Are meetings taking over your life? You're not alone. Meet Iris, a sales director so overwhelmed by meetings that she feels like a hamster on a wheel—in fact, she's turned into one. Just in time, she meets a coach—a leading meeting efficiency expert—with a simple system that helps her regain her sanity and humanity.

The coach's secret is a laser-like focus on the five biggest meeting pain points:

1. Meeting overload: Professionals waste twenty-four days a year in useless meetings.

2. Missing success ingredients: ninety percent of all professionals attend meetings that lack a clearly stated objective and agenda.

3. Virtual-meeting chaos: Disinterested participants + endless technical glitches huge amounts of wasted time.

4. Agenda adrift: Goals are missed when meetings veer off course.

5. Action distraction: Incomplete action items result in delayed projects and missed deadlines.

The coach demonstrates that these five challenges are damaging Iris's career and costing the world over a trillion dollars each year. He provides practical new solutions that rapidly transform Iris from victim to victor. These solutions are tailored to the technology-driven world in which Iris lives—she discovers how to use e-calendars, PDAs, and virtual meetings to make her life easier, not more complicated. She applies the solutions, gets immediate results, and reclaims her life. The Hamster Revolution for Meetings focuses on a small number of high-impact best practices that really work. Included is a landmark case study that shows how 3,000 Capital One associates reclaimed ten days per year while improving meeting effectiveness by over 35 percent.

One of the most provocative and revolutionary books written on leadership, business, and organizational design, Stewardship remains just as relevant, even twenty years later, to transforming our organizations for the common good of the wider community.
 
We still face the challenge of fostering ownership and accountability throughout our organizations. Despite all the evidence calling for profound change, most organizations still rely on patriarchy and control as their core form of governance. The result is that they stifle initiative and spirit and alienate people from the work they do. This in the face of an increasing need to find ways to be responsive to customers and the wider community. 
 
Peter Block insists that what is required is a dramatic shift in how we distribute power, privilege, and the control of money. “Stewardship,” he writes, “means giving people at the bottom and the boundaries of the organization choice over how to serve a customer, a citizen, a community. It is the willingness to be accountable for the well-being of the larger organization by operating in service, rather than in control, of those around us.”
 
Block has revised and updated the book throughout, including a new introduction addressing what has changed—and what hasn't—in the twenty years since the book was published and a new chapter on applying stewardship to the common good of the wider community. He covers both the theory of stewardship (in particular how it ameliorates the shortcomings of traditional leadership) and the practice (how it transforms every function and department for the better). And he offers tactical advice as well on gearing up to implement these reforms. 

An authoritative and accessible guide to this foundational form of collaborative decision-making Uses images, stories and step-by-step instructions to teach the basics of circle and explore it’s deeper meanings Written by two pioneers in reviving, standardizing and popularizing circle process More and more organizations are looking for alternatives to rigid, top-down hierarchy. Even the most old-school now realize that good ideas can come from anywhere and that fostering collaboration and group cohesion is vital to any healthy enterprise. But what approach can best create an environment that ensures clear speaking, compassionate listening, and the making of well-grounded decisions? The most ancient one: the circle. The circle was the form of original gathering that taught human beings how to create social patterns. All modern group processes open to collaboration or to flattening the hierarchy are based in some way on circle practices. Here two veteran practitioners offer a comprehensive guide to this foundational form of human interaction The Circle Way lays out the basics of circle conversation based on the original work of the coauthors, who have studied and standardized the essential elements of circle practice and have been implementing them in a variety of organizations for over fifteen years. It opens with a unique visual guide to circle and then presents both structure and story so that readers understand how these elements come into play and how they are interrelated and interactive. Baldwin and Linnea include detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving conflicts. And they delve into the deeper aspects of circle, illuminating the profound transformation the process has on people who participate in it.

Work through your fears by getting fierce!

Fiercely You is a creative, playful approach to the serious problems that women face regarding confidence and risk taking. At a particularly low point in her life, bestselling author Jackie Huba serendipitously stumbled upon the wonderful world of drag queens and was inspired. They were supremely self-assured, utterly fearless, strong, powerful, and unabashedly and completely themselves. Jackie even became a drag queen herself: Lady Trinity. Drawing on her own experiences and interviews with the world's top drag queens, Huba and coauthor Shelly Kronbergs offers five Keys to Fierce that will help readers find the courage to ignore criticism and live the life they truly want to live every day—no wigs or stilettos required.

The media's bias toward stories of conflict, violence, and division is bad for your health. Hal Urban shows how to find the positive and uplifting all around us.

What we eat greatly impacts our physical health. Hal Urban says that we can nourish our minds just like we nourish our bodies by choosing what information we consume. Urban explains why, due to neuroscience as much as economics, the media—left, right, and center—focuses mostly on negative stories. And he describes the psychological toll this takes on our mental health. But he's not suggesting we ignore these stories, just that we vary our diets.

We can find countless signs of progress and acts of kindness all around the world if we know where to look. And there are positive aspects in our own lives—family, friends, beauty, generosity, and progress—that we take for granted. Offering techniques he road tested as a teacher for thirty-six years, Urban helps readers become a conscious consumer of information, balancing sources like food groups.

If, as the late Zig Ziglar put it, “you are what you are . . . because of what has gone into your mind,” then it's in our best interest to choose positive, healthy, and uplifting input whenever possible. Urban shows how to do this with open eyes and an open heart.

Leadership legend and bestselling author Ken Blanchard returns with trust expert and thought leader Randy Conley to present a structured playbook based on the bestselling Simple Truths of Leadership.

The companion playbook to Simple Truths of Leadership expands on the book's 52 essential principles of servant leadership and trust building. This structured playbook provides weekly prompts and exercises to help you track your progress toward your leadership goals. It focuses on one Simple Truth per week and includes:

• A summary of each Simple Truth
• A game plan for using each truth in your workplace, including thought-provoking questions and exercises to challenge your thinking and cause you to consider new ideas about leadership
• A Call to Action to Try It This Week

With so much of today's workforce feeling disengaged from the work they do, it's critical for leaders to move away from self-serving methods and embrace servant leadership to put their followers' needs before their own. And by journaling alongside servant leadership principles, you will be able to turn the common sense behind these simple truths into common practice for you and your organization.