From beloved bestselling author Parker J. Palmer (Let Your Life Speak) comes a beautiful book of meditations and reflections on eight decades of life, the process of aging, his own spiritual journey (which has never been confined to a creed), and his vocation as a writer and thinker.From beloved bestselling author Parker J. Palmer (Let Your Life Speak) comes a beautiful book of meditations and reflections on eight decades of life, the process of aging, his own spiritual journey (which has never been confined to a creed), and his vocation as a writer and thinker.

On the Brink of Everything is an exploration of Parker Palmer's experience of living and aging, written in hopes of encouraging readers of every age to explore their life course. It is not a "guide to" or "handbook" for "getting old"--something all of us are doing all the time. Instead it's a set of meditations in prose and poetry that turn the prism on the meaning(s) of one's life--and on the importance of staying meaningfully engaged with life until the end. From beginning to end the book is packed with both humor and gravitas.

Too many organizations are overlooking, or even suppressing, their single most powerful source of growth and innovation. And it's right under their noses. The frontline employees who interact directly with your customers, make your products, and provide your services have unparalleled insights into where problems exist and what improvements and new offerings would have the most impact.

In this follow-up to their bestseller Ideas Are Free , Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder show how to align every part of an organization around generating and implementing employee ideas and offer dozens of examples of what a tremendous competitive advantage this can offer. Their advice will enable leaders to build organizations capable of implementing 20, 50, or even 100 ideas per employee per year.

Citing organizations from around the world, they explain what's needed to put together a management team that can lead the type of organization that embraces grassroots ideas and describe the strategies, policies, and practices that enable them. They detail exactly how high-performing idea processes work and how to design one for your organization.
There's constant pressure today to do more with less. But cutting wages and benefits and pushing people to work harder with fewer resources can go only so far. Ironically, the best solution resides with the very people who have been bearing the brunt of these measures. With Robinson and Schroeder's advice, you can unleash a constant stream of great ideas that will strengthen every facet of your organization.

We all know the proverb about teaching someone to fish, but if there are no fish left, knowing how to catch them won't do you any good. And that's the position businesses are in today. Resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and the cost of raw materials is rising dramatically. As a result, scholar and entrepreneur Nadya Zhexembayeva says, businesses need to make resource scarcity—the overfished ocean—their primary strategic consideration, not just a concern for their “green” division.

Overfished Ocean Strategy offers five essential principles for innovating in this new reality. Zhexembayeva shows how businesses can find new opportunities in what were once considered useless by-products, discover resource-conserving efficiencies up and down their value chain, transfer their expertise from physical products to services, and develop ways to rapidly try out and refine these new business models. She fills the book with examples of companies that are already successfully navigating the overfished ocean, from established corporations such as BMW, Microsoft, and Puma to newcomers such as Lush, FLOOW2, and Sourcemap.

The linear, throwaway economy of today—in which we extract resources at one end, create products, and throw them away at the other—is rapidly coming to an end. In every industry, creative minds are learning how to make money by taking this line and turning it into a circle. Nadya Zhexembayeva shows how you can join them and avoid being left high and dry.

What do you do when the biggest threat to your project is your boss? It's not that your boss is out to get you. In fact, bosses generally mean well. But clueless leadership from a well-intentioned boss can sometimes cause more damage than a criminal mastermind tying your project to the railroad tracks.

The Unwritten Rules of Managing Up provides refreshingly practical and candid insight into the best practices and techniques that project managers have successfully used for decades to manage a wide variety of senior-level stakeholders—ranging from perfectly competent and pleasant to downright dysfunctional and inept. 

While managing up is an incredibly valuable skill for virtually any type of boss (not just the difficult ones), the book includes recommendations for managing six particularly challenging—and common—types of senior leaders. They are the bombastic Tornado, who takes over meetings without realizing it; the Wishful Thinker, who regularly asks the impossible; the Clueless Chameleon, who can't quite decide what he or she really wants (but still holds you responsible for delivering it); the MIA Boss, who is just not around enough; the Meddlesome Micromanager, who hovers and insists you complete a task his or her way; and the Naked Emperor, who falls in love with his or her own crazy ideas. Brownlee also offers basic techniques to use with any boss, even a great one.

This book is not just for professionals seeking to enhance their workplace effectiveness but also for senior leaders interested in addressing their blind spots and coaching others toward a more collaborative, results-focused leadership approach.

“Everyone in a hospital leadership role should read this book as it offers a wealth of practical advice for organizations intent on improving their clinical care delivery.”
—Amy C. Edmondson, professor, Harvard Business School, and author of The Fearless Organization

All Americans deserve and should have access to high quality, affordable healthcare services delivered by professionals who have sufficient time and resources to care for them. This book offers proven and practical approaches for redesigning healthcare organizations to be less fragmented—and more patient-centered—by tapping into the experiences of staff on the front lines of patient care.

Peter Lazes and Marie Rudden show how collaboration and active communication among administrators, medical staff, and patients are a core element of a successful organizational change effort. Through case studies and the direct voices and experiences of frontline workers, they explore exactly what it takes to effectively engage staff and providers in improving the patient care shortcomings within their institutions.

This book not only is a manual detailing what can be achieved when frontline staff have a direct voice in controlling their practice environments but was written to show how to accomplish transformative changes in how our hospitals and outpatient clinics work. At a time when the massive gaps in our healthcare systems have been laid bare by the fragmented responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, this book offers hope and a plan for change.

Would you rather get a root canal than face a group of strangers? Does the phrase “working a room” make you want to retreat to yours? Devora Zack, an avowed introvert and successful consultant who gives presentations to thousands of people at dozens of events annually, feels your pain. She found that other networking books assume that to succeed, you have to act like an extrovert. Not at all. There is another way.

Zack politely examines and then smashes to tiny fragments the “dusty old rules” of standard networking advice. She shows how the very traits that make many people hate networking can be harnessed to forge an approach more effective and user-friendly than traditional techniques. This edition adds new material on applying networking principles in personal situations, handling interview questions, following up—what do you do with all those business cards?—and more.

Networking enables you to accomplish the goals that are most important to you. But you can't adopt a style that goes against who you are—and you don't have to. As Zack writes, “You do not succeed by denying your natural temperament; you succeed by working with your strengths.”