Books published by Berrett-Koehler

In Your Life Isn't for You, Seth Adam Smith expands on the philosophy outlined in his huge hit blog post Marriage is Not for You, which has received over 30 million hits and has been translated into 20 languages (and counting). In this inspiring, funny, and moving book, Seth shows how his philosophy of living for others can enrich every aspect of your life - just as it has his. Seth writes not as an "expert" but as flawed human being sharing what he's learned - and learned the hard way. He 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 20.It was the love and support Seth experienced in the aftermath, which he so poignantly depicts here, that opened his eyes to the dead end (literally) of selfishness. With a mix of humor, candor, and compassion, he reflects on the experiences in his life - his difficult missionary stint in Russia, his time as a youth leader in the Arizona desert, his marriage, even a children's book his father read to him - which were the seeds from which his conviction grew that the only way you can find your life is to give it away to others.

In this brilliant historical classic, Dan Sisson provides the definitive window into key concepts that have formed the backdrop of our democracy: the nature of revolution, stewardship of power, liberty, and the ever-present danger of factions and tyranny. Most contemporary historians celebrate Jefferson's victory over Adams in 1800 - which Jefferson firmly maintained was "as real a revolution...as that of 1776 - as the beginning of the two-party system, but Sisson believes it is entirely the wrong lesson. Jefferson saw his election as a peaceful revolution by the American people overturning an elitist faction that was stamping out cherished constitutional rights and trying to transform our young democracy into an authoritarian state. If anything, our current two-party system is a repudiation of Jefferson's theory of revolution, and his earnest desire that the people as a whole, not any faction or clique, would triumph in government. Sisson's book makes clear that key ideas of the American Revolution did not reach their full fruition until the "Revolution of 1800," to which we owe the preservation of many of our key rights. With new contributions from the author and Thom Hartmann, this fortieth anniversary edition contains fresh insights and reflections on how Jefferson's vision can help us in our own era of polarization, corruption, government overreach, and gridlock.

As a banker in Silicon Valley in the 80s, and an entrepreneur who founded a number of successful companies beginning in the 90s, Bill Fisher has seen first-hand that raising capital is the most important part of the startup process. Regardless of vision, motivation, and commitment to social responsibility, nothing will happen without capital. But most entrepreneurs continue to make rookie mistakes that stop them before they have a chance to get started.Fisher looks at six traditional steps in the capital-raising process and digs beneath the surface to expose subtle but critical aspects of each - knowledge that, until now, could only come with experience. For example, everyone knows that you need to have a compelling story to raise capital, but compelling for whom? Not for you or your friends or your potential customers, but for investors. So how do you design your pitch to work for them? And while you obviously need investors, they have to be the right investors. You need people who understand your vision and goals, not just whoever is waving the biggest checks.. Based on Fisher's three-day seminars that regularly sell out all over the world, this book offers the kind of capital-raising street smarts no entrepreneur can do without.

Boards That Excel is a different kind of corporate governance book. Author B. Joseph White, a successful businessman, veteran of several boards, and a distinguished academic, argues that boards enable organizations to excel only when the directors go beyond the standard duties of good governance, such as oversight, monitoring, and facilitating strategy. Directors, he says, must see themselves as stewards who have a responsibility to know the organization inside out and make decisions that create value for all stakeholders - customers, shareholders, and society. The goal should be not just quarterly success, but giving the organization the ability to control its destiny over the long term.White provides a comprehensive guide to all the responsibilities of a board member, always informed by this wider perspective. He draws lessons from his 25 years of personal experience-including serving as governance committee chair of an S&P 500 company board and as a director of one of America's largest privately held, family-controlled businesses. He also includes candid interviews with more than a dozen high-performance directors, including General Motors' recently appointed board chair Tim Solso, Siebel Systems founder Tom Siebel, and legendary real estate investor and Equity Residential chairman Sam Zell. Authoritative and disarmingly honest, this is an inspiring call to board members to understand and fully embrace their critically important role.

