Showing results by publisher "Berrett-Koehler Publishers" in Workplace & Organisational Behaviour

We live, say Edgar and Peter Schein, in a culture of “tell". All too often we tell others what we think they need to know or should do. But whether we are leading or following, what matters most is we get to the truth. We have to develop a commitment to sharing vital facts and identifying faulty assumptions - it can mean the difference between success and failure. This is why we need Humble Inquiry more than ever.  

This audiobook is a practical guide that shows how leaders can build psychological safety in their organizations, creating an environment where employees feel included, fully engaged, and encouraged to contribute their best efforts and ideas. Perhaps, the leader’s most challenging task is to increase intellectual friction while decreasing social friction. 

With staffs that are collectively larger than the Russian army and combined revenues of over $130 billion a year, the Big Four accounting firms - Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG - are a keystone of global commerce. But leading scholar Ian Gow and award-winning author Stuart Kells warn that a house of cards may be about to fall. This account of the past, present, and likely future of the Big Four is essential listening for anyone perplexed or fascinated by professional services.

New edition, expanded and updated. With the release of Theory U almost 10 years ago, Otto Scharmer set in motion a revolution in thought. Scharmer explained that what we pay attention to and how we pay attention is key to what we create. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of and in touch with the inner place from which attention and intention originate.

With its vivid stories and conversational tone, Boards That Excel is like sitting down with an astute and experienced friend - one who's passionate about what corporate and nonprofit boards can do when they set high aspirations, are clear on purpose, and do the right things in the right way.

Filled with practical advice and lessons, and backed by extensive research by Gentry and others, this book lays out the art, science, and practice behind learning and leading as a first time manager. Through first-hand accounts, stories, and other examples drawn from the experiences of first-time managers - including Gentry's own story of recently become a first-time manager himself - the book's practical, actionable content helps readers flip the old script, and write and live their new script.

Human beings have been organizing to accomplish work for as long as we’ve existed. So why is organizational behavior still so elusive and mysterious? In this book, one of the greatest scholars in his field reframes his career’s work around the seven forces that drive all organizations. Mintzberg identifies them as efficiency, proficiency, consolidation, collaboration, culture, division, and conflict.

This book is about one of the most important factors that leads to spectacular performance in organizations. Kim Cameron, a true pioneer in the study of positive leadership, offers validated scientific evidence that all individuals are inherently attracted to and flourish in the presence of positive energy.

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.

We’ve all had those perfect moments when events that could never be predicted, let alone controlled, remarkably seem to guide us along our path. Carl Jung called this phenomena “synchronicity” - “a collaboration between persons and events that seems to enlist the cooperation of fate.” In this book, Joseph Jaworski argues that the right state of mind will make you the kind of person who can enlist the cooperation of fate and take advantage of synchronicity, creating the conditions for “predictable miracles.”

This book is a guide for leaders seeking to build a community, to strengthen the community they already have, or who may not think of themselves as community leaders but who are envisioning a group they hope to create. These communities can be formal, with official memberships and administrations, or informal, tied by shared values and commitments.

Hierarchy in organizations is obsolete. There is a better way: one that increases the engagement of employees and managers alike, reduces micromanaging and other limiting approaches, and promotes organizational and individual success. In this book, self-management expert Samantha Slade presents seven concrete practices to help your organization flatten its existing hierarchy and develop a horizontal organization. The result will be enhanced creativity, greater growth, and an increased employee retention and productivity - and a better bottom line.

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.

Nobody likes cold calls. And nobody really needs to make them. The Referral of a Lifetime teaches a step-by-step system that will allow anyone to generate a steady stream of new business through consistent referrals from existing customers and friends and, at the same time, maximize business with existing customers.

Too many people associate creativity solely with the arts, even though to be an incredible scientist, engineer, or entrepreneur requires immense creativity. Combining creativity tools and techniques with real-world stories of innovative people and businesses, this audiobook is a provocation, an inspiration, and an invitation to unleash the innate creativity that lies within each of us. It offers a more dynamic and integrative way to adapt and innovate, one that allows us the freedom to access our full human selves.

Helping is a fundamental human activity, but it can also be a frustrating one. All too often, to our bewilderment, our sincere offers of help are resented, resisted, or refused - and we often react the same way when people try to help us. Why is it so difficult to provide or accept help? How can we make the whole process easier?

Part memoir and part career guide, this book gives introverts the tools to understand how they can form relationships, excel in cross-cultural workplaces, and navigate extroverted settings without compromising comfort or personality.

Written by the originators and leaders of the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) movement itself, this short, practical audio guide offers an approach to organizational change based on the possibility of a more desirable future, experience with the whole system, and activities that signal "something different is happening this time." That difference systematically taps the potential of human beings to make themselves, their organizations, and their communities more adaptive and more effective.

Without trust, people and businesses fail. Trusted Leader provides a framework for building trust so that you and your organizations can perform at your best. “A lack of trust is your biggest expense", says Wall Street Journal best-selling author David Horsager. Without trust, transactions cannot occur. Without trust, influence is destroyed. Without trust, leaders lose their people. Horsager introduces listeners to his eight pillars of trust through the journey of a senior leader who thought success was certain.

This book offers a concise, accessible guide to the key concepts and applications in Otto Scharmer's classic Theory U. Scharmer argues that our capacity to pay attention coshapes the world. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of that interior condition from which our attention and actions originate. Scharmer calls this lack of awareness our blind spot. He illuminates the blind spot in leadership today and offers hands-on methods to help change makers overcome it through the process, principles, and practices of Theory U.