Dan Rockwell

Wall Street Journal Bestseller Publishers Weekly Bestseller Create the company culture of your dreams—and make it last. In every organization, people either love their work or loathe it; they contribute or coast. Your culture can be soul enriching or soul crushing. Your culture gives life or takes it. Your employees care deeply or couldn’t care less. Your organization’s culture can become the most valuable intangible asset you steward. You can build a high performance culture—a place where people and the organization win. But cultures like this don’t just happen overnight—leaders are responsible for fostering them. So, what really contributes to a thriving culture? What can a leader do to make a difference? Mark Miller and his team conducted a global study with more than 6,000 participants from ten countries to find the answers to these questions and more. In Culture Rules, leaders will learn the three simple rules that determine the health, vitality, and sustainability of culture, enabling them to build organizations that uncover untapped potential and transform it into performance. Play the game well and you’ll be astonished by what your organization can become. Culture rules!

Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father’s attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy’s daughter, began a sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich. In The Last Letter: A Father’s Struggle, a Daughter’s Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust, Gordon explores not only her father’s life story, but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents—two Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II. This investigation of her family’s history is grounded in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie Baum, Rudy’s mother and Karen’s grandmother, to Rudy between November 1936 and October 1941. In five parts, Gordon examines pieces of these well-worn, handwritten letters and other archival documents in order to discover what her family experienced during the Nazi period and the psychological impact that reverberated from it in the generations that followed. Part of the Legacies of War series, The Last Letter is a captivating family memoir that spans events from the 1930s and Hitler’s rise to power, through World War II and the Holocaust, to the present-day United States. In recreating the fatal journeys of her grandparents and tracing her father’s efforts to save them an ocean away in America, Gordon discovers the forgotten fragments of her family’s history and a vivid sense of her own Jewish identity. By inviting readers along on this journey, Gordon manages to honor victim and survivor alike and shows subsequent generations—now many years after the tragic events of World War II—what it means to remember.

Thoughtful and rich with advice, The Mentor's Guide explores the critical process of mentoring and presents practical tools for facilitating the experience from beginning to end. Now managers, teachers, and leaders from any career, professional, or educational setting can successfully navigate the learning journey by using the hands-on worksheets and exercises in this unique resource.Readers will learn how to:Assess their readiness to become a mentorEstablish the relationshipSet appropriate goalsMonitor progress and achievementAvoid common pitfallsBring the relationship to a natural conclusion"The greatest gift one can give, other than love, is to help another learn! Every leader who cares about nurturing talent and facilitating excellence will find this book a joy to read and a jewel to share." --Chip R. Bell, author of Managers as Mentors

Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns withanother groundbreaking work, this time to ask: why do some companies thrive inuncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research,buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins andhis colleague Morten Hansen enumerate the principles for building a truly greatenterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous and fast-moving times. This book isclassic Collins: contrarian, data-driven and uplifting.

For newcomers and upper management alike, leadership can be overwhelming and overcomplicated. By building core tenets of leadership around two key words for each chapter, Bill Treasurer simplifies the equation. Congratulations, new leader! You’ve joined the ranks during an exceptionally complicated time. Our current workplace climate is fraught with political divisions, economic disparities, and ever-shifting social dynamics. Leaders are managing remote teams across larger geographic distances and facing new roadblocks to onboarding, giving performance feedback, and nurturing healthy relationships. Leadership Two Words at a Time speaks directly to the plight of the new leader and is divided into three parts: Leading Yourself, Leading People, and Leading Work. Rather than overintellectualize the practice, Bill Treasurer breaks up the concept into essential and understandable learning nuggets—summed up by two-word headers—that provide the practical guidance and support that leaders often don’t get. The result is time-tested wisdom that new leaders can grasp immediately and implement easily—and, with a little practice, master completely. Consider it a personal leadership playbook. This book gives you the basic building blocks to gain both competence and confidence, take on greater responsibility, and learn what it takes to be and stay a leader.