Jeffrey Ashe draws on his long, distinguished career in international development and his personal experience helping to build savings groups to explain how this simple and powerful approach works. As this book shows, the poor are not too poor to save, there is enough savings potential within a group of twenty to meet most needs, and very small sums can make a big difference. Savings groups are as convenient as meeting under a mango tree in the village, and they are as flexible as the rules group that members design for themselves. They build on existing resources while avoiding the subsidies, debt, dependency, and high costs of other approaches, including microlending.This model has the potential to revolutionize development programs in many other areas, including health, agriculture, education, and even grassroots political empowerment. "Being organized gives us courage," as one saver said. It is their courage translated into action that explains the success of this "in their own hands" approach to development.

Economic inequality has become like the weather: everyone talks about it and nobody does anything about it. Working Assets founder Peter Barnes actually has a plan: a bold effort to break the stalemate over economic policy, lift up our middle class, and make everyone a stakeholder in a cleaner planet. Barnes argues that, thanks to automation, globalization, and winner-take-all capitalism, there will never again be enough high-paying jobs to sustain a large middle class. The only hope lies in non-labor income - that is, in jobs plus something more.Building upon our Declaration of Independence, an essay by Thomas Paine, and a 30-year-old program in Alaska, Barnes proposes paying monthly dividends to every American. This supplemental income would come from the wealth we own together - such as the atmosphere, our ecosystems, and the benefits that flow from our common cultural, social, legal and intellectual heritage. Such dividends would not only keep our economy humming, but can also be designed to make it unprofitable to abuse nature. And Barnes' proposal bypasses the current gridlock between left and right; once set up, the dividend system is purely market-based. This is a truly visionary yet eminently practical solution to a seemingly intractable problem.

The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling that corporations are people eliminated campaign finance restrictions and dramatically increased corporate power. Attorney and activist Jeffrey Clements shows how you can fight back. In this new edition, he describes the growing movement to reverse the ruling - since the first edition 16 states, 160 Congress people, and 500 cities and towns have called for a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. But at the same time he shows the ongoing destructive effects of the ruling - for example, 5% of the population contributed $7 billion in the 2012 Presidential election, and Chevron spent 1.2 million to influence a single local election in a city of 100,000 people. Clements explains the strange history of how the Supreme Court came to embrace a concept that flies in the face of, not only all common sense, but most of American legal history as well. He shows how unfettered corporate rights will impact public health, energy policy, the environment, and the justice system. And, even more importantly, he provides solutions: the text of a Constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United, and a new chapter, Do Something!, that tells stories of the people leading the movement. His book provides tools every American can use to overturn corporate personhood state by state and community by community.

Drawing from their own ten-year partnership and from interviews with women business partners across the world, Betsy Polk and Maggie Chotas have learned something powerful: when women work together they discover a level of shared support, balance, and a freedom to be themselves that is rarely found in other work relationships.Power Through Partnership is a call for women ready to build on their inherent strengths and to collaborate in trust-based professional relationships. Polk and Chotas discuss new research that demonstrates women are actually wired to be better partners than men. They demolish the myths that keep women from collaborating and then walk readers through the potential challenges: finding the best partner, dealing with conflict, facing fears and taking risks, and knowing when to let go of a partnership. Featuring illuminating interviews with women partners in all kinds of industries, this book shows that when women collaborate - combining complementary skills, pushing ego aside and supporting each other - they can work as full equals to achieve something that's exponentially greater than the two alone.

Turn Strategy into Performance!In today's world of rapid, disruptive change, strategy can't be separate from execution - it has to emerge from execution. You have to continually adjust your strategy to fit new realities. But if your organization isn't set up to be fast on its feet, you could easily go the way of Blockbuster or Borders.Laura Stack shows you how to quickly drive strategic initiatives and get great results from your team. Her LEAD Formula outlines the Four Keys to Successful Execution: the ability to Leverage your talent and resources, design an Environment to support an agile culture, create Alignment between strategic priorities and operational activities, and Drive the organization forward quickly. She includes a leadership team assessment, group reading guides, and bonus self-development resources. Stack will equip you with the knowledge, skills, and inspiration to help you hit the ground running!

