Organizational Culture

The scenario is all too familiar: a qualified, motivated professional woman does everything she can think of to secure a coveted promotion. After years of investing her time and energy in the company, she is ready to advance. Later, she is shocked and dismayed to find that not only was she passed over, but the successful candidate had fewer qualifications and little to no familiarity with the practical side of the business. What happened?

For over a decade, Jaime Taets, chief vision officer and founder of Keystone Group International, has been the go-to consultant for executive teams hoping to untangle their issues and improve their businesses—profits, strategies, and services—along the way. And throughout that time, Jaime has learned that most business problems are actually people problems. To get at the root cause, leaders must go deeper than the business layer with questions that are rooted in culture and people.

After five years of ground-breaking research, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom share some unexpected answers, gripping stories, and a tapestry of unlikely connections. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: traditional “spiders,” which have a rigid hierarchy and top-down leadership, and revolutionary “starfish,” which rely on the power of peer relationships. The Starfish and the Spider explores what happens when starfish take on spiders (such as the music industry vs. Napster, Kazaa, and the P2P services that followed).

How can we create workplaces where people thrive and love what they do and where they work? Al Lopus, cofounder and CEO of Best Christian Workplaces Institute, has studied hundreds of organizations to discover eight key drivers in companies with healthy cultures and engaged employees. With compelling case studies, behind-the-curtain revelations, and enlightening personal anecdotes, Road to Flourishing will motivate leaders, managers, and their teams to reimagine, reassess, and renew their commitment to building healthy work cultures where everyone can flourish.

Are you looking to build a workplace culture with a certain buzz about it? Where employees are thriving and engagement survey scores are through the roof? Where people from different backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations and identities, ages, and abilities are hired and set up for success? One secret to creating this kind of vibrant and supportive workplace is practicing active allyship.

Where can a person go to learn how to become a better team player? Your choices are definitely limited. John C. Maxwell takes the pain out of knowing what makes a team tick. If you want to have a better team, you have to develop better players. Great team players, like great teams, are formed from the inside out. The qualities Maxwell teaches quickly take you to the heart of teamwork. Anybody can understand them and apply them - whether at home, on the job, at church, or on the ball field.

From the best-selling author of The Little Book of Stress Relief comes the definitive guide to treating - and eliminating - excessive stress in the workplace. Dr. David Posen, a popular speaker and a leading expert on stress mastery, identifies the three biggest problems that contribute to burnout and low productivity: Volume, Velocity, and Abuse. He shares revealing anecdotes and offers clear descriptions of the biology of stress to illustrate how downsizing, economic uncertainty, and technology have made the workplace more toxic than ever.

This book is about one of the most important factors that leads to spectacular performance in organizations. Kim Cameron, a true pioneer in the study of positive leadership, offers validated scientific evidence that all individuals are inherently attracted to and flourish in the presence of positive energy.

Building a fully engaged, energized workforce is the key to business success. The Power of Thanks reveals how leading companies like Intuit, JetBlue Airways, IHG, Symantec, ConAgra Foods, and The Hershey Company empower employees through social recognition, in which the practice of mutual appreciation and trust directs and rewards higher performance. Eric Mosley and Derek Irvine, executives at the world-renowned employee recognition firm Globoforce, explain why social recognition is so powerful and how you can apply it in your company.

We've decided by consensus that consensus is good. In In Defense of Troublemakers, psychologist Charlan Nemeth argues that this principle is completely wrong: left unchallenged, the majority opinion is often biased, unoriginal, or false. It leads planes and markets to crash, causes juries to convict innocent people, and can quite literally make people think blue is green. In the name of comity, we embrace stupidity. We can make better decisions by embracing dissent. Dissent forces us to question the status quo, consider more information, and engage in creative decision-making.

As a global pandemic shuttered schools across the country in 2020, parents found themselves thrust into the role of teacher — in more ways than one. Not only did they take on remote school supervision, but after the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, many also grappled with the responsibility to teach their kids about social justice — with few resources to guide them.

In Freedom Teaching, educator and distinguished anti-racism practitioner Matthew Kincaid delivers a one-stop resource for educators and educational leaders seeking to improve equity and increase the cultural responsiveness of their school. In this book, you'll discover the meaning and fundamentals of anti-racist education and find a roadmap to reducing the impact of systemic racism in your classroom.

Amplifying Indigenous Voices in Business is for organizations and allies who would like to make a positive difference by learning how to amplify Indigenous voices, Indigenize businesses, and support Indigenous entrepreneurship, all in the bigger spirit of reconciliation.

Design offers so much more than an aesthetically pleasing logo or banner, a beautification add-on after the heavy lifting. In Reimagining Design, Kevin Bethune shows how design provides a unique angle on problem-solving—how it can be leveraged strategically to cultivate innovation and anchor multidisciplinary teamwork. As he does so, he describes his journey as a Black professional through corporate America, revealing the power of transformative design, multidisciplinary leaps, and diversity.

Decades of research demonstrates that we often have an over-inflated sense of self and are rarely as good as we believe. Perfectly Confident is the first book to bring together the best psychological and economic studies to explain exactly what confidence is, when it can be helpful, and when it can be destructive in our lives.

Culture Smart! provides essential information, ensuring that you arrive at your destination aware of basic manners, common courtesies, and sensitive issues. These concise guides tell you what to expect, how to behave, and how to establish a rapport with your hosts. This inside knowledge will enable you to steer clear of embarrassing gaffes and mistakes, feel confident in unfamiliar situations, and develop trust, friendships, and successful business relationships.

You see the giant footprints the moment you walk through the door. The conference room is a swirling mess of tension, heaviness, anxiety, and peanut shells. Something is very wrong with your team. Everybody knows it, but nobody is talking about it. It’s obvious there’s an elephant in the room. Is it an Avoidephant, feeding off the fears of retaliation and exclusion? Perhaps it’s a Blamephant—whom we love to feed because it makes us feel better about ourselves. In Don’t Feed the Elephants!, Sarah explores how you can address the true elephant in the room: avoidance.

Most of us are terrified of conflict, says Arnold Mindell, PhD, author of 15 books and internationally recognized for his innovative synthesis of Jungian therapy, dreams, and bodywork. But we needn't be. His burning passion is to create groups and organizations, where everyone looks forward to group processes instead of fearing them. He calls this the deep democracy of open forums, where all voices, thoughts, and feelings are aired freely, especially the ones nobody wants to hear.

Jenn Lim has dedicated her career to helping organizations from name-brand industry leaders to innovative governments build workplace cultures that benefit both their employees and their bottom line, with less employee turnover, greater engagement, and higher profits. Her culture consultancy, Delivering Happiness, demonstrates the profound impact happiness can have on businesses' ability to thrive in our ever-changing times. In this book, she clearly and concretely shows the way the model works in a hyper-connected fast-paced world.

For thousands of years, the Chinese believed that they had created a perfect social system based on Confucian values and tempered by the Mandate of Heaven. Dynasties came and went, but the essence of being Chinese remained essentially unchanged until the 20th century. Since then, change has taken place in Chinese society at an unprecedented speed: the country experienced the turmoil of civil war and revolution and then emerged on to the world stage as a global superpower.