives of 15 highly successful business women. This book profiles women CEOs and presidents of companies with gross annual revenues of $10 million or more, and gives recognition to women's achievements in business and life. Through personal interviews and intimate photographs, these women business leaders reveal how they broke through the gender barrier to achieve top executive positions, and how they learned to balance personal and work life in the process. All of these women have had to make sacrifices to meet the challenges along their diverse routes to leadership. Rather than relying on the traditional business school model of how to succeed in the workplace, each of these women has invented her own path to success by drawing on the unique resources available to her-from her natural talents, to family values and ethnic heritage. All have relied on their own intuitive and distinctive approaches to business and life, and all have drawn extensively on their instincts and passions. Although their businesses are varied-from railroads to television-their approaches to business have striking similarities. All rely heavily on intuition and a willingness to take risks. In their management styles, they tend to build consensus rather than dictate; they create "families" in an otherwise anonymous organizational environment. And they all emphasize the importance of integrating their businesses into the whole of their lives. Their stories are as varied as their businesses--some climbed the corporate ladder, some inherited businesses, while others founded or bought their companies. Each story offers inspiration and useful advice that can be applied to any career or organization. In On Our Own Terms, these innovative women give candid, down-to-earth advice on issues ranging from employee communications to child day care. They offer useful advice on: o Career planning, o Customer service, o Growing a business, o Managing work and family life, and more. The women selected represent a cross-section of American women in ethnicity, age, geography, and business experience. On Our Own Terms explores the struggles, sacrifices, challenges and triumphs they have experienced on their way to success.

A Company Discovers Its Soul is the engaging story of a year in the life of a fictional, yet true-to-life company as it undergoes profound transformation. Grounded in the author's own experiences in organizations, it is a tale that probes deeply into the "soul issues" of organizational life and offers an inspiring and realistic portrayal of how new principles and concepts evolve in everyday business reality. Randall Hawkes was trained in modern business schools and is CEO of a company founded by his grandfather-a traditional, hierarchical organization that is facing decreasing profits, low morale, and competitors that are taking market share. Recognizing that the managerial techniques he learned in school are now producing dis-ease in himself, his family, his staff, and the organization, Randall becomes convinced that some kind of radical change must be made. Exploring the gradual changes in Randall's own thinking and way of leading the company, A Company Discovers Its Soul illustrates how such a process of change might happen. It shows how-through a combination of humility, courage, rigorous self- and mutual appraisal, and practice-Randall and his staff gradually learn to see the Hawkes Company as a living community. Most important to this change process is Randall's own change in perception and thinking regarding his role in the organization and his notions about control, ownership, information sharing-and the resulting freedom for his staff, and everyone in the organization, to be more powerful and creative. By the end of the first year of this journey, The Hawkes Company staff has become more strongly aligned around their purpose and vision, the management team has truly become a team, relationships with suppliers and customers have been strengthened, and even their work environments have been improved as employees have taken ownership for maintaining their working spaces, and the plant in general. Author Alan Green examines the changes that take place in the lives of the company's top management as they struggle to achieve greater effectiveness previously prevented by their control-oriented, narrowly functional roles. Readers will learn along with Randall as he combines the roles of servant, steward, partner, and leader in an effort to create an organizational culture that fosters creativity, cooperation, and resiliency.

A fundamental transformation-what many are calling a "paradigm shift"-is underway today in our business and work world. This transformation goes beyond the traditional quest for productivity and profit to embrace such issues as achieving more congruence between our spiritual values and our work, creating a more caring and loving workplace, empowering people to unleash their full creativity and vision at work, and recognizing the global and social responsibilities of business. This book brings together fifteen of the foremost visionary thinkers about these new business traditions. These visionaries include leading futurists, such as Willis Harman; authors of important new books, such as Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization; leaders of influential organizations in promoting new paradigm thinking, such as Charles Kiefer, chairman of Innovation Associates; and creators of innovative business and academic programs, such as Michael Ray, developer of the path-breaking Stanford University course on "New Paradigm Business." New Traditions in Business is the first collection in one book of their seminal writings. Part I describes the historical roots and current signs of the transformation o how the new paradigm differs from traditional business practice o the shifts in human consciousness that form the context for the transformation o the role of spiritual values, vision, and community in the new business culture. Part II details specific strategies for business transformation: new leadership roles to build learning organizations o the qualities of truly healthy companies o fostering community in corporations o steps for putting global thinking into practice in business o developing and communicating visionary leadership o creating empowered workplaces oenabling people to tap their full creative powers o keys to practicing ethical behavior in business.