Ben & Jerry's have always been committed to an insanely ambitious three-part mission: making the world's best ice cream, supporting progressive causes, and sharing the company's success with all stakeholders: employees, suppliers, distributors, customers, cows, everybody. But it hasn't been easy.This is the first book to tell the full, inside story of the inspiring rise, tragic mistakes, devastating fall, determined recovery, and ongoing renewal of one of the most iconic mission-driven companies in the world. No previous book has focused so intently on the challenges presented by staying true to that mission. No other book has explained how the company came to be sold to corporate giant Unilever or how that relationship evolved to allow Ben & Jerry's to pursue its mission on a much larger stage. Journalist Brad Edmondson tells the story with an eye for details, dramatic moments, and memorable characters. He interviewed dozens of key figures, particularly Jeff Furman, who helped Ben and Jerry write their first business plan in 1978 and became chairman of the board in 2010. It's a funny, sad, surprising, and ultimately hopeful story.

Our leadership models are stuck in an Industrial Age, top-down mentality. But in our complex, data-drenched, 24/7 world, there is simply too much information coming from too many different directions too quickly for any one leader or group to stay on top of it. Hierarchy is breaking down everywhere - why should leadership be any different?Inspired by the peer-to-peer model of computing used in social networking and crowdsource technologies, Mila Baker shows a new way to lead. Organizations, she says, must become networks of "equipotent" nodes of power-peer leaders. The job of the leader is now to set the overall goals and direction and optimize the health of that network, not tell it what to do. In these organizations, leadership roles shift rapidly to fit the needs of any given situation. Information flows freely so those who need it can find it easily and act on it immediately. Feedback becomes an organic part of the workflow, enabling rapid course corrections. Baker shows how companies like Gore and Herman Miller have achieved long-term success practicing these principles and provides a structure that any organization can adapt to build flexibility, resiliency, and accountability.

If you are in middle management, to get anything done you must present your ideas to decision makers, and those presentations can be brutal. The stakes are high—one presentation can make or break a career—but the rules are utterly unclear. Tactics and techniques that work well with peers, subordinates, and immediate supervisors can actually work against you when presenting up the chain. Speaking Up is an indispensable resource for anyone who needs to know how to present to those at the highest levels. Psychologist and coach Frederick Gilbert offers revelatory insights into the minds of the men and women at the top—information that is crucial to understanding what they’re looking for from presenters. Based on ten years of research and hundreds of interviews, Speaking Up features extensive comments from executives explaining exactly what they want and don’t want in a presentation and includes nine chapters containing QR codes for free videos on the chapter topics. This is a must-read book for surviving high-stakes meetings.

No More 16-Hour Days! Running your own business—the American dream—can be daunting: long days, none of the freedom you envisioned, no time for family and friends, and the unrelenting pressure to keep up the pace. Worse, all this hard work can only take you so far. To get to the next level, you need to stop being “Super-Employee” and become a leader who sets direction, operationalizes goals, monitors and controls results, and involves others. You need to run your business using an integrated professional management system. Clay Mathile, who grew the Iams Company from $500K to $1 billion in sales, discusses proven management fundamentals applied in a practical way, one that has been used by thousands of business owners. You’ll get real-world details that academic courses don’t teach—true stories from those who, like Mathile, implemented these fundamentals and thrived. Read this book and discover how to make your business more successful and sustainable and your life more fulfilling!

We all want to change something about ourselves: lose weight, quit smoking, improve our finances, and so on. But change is hard, even painful, and it’s our nature to avoid pain. In this inspiring how-to guide, Terry Hawkins provides exactly what we need: a straightforward way to break free of old habits that hold us back and adopt new ones that move us forward. It’s a process Hawkins herself used to rise above poverty, abuse, and serious health problems. Two fictional characters—Pitman and Flipman—demonstrate two possible ways of being. As Pitman, we’re trapped in the Pit of Misery, chained to our past, a helpless victim of circumstance. As the superhero Flipman, we are powerful, courageous, loved, successful, and able to flip negative thoughts and habits into positive ones. Hawkins illustrates precisely what feelings, thoughts, and behaviors send us to the pit and provides a detailed action plan for getting out of it. This wonderfully human and honest book will help you create the life you want once and for all.

A huge part of our economy is invisible, invaluable, and under siege. This is “the commons,” a term that denotes everything we share. Some parts of the commons are gifts of nature: the air and oceans, the web of species, wilderness, and watersheds. Others are the product of human creativity and endeavor: sidewalks and public spaces, the Internet, our languages, cultures, and technologies. Jonathan Rowe illuminates the scale and value of the commons, its symbiotic relationship with the rest of our economy, its importance to our personal and planetary well-being, and how it is threatened by privatization and neglect. He unifies many seemingly disparate struggles—against pollution, excessive development, corporate marketing to children, and more—with the force of this powerful idea. And he calls for new institutions that create a durable balance between the commons and the profit-seeking side of our economy.

