Unleash Commitment, Initiative, and Innovation

In their decades of leading groups all over the world, Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff discovered they could get superior results by creating an unconventional approach to leadership. Leaders still need to get everyone aligned around the same goals. But to maximize energy, creativity, and productivity, they gain more by focusing on structure rather than behavior, enabling people to take responsibility and manage themselves. 

Lead More, Control Less describes eight essential skills for establishing a culture of autonomy and self-leadership. Using examples and case studies, Weisbord and Janoff describe how leaders can share responsibility, defuse group conflicts, show everyone the big picture, and more. With this approach, leaders truly gain more control by giving it up.

This enhanced edition features six unique videos created by Seth Adam Smith, in settings ranging from nineteenth century England to medieval Russia, the Arizona desert, the mountains of Alaska, and more.  Seth draws on literature, history, and his personal experiences with extraordinary "ordinary" people to tell stories that vividly illustrate the joys and rewards of a life lived for others. He also explains what it's like to live with a giant head and mean brothers and sisters.

This book expands on the philosophy behind his extraordinarily popular blog post “Marriage Isn't for You”—which received over 30 million hits and has been translated into over twenty languages—and shares how living for others can enrich every aspect of your life, just as it has his. With a mix of humor, candor, and compassion, Seth Adam Smith reveals how, years before his marriage, his self-obsession led to a downward spiral of addiction and depression, culminating in a suicide attempt at the age of twenty. Reflecting on the love and support he experienced in the aftermath, as well as on the lessons he learned from a difficult missionary stint in Russia, his time as a youth leader in the Arizona desert, his marriage, and even a story his father read to him as a child, he shares his deep conviction that the only way you can find your life is to give it away to others.

Make the Right Choice - Enhance Your Ethical Decision Making Skills Today!
Ethical issues arise in all walks of life, but none have implications as far-reaching and serious as those related to public management. Most people working in the public sector want to do the "right" thing, but the issues can be highly complex or just not lend themselves to easy answers. Practical Ethics in Public Administration, Third Edition, provides the tools, techniques, and methods needed to help meet these challenges. This completely updated third edition provides public sector professionals the information they need to face the ethical issues that arise in the course of a day's work, address those issues with greater self-assurance, perform their duties in an ethically justifiable manner, and explain their actions reasonably.
This new edition:
• Covers emerging ethical issues surrounding public-private partnerships
• Examines the shift from compliance-based to integrity-based ethics programs
• Explores the context of moral competency

This master reference is essential if you contract with the government!
Correctly pricing your goods or services—and making certain that those prices are in compliance with myriad federal rules and regulations—is essential to doing business with the government…and ensuring your commercial success. Cost-Based Pricing: A Guide for Government Contractors shows you how to appropriately estimate and price for government contracts and defend those estimates in a government contracting and subcontracting environment. This practical book includes coverage of all government pricing rules and regulations as well as pertinent aspects of related laws, such as the Truth in Negotiations Act.
The book walks you through every step of the estimating process. From figuring direct labor costs to intra-company transfers to contract modifications, the coverage is extensive yet accessible for even those new to the process. Using Cost-Based Pricing, you will be able to:
• Develop more realistic estimates
• Enhance your support of those estimates in negotiations
• Avoid violations of the Truth in Negotiations Act
• Increase your chances of securing a fair and reasonable price
Cost-Based Pricing: A Guide for Government Contractors can make the difference between your success—and profitability—and failure in the federal government arena.

This book is a comprehensive guide to an exciting new approach that managers at any level can use to transform their corners of government.

Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones.

In their six-year, five-country study of seventy-seven government organizations-ranging from small departments to entire states-Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don't work well in the public sector, while practices that are rare in the private sector prove highly effective. The highest performers they studied had attained levels of efficiency that rivaled the best private-sector companies.

Rather than management making the improvements, as is the norm in the private sector, these high-performers focused on front-line-driven improvement, where most of the change activity was led by supervisors and low-level managers who unleashed the creativity and ideas of their employees to improve their operations bit by bit every day.

You'll discover how Denver's Department of Excise and Licenses reduced wait times from an hour and forty minutes to just seven minutes; how the Washington State Patrol garage tripled its productivity and became a national benchmark; how a K8 school in New Brunswick, Canada, boosted the percentage of students reading at the appropriate age level from 22 percent to 78 percent; and much more.

Discover how the questions we ask ourselves and others can either expand our mindsets and open us up to exciting new possibilities or constrict our mindsets and limit our choices for successful change.

Change Your Questions, Change Your Life is an international bestseller that has sold over 400,000 copies in twenty-two languages. People have discovered that, when we're looking for answers, we often forget to take the time to ask the right questions. But, as Dr. Marilee Adams shows, intentionally using questions helps us make wiser choices, find solutions, and transform our personal and professional lives.

Dr. Adams uses a highly engaging fable to illustrate how great results begin with great questions. The book's hero, Ben Knight, learns such breakthrough insights and undergoes a transformative journey. As we read how his coach takes him step by step through the twelve powerful tools of Question Thinking, we also learn how to apply the same information and practical skills in our own lives. At the center of this work is the Choice Map, which provides a simple yet powerful image to predict the likely results of the questions we ask ourselves and others. It tells us how to change our questions and our mindsets for the most rewarding outcomes.

The book contains a new chapter delving into what neuroscience reveals about managing our stresses and fears more effectively using methodssuch as those described in this book. It includes powerful and practical tools that help readers switch from a constricting Judger to an expansive Learner mindset, achieve the results they desire, and foster breakthroughs.