Join in the fun with Sam-I-Am in this iconic Dr. Seuss classic about the joy of trying new things. And don’t miss the Netflix series adaptation! I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am. With unforgettable characters and signature rhymes, Dr. Seuss’s beloved favorite has cemented its place as a children’s classic. Kids will love the terrific tongue twisters as the list of places to enjoy green eggs and ham gets longer and longer...and they might even find themselves craving something new! Beginner Books are fun, funny, and easy to read! Launched by Dr. Seuss in 1957 with the publication of The Cat in the Hat, this beloved early reader series motivates children to read on their own by using simple words with illustrations that give clues to their meaning. Featuring a combination of kid appeal, supportive vocabulary, and bright, cheerful art, Beginner Books will encourage a love of reading in children ages 3–7.

“To say love is what makes a marriage work is like saying it takes oxygen to climb a mountain. Yes, oxygen is necessary. But not sufficient.” From the author of the bestselling Go-Giver series and his wife, a clinically trained therapist, this one-of-a-kind relationship guide shows readers how to unlock a deeply satisfying, abundant relationship based on simple, everyday acts of generosity. In this new narrative, a position has opened up at the top of the multinational giant Rachel’s Famous Coffee, and Tom desperately wants the job. To gain the position, he must first go through a series of interviews with the company’s top executives, including its eccentric CFO, Jeremiah. Tom’s wife, Tess, is facing her own challenges. The couple first met on the job, where Tess was a rising star—until her career was put on hold by the birth of a son with special needs. The trauma and heartbreak of the past six years has put tremendous stress on their marriage. Now, Tess has learned that her best friend Amy is getting a divorce. Could she and Tom be drifting in the same direction? The thought leaves her stomach in knots. But Tom and Tess are about to have a transformational day. Over the next few hours, they will each learn from a wise cast of characters (including some surprise guests from previous Go-Giver stories) about five powerful secrets to building a love that lasts. Over the years since the original book’s publication, the term “go-giver” has become shorthand for a defining set of values that has helped hundreds of thousands of people around the world find greater professional success. Now, with its charming fable-within-a-parable, followed by an in-depth practical guide, The Go-Giver Marriage brings the personal side of The Go-Giver to life.

Escape the mediocrity that ensnares so many in business and become a better, more effective leader. Have you ever wondered what it would take to be a better leader, or achieve your wildest dreams, or make a bigger difference in the world? The answer lies in the choices you make: about everything from how you spend your time to the way you view the world. Smart Leadership is the latest essential business title from internationally bestselling author of Win the Heart and Chess Not Checkers Mark Miller. In this book, he shares the four research-based “smart choices” the best leaders make to scale their influence and results. By teaching you how to Confront Reality, Grow Capacity, Fuel Curiosity, and Create Change, Miller will help you: Bring fresh eyes and fresh thinking to your leadership approach.Increase your confidence in your ability to make a difference.Lead at levels you never thought possible.Accelerate your learning curve so that all these benefits come faster and more naturally. With this guide, your leadership—and your life—will be transformed forever.

Conversations can be critical and destructive, or they can be generative and productive. This book shows how to guarantee your conversations will help people, organizations, and communities flourish. Conversations are at the core of how we interact. We all know that conversations influence us, but we rarely stop to think about how much impact they have on our well-being and our ability to thrive. This book shows how Appreciative Inquiry (AI)--one of the most widely used new approaches for fostering positive change for individuals, groups, organizations, and communities--can help everyone communicate better and flourish in all areas of their lives. Stavros and Torres spell out 2 practices and 5 principles to create great conversations. Each chapter is built around real-life stories of people using these practices and principles to strengthen relationships and generate possibilities for a future that works for everyone.

