Everything you think you know about presentations is turned on its head in this funny, wise, and immensely useful book. We can't learn to become good presenters if we're terrified of being bad. So, revel in your imperfections and learn what's really important about presenting: being yourself.

“Fear and doubt are the two greatest enemies of high performance in the workplace. This powerful book shows you how to instill more and more courage and confidence in every person, releasing personal potential you didn't know you had available.”
-Brian Tracy, author of Eat That Frog!


The hardest part of a manager's job isn't staying organized, meeting deliverable dates, or staying on budget. It's dealing with people who are too comfortable doing things the way they've always been done and too afraid to do things differently-workers who are, as Bill Treasurer puts it, too “comfeartable.” They fail to exert themselves any more than they have to and make their businesses dangerously safe.

Treasurer, a courage-building pioneer, proposes a bold antidote: courage. He lays out a step-by-step process that treats courage as a skill that can be developed and strengthened. Treasurer differentiates what he calls the Three Buckets of Courage: TRY Courage, having the guts to take initiative; TRUST Courage, being willing to follow the lead of others; and TELL Courage, being honest and assertive with coworkers and bosses.

Aristotle said that courage is the first virtue because it makes all other virtues possible. It's as true in business as it is in life. With more courage, workers gain the confidence to take on harder projects, embrace company changes with more enthusiasm, and extend themselves in ways that will benefit their careers and their company.

Well-intentioned diversity programs are failing to create true workplace equality; Martin Davidson provides a new model for the future that makes "leveraging difference" a critical business strategy, not just politically correct window dressing.

The idea for this book came to Martin Davidson during a disarmingly honest conversation with a CFO he worked with. “Look,” the executive said, clearly troubled. “I know we can get a diverse group of people around the table. But so what? What difference does it really make to getting bottom-line results?”

Answering the “so what?” led Davidson to explore the flaws in how companies typically manage diversity. They don't integrate diversity into their overall business strategy. They focus on differences that have little impact on their business. And often their diversity efforts end up hindering the professional development of the very people they were designed to help.

Davidson explains how what he calls Leveraging Difference™ turns persistent diversity problems into solutions that drive business results. Difference becomes a powerful source of sustainable competitive advantage instead of a distracting mandate handed down from HR.

To begin with, leaders must identify the differences most important to achieving organizational goals, even if the differences aren't the obvious ones. The second challenge is to help employees work together to understand the ways these differences matter to the business. Finally, leaders need to experiment with how to use these relevant differences to get things done. Davidson provides compelling examples of how organizations have tackled each of these challenges.

Ultimately this is a book about leadership. As with any other strategic imperative, leaders need to take an active role-drive rather than just delegate. Successfully leveraging difference can be what distinguishes an ordinary organization from an extraordinary one.

This exposé of the investment world shows how most popular investment strategies are based on confusion and deception and do not work-and reveals the few, simple, low-cost, easy-to-follow strategies that do work.

Most conversations to get things done at work are of one of four types - initiative conversations, conversations for understanding, performance conversations, or conversations for closure - but they are often done poorly or misused. This book shows managers and employees how to use the right conversation at the right time, plan and start each conversation well, and finish each conversation effectively.

“Fear and doubt are the two greatest enemies of high performance in the workplace. This powerful book shows you how to instill more and more courage and confidence in every person, releasing personal potential you didn't know you had available.”
-Brian Tracy, author of Eat That Frog!


The hardest part of a manager's job isn't staying organized, meeting deliverable dates, or staying on budget. It's dealing with people who are too comfortable doing things the way they've always been done and too afraid to do things differently-workers who are, as Bill Treasurer puts it, too “comfeartable.” They fail to exert themselves any more than they have to and make their businesses dangerously safe.

Treasurer, a courage-building pioneer, proposes a bold antidote: courage. He lays out a step-by-step process that treats courage as a skill that can be developed and strengthened. Treasurer differentiates what he calls the Three Buckets of Courage: TRY Courage, having the guts to take initiative; TRUST Courage, being willing to follow the lead of others; and TELL Courage, being honest and assertive with coworkers and bosses.

Aristotle said that courage is the first virtue because it makes all other virtues possible. It's as true in business as it is in life. With more courage, workers gain the confidence to take on harder projects, embrace company changes with more enthusiasm, and extend themselves in ways that will benefit their careers and their company.

A microfinance industry insider offers a shocking account of corruption and betrayal of the poor by an industry supposedly dedicated to doing good. The author is one of the rare field workers who has seen microloans work at the ground level; he concludes that predatory lending and profit pressure are causing most of them to do far more harm than good. This is the sad tale of a good idea gone horribly bad.

Leading thinker and change consultant Peggy Holman provides leaders, trainers, and other agents of change grappling with disruption with a theory of "emergence" and tools for fostering it in organizations.

Tim Mohin argues that environmentalists can do as much good for the earth working "inside" the corporate system as by protesting from the outside. This book outlines how to work in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), either as a new career, of as a leader in a CSR initiative.

Milton Friedman's “financial capitalism” business model, which focuses exclusively on maximizing returns to shareholders, has caused tremendous harm to people, planet, and even profits, argue Mars, Inc., executives Bruno Roche and Jay Jakub. They advocate a detailed, field-tested alternative that takes a broader view and enables businesses to do well while doing good.