Persuade, Don’t Push! Surely you know plenty of people who need to make a change, but despite your most well-intentioned efforts, they resist because people fundamentally fear change. As a salesman, father, friend, and consultant, Rob Jolles knows this scenario all too well. Drawing on his highly successful sales background and decades of research, he lays out a simple, repeatable, predictable, and ethical process that will enable you to lead others to discover for themselves what and why they need to change. Whether you hope to make a sale or improve a relationship, Jolles’s wise advice—illustrated through a bevy of sometimes funny, sometimes moving, always illuminating stories—will help you ensure that changing someone’s mind is never an act of coercion but rather one of caring and compassion.

Your people might be your organization’s greatest assets, but their interactions with one another are what determine the quality and the quantity of their contributions. Few organizations know how to generate the sense of excitement, energy, and shared mission that occurs when people truly join together. This book shows how, describing four simple behavioral keys that fundamentally change how people work together — building greater trust, understanding and collaboration.

Everyone knows that yoga helps reduce stress and increase the body’s flexibility and strength. But the physical aspects barely scratch the surface of yoga’s transformative powers. The poses are only one part of a larger philosophy offering profound insights for confronting the complexities of daily life. Yoga can help you remain centered, compassionate, positive, and sane every hour of the day—especially those between nine and five. This unprecedented guide shows how practicing the full range of yogic concepts—the traditional “Eight Limbs of Yoga”—leads to a productive, creative, and energizing work environment and features examples from professions like law enforcement, teaching, banking, filmmaking, medicine, and many more. But beyond that, this book is an invitation to use all of yoga’s teachings to cultivate the spark of the divine that dwells within each of us.

Every four minutes, over 50 children under the age of five die. In the same four minutes, 2 mothers lose their lives in childbirth. Every year, malaria kills nearly 1.2 million people, despite the fact that it can be prevented with a mosquito net and treated for less than $1.50. Sadly, this list goes on and on. Millions are dying from diseases that we can easily and inexpensively prevent, diagnose, and treat. Why? Because even though we know exactly what people need, we just can’t get it to them. They are dying not because we can’t solve a medical problem but because we can’t solve a logistics problem. In this profoundly important book, Eric G. Bing and Marc J. Epstein lay out a solution: a new kind of bottom-up health care that is delivered at the source. We need microclinics, micropharmacies, and microentrepreneurs located in the remote, hard-to-reach communities they serve. By building a new model that “scales down” to train and incentivize all kinds of health-care providers in their own villages and towns, we can create an army of on-site professionals who can prevent tragedy at a fraction of the cost of top-down bureaucratic programs. Bing and Epstein have seen the model work, and they provide example after example of the extraordinary results it has achieved in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This is a book about taking health care the last mile—sometimes literally—to prevent widespread, unnecessary, and easily avoided death and suffering. Pharmacy on a Bicycle shows how the same forces of innovation and entrepreneurship that work in first-world business cultures can be unleashed to save the lives of millions.

This latest edition of the classic Managers as Mentors is a rapid-fire read that guides leaders in helping associates grow in today’s tumultuous organizations. Thoroughly revised throughout with twelve new chapters, this edition places increased emphasis on the mentor acting as a learning catalyst with the protégé rather than simply handing down knowledge. As with previous editions, a fictional case study of a mentor-protégé relationship runs through the book. But now this is augmented with interviews with six top US CEOs. New chapters cover topics such as the role of mentoring in spurring innovation and mentoring a diverse and dispersed workforce accustomed to interacting digitally. Also new to this edition is the Mentor’s Toolkit, six resources to help in developing the mentor-protégé relationship. This hands-on guide teaches leaders to be the kind of confident coaches integral to learning organizations.