Whatever your position, if you influence change in the lives of those around you, you and engaged in an act of leadership. And if you are a leader in any sense, you are creating a legacy as you live your daily life. Your leadership legacy is the sum total of the difference you make in people's lives, directly and indirectly, formally and informally. Will you consciously craft your legacy or simply leave it up to chance? What can you do to create a positive, empowering legacy that will endure and inspire? Through an insightful parable, Your Leadership Legacy shows how to create a positive, empowering legacy that will endure and inspire. Doug Roman is a brash, thirty-something CEO heir apparent who assumes he will just waltz into the job after the death of the former CEO, his beloved Aunt Nan. But he must first embark on a journey to learn the three le adership imperatives that will prepare him to shape his leadership legacy. Your Leadership Legacy shows that leaving a lasting legacy is about more than just professing values -- you must demonstrate them by the way you live.

The Accidental American calls for a bold new approach to immigration: a free international flow of labor to match globalization’s free flow of capital. After all, corporations are encouraged to move anywhere in the world they can maximize their earnings. People shouldn’t have to risk exploitation, abuse, and even imprisonment when they try to do the same. Activist, journalist, and immigration expert Rinku Sen and organizer Fekkak Mamdouh examine the consequences of this injustice through Mamdouh’s own story. Born in Morocco, he was a waiter and union leader at Windows on the World, a restaurant in the World Trade Center. In the aftermath of September 11th, facing a rising tide of anti-immigrant bias, Mamdouh and others formed the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY) to help their colleagues fight for decent jobs and fair treatment. ROC-NY was able to unite native-born and immigrant workers, helping each group realize they were involved in a common struggle for better working conditions. The organization is now expanding nationwide. Since 9/11, immigrants have increasingly been treated as presumptive criminals. As a counterpoint to these regressive, fundamentally un-American practices, the authors forcefully advocate more humane policies that would ease rather than restrict people’s movements, coupled with proposals for reforming globalization so that both sending and receiving countries can more equitably benefit from a more mobile international labor force. Immigrants enthusiastically contribute much more to our country than their labor. They ought to be welcomed, not marginalized. Citizenship should ultimately be determined by how willing people are to become a part of the social, civic, and political fabric of the country they live in, not by an accident of birth.

In all too many companies, once a business plan is created there is no systematic follow-up. The plan is filed and forgotten until it's time for the annual review-and the result is repeated failure to achieve goals and objectives. Seasoned organizational consultant Michele Bechtell draws on twenty years of experience to describe a straightforward, easy-to-implement, yet powerful set of business review techniques that will transform a traditional static paper plan into a reliable targeting process to produce quantum leaps in performance. Bechtell shows how to: Identify the priority measures requiring continual review, Detect and respond to early warning signs, Accelerate the change process to drive current objectives, Link lessons from one cycle to the next for dramatic results, and much more. Each chapter includes sample forms, tools, and graphics easily customized for your organization. If you are stretching toward a compelling vision, attempting to implement a strategy, or have tried and failed to achieve a desired goal or objective, this book is a must-read. On Target shows that by making business review an ongoing process, rather than an isolated event, you can achieve dramatic results at any level of any organization.

Synthesizes current thinking on knowledge management and intellectual capital and identifies how human resource management can make a value-added contribution As more organizations recognize the importance of intellectual capital and knowledge management to competitive success, you would expect human resources (HR) to move to the forefront of organizational leadership. Yet, to the contrary, HR continues to be criticized for its operational and bureaucratic focus and its inability to keep up with changes in the environment. Human Resource Management in the Knowledge Economy examines how human resource management must change if it is to remain a vital part of the organization. The Lengnick-Halls show how HR departments can move beyond a simple operational focus on attracting, selecting, developing, retaining, and using employees to a more strategic focus on managing human capital and managing knowledge. The book identifies the most important features of the knowledge economy and details four new roles HR must adopt in order to help organizations succeed in this new environment: human capital steward, knowledge facilitator, relationship builder, and rapid deployment specialist. Each of these roles is defined and described in detail using examples from leading-edge businesses. Human Resource Management in the Knowledge Economy describes how human resource management has evolved and continues to evolve to meet the increasing demands of organizations for sources of competitive advantage.