#1 New York Times Bestseller “THIS. This is the right book for right now. Yes, learning requires focus. But, unlearning and relearning requires much more—it requires choosing courage over comfort. In Think Again, Adam Grant weaves together research and storytelling to help us build the intellectual and emotional muscle we need to stay curious enough about the world to actually change it. I’ve never felt so hopeful about what I don’t know.” —Brené Brown, Ph.D., #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dare to Lead The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential, Originals, and Give and Take examines the critical art of rethinking: learning to question your opinions and open other people's minds, which can position you for excellence at work and wisdom in life Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there's another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos, rather than an opportunity to learn. We surround ourselves with people who agree with our conclusions, when we should be gravitating toward those who challenge our thought process. The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We think too much like preachers defending our sacred beliefs, prosecutors proving the other side wrong, and politicians campaigning for approval--and too little like scientists searching for truth. Intelligence is no cure, and it can even be a curse: being good at thinking can make us worse at rethinking. The brighter we are, the blinder to our own limitations we can become. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people's minds--and our own. As Wharton's top-rated professor and the bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take, he makes it one of his guiding principles to argue like he's right but listen like he's wrong. With bold ideas and rigorous evidence, he investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, bring nuance to charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners. You'll learn how an international debate champion wins arguments, a Black musician persuades white supremacists to abandon hate, a vaccine whisperer convinces concerned parents to immunize their children, and Adam has coaxed Yankees fans to root for the Red Sox. Think Again reveals that we don't have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It's an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don't know is wisdom.

This sixth edition of the number one bestselling employee retention book in the world (over 800,000 copies sold) puts a new emphasis on diversity and inclusion but keeps the same appealing format: twenty-six simple strategies from A to Z. Despite booms and busts, technology advances, talent wars, layoffs, and even a global pandemic, people want what they’ve always wanted. Employees want—and now expect—meaningful work, supportive bosses, regular recognition, and a chance to learn and grow. And managers want their amazing people to stay—for at least a little while longer. For two decades, this Wall Street Journal bestseller—over 800,000 sold—has offered twenty-six simple strategies, from A to Z, that managers can use to address their employees’ real concerns and keep them engaged. The authors have gone over every word of the previous edition, revising, updating, and streamlining. This edition includes a timely focus on diversity and inclusion in every chapter. For example, chapter 6 focuses on family. Different cultures view family responsibilities differently, so the authors address how to take that into consideration when a treasured employee asks for extended leave to care for a grandparent. And a new section called “Conversations That Count” offers discussion questions for sparking deeper conversation around the topics in the book. This new edition will ensure that Love ’Em or Lose ’Em will continue to help managers all over the world create a supportive workplace cultureso they can fight burnout and keep the people they can least afford to lose.

All Great Coaches Are Good Leaders But Not All Good Leaders Are Great CoachesCoach ’Em Way Up teaches readers to exhibit their best thinking, set a great example, assess how you teach, lead with confidence, and mentor others to put them on a path to lasting competitive greatness while becoming great people, too. Based on the teachings of legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, readers get effective leadership strategies for creating a culture of excellence in today’s modern workplace. Simply put, Coach ‘Em Way Up does for readers what John Wooden did for decades: guide you to achieve true successchallenge you to reach extraordinary levels of performanceprepare you to coach yourself and others to be the very bestinspire you to pursue not just greatness but also goodness Make John Wooden a coach and mentor for your future. Allow him to coach you to coach yourself, your team, and business up—all the way up.

In Focus, Psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, author of the #1 international bestseller Emotional Intelligence, offers a groundbreaking look at today’s scarcest resource and the secret to high performance and fulfillment: attention. Combining cutting-edge research with practical findings, Focus delves into the science of attention in all its varieties, presenting a long overdue discussion of this little-noticed and under-rated mental asset. In an era of unstoppable distractions, Goleman persuasively argues that now more than ever we must learn to sharpen focus if we are to survive in a complex world. Goleman boils down attention research into a threesome: inner, other, and outer focus. Drawing on rich case studies from fields as diverse as competitive sports, education, the arts, and business, he shows why high-achievers need all three kinds of focus, and explains how those who rely on Smart Practices—mindfulness meditation, focused preparation and recovery, positive emotions and connections, and mental “prosthetics” that help them improve habits, add new skills, and sustain greatness—excel while others do not.