You Deserve Your Success! Joyce Roché rose from humble circumstances to earn an Ivy League MBA and become the first female African-American vice president of Avon, president of a leading hair care company, and CEO of the national nonprofit Girls Inc. But despite these accomplishments, she felt like a fraud. She worked more and more, had less and less of a personal life, and was never able to enjoy her success. In this deeply personal memoir, Roché shares her lifelong struggle with what she now recognizes as “the impostor syndrome,” a condition that plagues successful people in all walks of life. Based on her own experiences and those of top executives from organizations such as Eileen Fisher, Citigroup, BET, Pepsi, and Tupperware, she offers practical advice and valuable coping strategies that can help you embrace your own worth and live a life of joy, zest, and fulfillment.

Leaders struggle every day to have influence, battle stress, and create the future. Each day seems to spawn three problems for every one that gets solved. New initiatives fail, senior managers and investors grow impatient, and direct reports can chafe at feedback. Steven Snyder has a message for junior leaders and CEO's alike - this is all perfectly normal and part of the job. The myth of the perfectly confident, unflappable, and poised leader is just that - a myth. Snyder builds on more than 30 years as an executive, CEO, and academic to provide a blueprint for growing through adversity. He has studied nearly 100 senior executives to distill what really matters most in becoming a great leader. His main takeaway is that the struggle never goes away, and real growth only becomes possible when leaders become willing to learn. Snyder then digs into fifteen key strategies for mastering the art of struggle, from understanding the inevitable tensions, to practicing accountability and emotional centering.To be sure, Snyder does not promise any magic pill or quick fixes - the process of becoming a great leader is a lifetime journey. There may be no perfect leaders - but readers of this book will learn how to achieve greatness in the struggle.

In today's busy world of schedules and information overload, the Forces of Chaos are at an all-time high. Professionals everywhere desperately want to zip through tough tasks, jammed inboxes, and never-ending interruptions - but despite their best efforts they increasingly fall behind and often fail big time. After running in place at work for years like rodents on a wheel, some professionals even tragically morph into hamsters!This is the story of Z - a productivity super hero who helps business hamsters regain their humanity. Using his simple, superhuman-strength, not-so-secret weapon, ZIP! (TM) Tips, Z helps his friend Harold morph back into a human being. A small number of high-impact tech tips, ZIP! is, as Z describes it, lightning in a bottle - a hurricane in a can. ZIP! is rocket fuel for careers and a spa day for the stressed-out soul. And best of all, ZIP! Tips get the hamster in all of us off the wheel once and for all.

Lying in the workplace happens every day. People tell inconsequential lies, substantive lies, little lies, big lies, social lies and malicious lies. They tell lies of omission, lies that obscure facts, and lies that are blatant misrepresentations of the truth. Some lies - "white" lies - smooth the way for workplace interactions ("That's a nice tie you're wearing." "I'd be happy to serve on your committee.") Other lies poison business relationships, destroy employee engagement, and kill workplace productivity. The latter - destructive lies - is what Lies in the Workplace focuses on. This book looks at the high cost of workplace deception (for individuals and for organizations), why people tell lies, and why we tend to believe some liars over others. It examines the role that our own motives, vanities, desires, self-deceptions and rationalizations play in allowing ourselves to be duped. It then covers the verbal and nonverbal cues that you can use to spot a liar at work (an expanded version of Goman's Forbes blog), and urges the reader to be aware of their nonverbal behaviors, so that feeling anxious, introverted, or shy doesn't inadvertently signal untrustworthiness. It ends with insights on how to reduce lies in the workplace.

One insight can change your life, and the next can change your organization or even the world. Everybody has had the occasional insight-this book is a concise guide to simple actions that can help you have more consistent and timely insights. Put the ideas in these pages to good use and you will become a more effective thinker. Fresh ideas will abound. You will make better decisions quickly and confidently, find solutions to longstanding problems, and ultimately enjoy a more effortless and engaging life. The path to finding insights is simple once you know what to look for and how to listen. Kiefer and Constable's Insight Thinking Methods provide a guiding formula and practical steps to increase the frequency, strength, and quality of the insights that you experience each day. This is not a rigid set of rules-it's a creative pursuit. You'll find your own personal, individual approach to developing an insight state of mind and practicing insight listening, while having more insights on the topics that matter to you most. The book is supplemented with free web-based exercises, examples and illustrations (the draft website is at http://just-start.com/insight-thinking-book-landing-page-draft/ password: ArtOfInsight).