Cool Book Of The Day

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Question: Who is the intended audience?
Answer: The employee as well as the leader within all kinds of settings–business, academia, technology, sports, entertainment, arts, non-profit, spiritual, and government.

Q: What is the book about?
A: Imagine the opportunity to talk with 25 of America’s most respected leaders—-people like Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist; Mary Ellen Weber, former NASA astronaut; Susan Anton, Broadway star and actress; Dean Kamen of Segway; and Dipak Jain, dean of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School—-to learn firsthand what makes them so effective in their lives and work. Through our conversations, a new leadership model emerges, one that says there are effective ways to manage organizations and make profits without leaving a sense of humanity at the office door. More and more, at the helm of successful companies, you’ll find a different sort of leader. Collaborators, not controllers, they are “square apples,” bold men and women who dare to create success by reshaping the workplace with our 6 innovative values.

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: We are the co-authors of the pioneering book Values-Based Leadership. Susan has taught leadership skills to audiences ranging from youth organizations to the United Nations. Tom has taught innovation for 27 years at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Authors of 7 books, our research, speeches, seminars, teaching, and pragmatic consulting have made us leading experts in the field of leadership.

Q: How is this book different from other books on this topic?
A: Our new leadership model is guided by 6 critical values: humility, compassion, transparency, inclusiveness, collaboration, and values-based decisiveness.

Q: Is there anything else we should know about this book?
A: “Square apples” symbolically stand for a new way to lead and measure success. Just as former NFL star Chris Zorich’s mother took rotten apples and reshaped them into something edible and appealing, we need to take bruised work environments, cut off the bad spots, and reshape them into dynamic, inclusive, and collaborative organizations

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Question: Who is the intended audience?
Answer: Readers who are willing to invest in their own self-development and personal and professional improvement.

Q: What is the book about?
A: The usual will power and discipline strategies people use to overcome procrastination aren’t sustainable; we try them and then beat ourselves up for not making a complete and permanent change. But there’s another set of strategies – for example: You need to drop your goals… right now and get lots more of the right things done. Learn what the heck a hit man has to do with following through, how to stop taking yes for an answer, and how being “normal” is crushing you… and what to do about it.

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: I’ve helped hundreds of people who have been putting off tasks, goals, and dreams, to achieve them. I’m the author of another book on procrastinaton: Productive Procrastination (Echelon Press, 2007) – and consultant and coach to individuals and organizations, with multiple credentials in my field. I specialize in improving performance and productivity, following through with goals and objectives (the other side of which is procrastination), work/life balance, time and resources mastery, and sustaining effort through challenges. I have internationally recognized programs on time management, getting balanced and organized, saying no, and getting things done. My clients are executives, small business owners, professionals, and corporate organizations like NASA, Sony, Hilton, and Volvo. I was recently quote in TIME magazine as a procrastination “nichepert”.

Q: How is this book different from other books on this topic?
A: Ending Procrastination is much easier than you think…and you’ll be surprised at how you do it! That’s what’s completely different about the system this book is going to teach you. It’s not called radical for nothing! More of what’s in the book:

• The “secret pain” of people who do things immediately – and why you as a procrastinator are better off and much closer to getting things done than you think.
• The story of Jo – whose procrastinating “diversion” from her goals got her exactly what she wanted … and how you can do the same.
• The difference between “want to” and “have to” projects – and how to focus on the right type.

Q: Is there anything else we should know about this book?
A: How many procrastinators does it take to finish a long book on procrastination? None – they’ll finish it next week. That’s why this book is short and sweet, a breezy and entertaining read, printed in easy-to-read font, and will prompt new insights and perspectives on procrastination.

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Question: Who is the intended audience?
Answer: Anybody who works for a living. Its stories support practical principles that can be utilized by managers and their teams and all employees.

Q: What is the book about?
A: Fun Works is about leveraging the “soft science” of organizational development to support and reinforce positive, inspired performance. The book’s powerful perspective concerns the connection between happy, empowered employees, and the cogent and vital principles that underlie how it is successful companies create enthusiastic, passionate, and energized workplaces. The second edition of Fun Works, Creating Places Where People Love to Work, revisits eleven case studies five years after the original research to find that they all have continued to prosper and advance the cause of fun at work. Many of these companies simply out-perform their competition and, nowadays, their high performance cultures exemplify what other companies can do to be more competitive.

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: I don’t think of myself as the best person to write this book. I’m part of a wide spectrum of people who are researching, theorizing, and developing practical methods for the sake of developing innovative, high performance workplaces. This said, I’m the only one who could write this particular book! I’m passionate about the nature of successful companies and have been investigating the relationship between business success and what I term, ‘bringing the whole person to work and the Fun-Work Fusion,’ ever since I noted, in my consulting, how unhappy and (often) conflict-filled workplaces are immensely counter-productive to achievement and success. This is a book about what I’ve learned and what I understand may help companies be more successful. I’ve revamped what already was the most practical and accessible book on this important topic.

Q: How is this book different from other books on this topic?
A: This second edition represents a deepening and evolution of my research and findings. It struck me that the original emphasis on a variety of positive principles and practices coheres into a soft and human science of workplace development. I’ve centered the revision around the idea that real organizational synergy requires just as much attention to the soft science as it does to the ‘hard,’ usually quantitative, conventions of management science. Fun Works, Creating Places Where People Love to Work, is different because it both tightly argues for its research findings while, at the same time, it provides simple and accessible practices that can be tried out and put to the test in any business. I don’t know of another book that puts it all together in one place like Fun Works does!

Q: Is there anything else we should know about this book?
A: When Fun Works first was released it was among a handful of books about viewing employees as whole persons rather than cogs in a hard science driven machine. The global business space is more competitive today, and the cost of finding and hiring personnel has grown. Some companies will churn through employees at great expense and do so in an unforgiving and uncaring manner. But, because anybody who works would rather wake up and run to work rather than drag themselves out of bed and slink off to an unpleasant workplace, it is my mission to point out what successful companies do to inspire people to love to come to work. The Fun Works page on my web site contains an excerpt, comments, and links to what others have said about the book.

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Question: Who is the audience for this book?
Answer: Managers, directors, executives, and students of management.

Q: What is the book about?
A: “Managing Leadership” is an essential guide to help managers, executives, boards, and owners understand that leadership is really an organizational – not an individual – characteristic; it is their job to manage – not express – it.

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: I have been practicing, studying, and teaching organizational leadership for over 3 decades in civilian, governmental, and military
organizations around the world. I have seen organizational leadership at work from all sides in all kinds of organizations; I know what it is, how it works – and how to manage it.

Q: How is this book different from other books on this topic?
A: “Managing Leadership” is the first book to explain leadership in organizations as arising naturally and irresistably from the organizations, themselves, and not from the putative “leaders” at the top. In fact, the efforts of these individuals to represent themselves as the sole, or at least the primary, source of leadership in their organizations at the best reduces the power and force of the leadership actually present – and at the worst generates headline-grabbing catastrophe. “Managing Leadership” explains why this happens, what leadership really is and how it works, and, most importantly, how to manage – not express – it.

Q: Is there anything else we should know about this book?
A: “Managing Leadership” is an award winning book that has garnered wide critical acclaim, and has been referred to as “perhaps the most intelligent work on the subject in recent years.” Visit the author’s blog at http://www.managingleadership.com/blog to learn more.