American opportunity is not dead. Bestselling author and entrepreneur John Hope Bryant outlines the mindset and practices that will allow us to achieve the American Dream, no matter what our current circumstances are. Facing a challenging economy, too many Americans despair of improving their lives. But John Hope Bryant insists that America is still the Land of Opportunity. Up from Nothing revives the forgotten story of the American Dream. It's about our beginnings as a nation of go-getters who believed they were winners before they won. Using the inspiring story of his own rise from humble beginnings, and that of his parents and grandparents, Bryant shows how individually we can change our mindset from survivor to thriver to winner and move beyond just getting by or being financially independent to becoming wildly successful. Collectively, we need to become a nation of winners once again. By ensuring that every stakeholder in America has access to the Five Pillars of Success--massive education, financial literacy, strong family structure, self-esteem, and supportive role models--Bryant shows how we can fulfill the promise of America's greatness. But to do so, we must turn away from distractions--such as political in-fighting or racial and class divisions--and focus on what we can control. This is not a book of tips on how to get a better job or make more money. It's about adopting a new way of thinking that will do all that for us and more. Up from Nothing is the new (old) business plan to keep us winning as a country.

The Innovation Code The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict Harmony is sublime in music but deadly to innovation. The only way to create new, hybrid solutions is to clash. Innovation happens when we bring people with contrasting perspectives and complementary areas of expertise together in one room. We innovate best with people who challenge us, not people who agree with us. It sounds like a recipe for chaos and confusion. But in The Innovation Code, Jeff DeGraff, dubbed the “Dean of Innovation,” and Staney DeGraff introduce a simple framework to explain the ways different kinds of thinkers and leaders can create constructive conflict in any organization. This positive tension produces ingenious solutions that go far beyond “the best of both worlds.” Drawing on their work with nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies, the DeGraffs help you harness the creative energy that arises from opposing viewpoints. They identify four contrasting styles of innovator—the Artist, the Engineer, the Athlete, and the Sage—and include exercises and assessments for building, managing, and embracing the dynamic discord of a team that contains all four. You can also figure out where you fit on the continuum of innovator archetypes. Using vivid examples, The Innovation Code offers four steps to normalize conflict and channel it to develop something completely new. By following these simple steps, you will get breakthrough innovations that are both good for you and your customers. This is a rigorous but highly accessible guide for achieving breakthrough solutions by utilizing the full—and seemingly contradictory—spectrum of innovative thinking.

"Chip Bell's unique perspective, lively illustrations, and practical advice result in one terrific resource for anyone eager to tap a customer's ingenuity for creating breakthrough results." --Jeanne Bliss, founder and CEO, CustomerBliss; and cofounder, Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) Organizations need to offer customers breakthrough products, services, and solutions to effectively compete in today's innovation-hungry economy. The challenge is customers often don't know precisely what they want. As Henry Ford is reputed to have said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." To surprise and awe your customers, Chip Bell advises developing co-creation partnerships with them. Co-creation partnerships are about fulfilling customers' hopes and aspirations, not just their needs and expectations. Co-creation partnerships require (1) curiosity that uncovers insight, (2) grounding that promotes clear focus, (3) discovery that fosters risk-taking, (4) trust that safeguards partnership purity, and (5) passion that inspires energized generosity. Using examples from organizations like McDonald's, DHL, Marriott, Lockheed Martin, Discover Financial, Ultimate Software, and many more, Bell shows how co-creation partnerships enable you to tap into the treasure trove of ideas, ingenuity, and genius-in-the-raw within every customer.

The acclaimed leadership expert offers a proven, research-based method for creating workplaces where everyone performs at the highest level. All high-performance organizations have one thing in common: execution. The men and women who work there sustain performance at seemingly otherworldly levels of precision, accuracy, and consistency. In the fifth and final book of Mark Miller's High-Performance series, he uses his trademark business fable format to show how any organization can cultivate the kind of everyday habits that yield extraordinary results. Miller tells the story of Blake Brown, a CEO who learns essential business leadership lessons from a surprising source: his son's high school football coach. The story is fictional, but the principles and practices are very real, derived from years of research led by a team from Stanford University. Miller and his team interviewed leaders and employees from numerous world-class organizations, including the Navy SEALS, Starbucks, Apple, Southwest Airlines, the Seattle Seahawks, Mayo Clinic, Cirque du Soleil, and more. The lessons learned were then field-tested with over seventy businesses employing over seven thousand people. Miller gives you proven tools to release the untapped potential in your people, create a strong competitive advantage, and win not just on game day but every day.