Online Learning Today is an incisive, no-nonsense guide on why, how, when, and where to use e-learning. Shea-Schultz and Fogarty show why an organization should (or should not) implement e-learning, what should and should not be taught online, how to design and deliver it, and where to incorporate it in the organizational structure. Addressing professionals who want to maximize the effectiveness of online learning in their own organization, the authors teach seven key strategies to ensure success. They show how to tailor courses to the needs of the learner; ensure enterprise-wide buy-in; leverage time- and money-saving benefits; get a grip on technology; effectively design course materials so people can and will use them; connect with global participants; and successfully partner across and outside the organization. Online Learning Today offers a unique new perspective on how organizations can truly leverage learning on the Internet.

Through this ingenious, entertaining murder mystery format, The Value Effect helps readers solve a real-world business mystery: why haven't our Next Big Thing efforts worked out as well as we had hoped they would? Renowned customer value and quality guru John Guaspari provides an insightful analysis of why a variety of organizational change initiatives often fall short-what he calls Next Big Things-and offers an effective, dynamic alternative: the Value Effect. In presenting "The Evidence" of the case, Guaspari shows how the Value Effect can in fact provide the organizational alignment and tap into the energy needed to create and sustain organizational change. The Value Effect, he reveals, does not replace the other change methods, but instead creates the underlying context on which any change effort must be founded. Guaspari explains what value really is and provides basic steps for applying the Value Effect. He clearly states the grounding tenets to which a company must fervently adhere to sustain its transformational power, including making customer value the primary focus of the organization, ensuring that everyone knows what is of value to customers, and engaging everyone in delivering value to the customer. In this book, Guaspari shows that the full power of the Value Effect is only unleashed when individuals realize that it is not a Next Big Thing after all. Rather, its power comes from its ability to provide a stable and enduring context to help people and their organizations better understand and deal with change.

In this alternately amusing and appalling exposé of the standardized test industry, fifteen-year veteran Todd Farley describes statisticians who make decisions about students without even looking at their test answers; state education officials willing to change the way tests are scored whenever they don’t like the results; and massive, multi-national, for-profit testing companies who regularly opt for expediency and profit over the altruistic educational goals of teaching and learning. Although there are absurd moments--as when Farley and coworkers had to grade students based on how they described the taste of their favorite food-- the enormous importance of standardized tests in the post “No Child Left Behind” era make this no laughing matter. “This book is dynamite! The nice personal voice makes it utterly accessible and enticing, wholly apart from the terribly important ammunition it provides to those of us in the `testing wars’ at national and local levels.”—Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequities

Karen Phelan is sorry. She really is. She tried to do business by the numbers—the management consultant way—developing measures, optimizing processes, and quantifying performance. The only problem is that businesses are run by people. And people can’t be plugged into formulas or summed up in scorecards. Phelan dissects a whole range of consulting treatments for unhealthy companies and shows why they’re essentially fad diets: superficial would-be fixes that don’t result in lasting improvements and can cause serious damage. With a mix of clear-eyed business analysis, heart-wrenching stories, and hard-won lessons for both consultants and the people who hire them, this book is impossible to put down and impossible to ignore. Karen Phelan and other consultants may have “broken” your company, but she’s eager to make amends.

Whether you’re the new kid in a cubicle, the boss in the executive suite, or self-employed, you have huge potential for greater productivity and fulfillment. Even very high performers in excellent organizations—large and small, for profit and nonprofit—report that 30 to 40 percent of their talent is untapped. Imagine what lies waiting for you. Take Charge of Your Talent details three keys to develop and enjoy your abilities. You’ll discover new ways to identify your aspirations and opportunities, power past obstacles, and translate your intentions into results. Finally, you’ll create a personal brand with enduring career assets that will multiply the payoffs for yourself and your organization.