For the past fifty years, the business world has been dominated by the Milton Friedman “financial capitalism” economic model, which preaches that it is the “sole social responsibility of business to maximize profit for distribution to shareholders.” This one-dimensional focus represents a grossly incomplete view of reality-businesses need to pay attention to many other factors if they are to thrive and endure-and has resulted in increasing global economic dysfunction, widening inequality, and environmental destruction.

In this new book, Roche and Jakub offer a new model that is built around detailed metrics to measure and track performance in all forms of capital, including social, human, and natural, as well as financial. And this is not simply theory: the model has been extensively field-tested in live business pilots in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. It is delivering superior measurable performance across the different forms of capital, including generating more profit than a profit maximization approach. Recent high-profile books like Capital in the Twenty-First Century have exposed the shortcomings of today's financial capitalism model, but this book goes far beyond by describing a well-developed, proven alternative.

Leaders, coaches, and mentors are charged with helping others to stretch their limits. However, few people enjoy hearing the messy-and sometimes painful-feedback it takes to overcome a personal obstacle. Marcia Reynolds shows how to use the discomfort zone to help others grow, not suffer.

John Perkins's sensational New York Times bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (more than 300,000 sold) revealed just the tip of the iceberg of the secret world of economic hit men and the web of global corruption. Now more economic hit men and investigators tell the whole shocking story.

Based on rigorous research of twenty-three real companies-and the unique practices they are using to encourage innovation and spur growth-DRIVING GROWTH THROUGH INNOVATION by bestselling author Robert Tucker (Managing the Future - over 75,000 copies sold) offers a practical but comprehensive approach for designing and implementing an enterprise-wide innovation strategy.

When leaders learn how to manage the emotions and drama in their organizations, conflict can be made healthier. Nate Regier uses the Drama Triangle Model and the Compassion Cycle to show leaders how to exercise compassion, not passion, and turn the negative energy of conflict into a positive energy for increased productivity and growth.


“Conflict without Casualties fills a gap by showing leaders at any level how to leverage positive conflict. Practical, insightful, challenging, relevant.
-Dan Pink, New York Times bestselling author

Most organizations are terrified of conflict in the workplace, seeing it as a sign of trouble. But Nate Regier says conflict is really just a kind of energy and can be used in positive or negative ways. Handled incorrectly, conflict becomes drama, which is costly to companies, teams, and relationships at all levels. Avoiding, managing, or reducing conflict is a limited alternative. Instead, Regier explores the interpersonal dynamics that perpetuate drama in organizations through a concept called the Drama Triangle and offers an alternative: the Compassion Cycle. The Compassion Cycle allows leaders to balance compassion and accountability, transforming conflict into a growth experience that enables organizations to achieve significant gains in energy, productivity, engagement, and satisfaction in relationships. Provocative and illuminating, the concepts Regier shares will turn conflict from an experience to be avoided into a partner for positive change.

Based on the work of best-selling author Parker Palmer and his Center for Courage & Renewal, this exploration of the inner life of leadership shows how to become a better leader by orienting yourself, your life, and your work toward greater courage, wholeness, and integrity.

Leadership demands courage. This book is about a way of life that names and explores this important resource and shows leaders how to access and draw upon courage in all that they do. It has its roots in the work and thought of Parker J. Palmer, who, over forty years of teaching, speaking, and writing has explored the human spirit--what he has called "the inner landscape"--and its role in life and leadership. The book offers specific practices developed by the Center for Courage & Renewal to build courage in seven key areas: the courage to become self-aware, to answer your calling, to question and be a deep listener, to see both/and and as a whole, to choose wisely, to connect and trust in each other, and to stay in the game...or leave. This book inspires leaders to reach inward to discover and trust in their true self and reach outward to bring their unique self into the world.

THE WAYS WE GO about changing organizations usually don't work, asserts Geoff Bellman. Our underlying assumptions predetermine the results and preclude the broad success we so desperately seek. Change efforts often end up off-track because of small expectations. What is needed are grand expectations, so big that they cannot be realized in many lifetimes. It is only when people awaken to and work toward these immense purposes that they have the chance of finding fulfillment. Organizations are the perfect place to do this-these "beasts" which we create and curse, love and hate, that are so essential to our lives. In The Beauty of the Beast, Bellman shows how we can explore our huge potential and shift our daily organizational focus to one of long life and fulfillment-and in the process redesign our organizations for tomorrow.
Bellman examines why we keep creating these creatures that fall so far short of our dreams for them. He reveals how to recognize the beast in ourselves, showing how organizational control and hierarchy multiply our natural and less constructive inclinations many times over. He points out that the problem is not the existence of organizations but in the ways we imagine them.
Bellman asks us to consider what we want to pass on to future generations, helps us imagine the organizations we would be proud to create, and challenges us to take action from where we are today. He offers twenty renewal assertions to help us in redesigning organizations for tomorrow. These solid guides (with related questions for work groups) open the organization to new possibilities, helping us to embrace the organizational world as it really is while working hard to change it. In the process we will also change ourselves, as we ultimately feel less distant from-and more responsible for-creating those troubling structures we love to vent about.
The Beauty of the Beast. will help people see their daily work in a new and larger perspective. It will help them embrace the real organizational world while they work at renewing it. And it will help people to recognize the choices available to them-and to exercise those choices for positive results.