Build a world-class team culture with proven principles from renowned “Follow My Lead” podcaster and business leader John Eades ***Ranked #1 Best New Management Book to Read in 2019 by Book Authority*** Organizational culture has undergone a seismic shift in the 21st century―and with it, the requirements of leadership. In Building the Best, LearnLoft CEO John Eades takes you on a journey of transformation that will equip you with the tools you need to become the kind of cutting-edge leader today’s workplace so urgently needs. “Leadership is about empowering, inspiring, and serving in order to elevate others over an extended period of time. You are the perfect person to live this out every day.” Eades’s powerful words form the backbone of this groundbreaking guide to cultivating leadership at its highest level. Beginning with the benefits of great leadership―and the drawbacks of bad leadership―Eades offers real-life examples of leaders who elevate others, and how their practices have paid huge dividends. At its core is a carefully balanced blend of “love and discipline”―a guiding principle that helps create high levels of performance by leaning on standards while at the same time caring about the long-term success and well-being of each team member. Through these proven practices, you’ll learn to: • Identify your current leadership style • Rely on the “purpose trifecta” to guide your team • Be a leader who properly leverages the “Acts of Accountability” model • Create a “Maximizing Mantra” to produce energy and results • Develop the skills of others by understanding the “4 Stages of Role Development” Leadership is a journey, not a destination. Building the Best offers a powerful blueprint for embarking on that journey―the first step in taking your team or organization toward true greatness.

You can be the leader you want to be--today and every day. Do you find yourself wishing you had more hours in the day? Do you want to do more, yet feel you just can't add another thing to your plate without being overwhelmed by stress or compromising your health, relationships, and integrity? No doubt, as a leader, there are some days when you feel the flow. You're able to make a difference and achieve big goals. You feel confident and energized. On days like this, you are your best self--the leader you want to be. But on other days, you go down a different, negative path, with pressures and doubts making you feel like a lesser version of yourself. How can you be the leader you want to be, every day? The answer is more than a time-management system or a silver-bullet solution for changing your routines. Leadership expert and coach Amy Jen Su's powerful new book helps readers discover that the answer lies within. By focusing in specific ways on five key leadership elements--Purpose, Process, People, Presence, and Peace--you can increase your time, capacity, energy, and ultimately your impact, with less stress and more equanimity. Drawing on rich and instructive stories of clients, leaders, artists, and athletes, as well as on research by experts, the author brings together the best of both Western management thinking and Eastern philosophy to provide a holistic yet hands-on approach. The Leader You Want to Be is your indispensable guide to tapping into and expanding your leadership capacity so that you can be your best, sustain yourself, and thrive as a leader.

Kevin Kruse knows two things about leadership that most people do not believe: First, leadership is a superpower. Second, almost everything we’ve been taught about leadership is wrong. In Great Leaders Have No Rules, New York Times bestselling author and highly successful entrepreneur Kevin Kruse debunks popular wisdom with ten contrarian principles for better, faster, easier leadership. Grounded in solid research and three decades of entrepreneurial experience, this book has one purpose: to teach you how to be both the boss everyone wants to work for and the high achiever every CEO wants to hire—all without drama, stress, or endless hours in the office Inspired by Kruse's viral article "Why Successful Leaders Don't Have an Open Door Policy," this contrarian approach to leadership reveals why you should throw out the rulebook and instead play favorites, crowd your calendar, tell employees everything (even salaries), stay out of meetings, hide your phone, and more. Kruse makes the case for these principles with engaging real-world stories and case studies, and shows how to use this wisdom to buck the trend and become more effective. He also shares applications beyond the office—at home, in sales, in sports, and more. Ultimately, his advice empowers you to focus on what matters, which is the key to success for you, your employees, and your company.