Rituals Roadmap: The Human Way to Transform Everyday Routines into Workplace Magic


Book Description

#2 Wall Street Journal Bestseller, USA Today Bestseller, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller From the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Bring Your Human to Work comes an indispensable guide to taking your employee engagement to the next level. In Bring Your Human to Work, Erica Keswin laid down the rules and protocols of a human workplace. Now, in Rituals Roadmap, she shows us how to further employee engagement, explaining that workplace rituals foster a sense of belonging and help workers connect with one another and their work. From our morning cup of coffee to the standing Wednesday morning meeting with our team, our lives are steeped in rituals. Rituals Roadmap combines cutting-edge scientific research with examples from the most human companies, like Starbucks, Microsoft, Chipotle and LinkedIn, showing how they establish rituals during meetings, employee onboarding procedures, and daily interactions among coworkers. Whether you choose to pass around a stuffed penguin at your weekly meeting to express gratitude like Aria Finger of DoSomething, or decide to make lunchtime a daily ritual with your team in the same way one top performing team at Douglas Elliman does, rituals create community and change us in a way that conjures lifelong commitments. If you’re serious about employee engagement, Rituals Roadmap is your blueprint for creating a workplace full of engaged, connected employees who drive revenue and stay at their jobs long term.




Bring Your Human to Work: 10 Surefire Ways to Design a Workplace That Is Good for People, Great for Business, and Just Might Change the World


Book Description

WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER The secret to business success? Get REAL and be HUMAN! As human beings, we are built to connect and form relationships. So, it should be no surprise that relationships must also translate into the workplace, where we spend most of our time! Companies that recognize this will retain the most productive, creative, and loyal employees, and invariably seize the competitive edge. The most successful leaders are those who actively form quality relationships with their employees, who honor fundamental human qualities—authenticity, openness, and basic politeness—and apply them day in and day out. Paying attention and genuinely caring about the effects people have on one another other is key to developing a winning culture where people perform at the top of their game and want to work. As a workplace strategist and business coach, Erica Keswin has spent over 20 years working with top business leaders and executives to build successful organizations that honor relationships. Featuring case studies from top brands such as, Lyft, Starbucks, Mogul, and SoulCycle, to name a few, Bring Your Human to Work distills the key practices of the most human companies into applicable advice that any business leader can use to build a “human workplace.” These building blocks include: • Understanding your company’s role in the world, beyond financial profit • Encouraging employees to be healthy in body and spirit • Running your meetings with clear purpose • Making space for face-to-face interaction • Building professional development into company culture • Inspiring your workforce to give back to the community • Simply saying “thank you” A human company is real, genuine, aligned, and true to itself. A real company flaunts its humanity, instead of hiding it. It’s what the most successful, sustainable companies are doing today, and there’s no reason yours can’t be the same. Keswin’s leadership lessons foster fairness, devotion, and joy in the workplace—all critical elements of a successful business. By bringing your human to work, you can design a workplace that is good for people, great for business, and just might change the world.




Rituals for Work


Book Description

Experience the transformative power of creative rituals in the workplace Rituals for Work shows us how creative rituals can make our personal and business lives more meaningful and rewarding. Rituals are powerful tools: they reinforce good habits, motivate personal and professional achievement, create a common bond between co-workers and build shared values; they can transform an organization’s culture and provide a foundation to achieve common goals. Focusing on real-world examples, this book takes a practical approach to the power and benefits of workplace rituals. This insightful guide presents 50 creative rituals, from business and management to design and personal development. Specific case studies highlight the use of rituals and their positive impact to real-world organizations, while vivid visuals allow us to feel their energy and emotion. A ritual is only effective when its purpose is clearly defined. This book goes beyond simple analysis to provide actual recipes for individual rituals designed to promote specific habits, change negative behaviors, and instill values. Each ritual can be adapted to achieve a multitude of goals and tailored to fit your organization or team’s specific needs. ● Change behaviors, form positive habits, and assign meaning to shared goals ● Build shared values, foster innovation, and encourage strong teamwork ● Deal with conflicts effectively and engage others to work on resolutions ● Learn the fundamental concepts of ritual-building and share your knowledge with your team An informative and inspirational resource for executives, managers, team leaders, and employees of every level, Rituals for Work provides a blueprint for building a culture of engagement, innovation, and shared purpose for organizations of all sizes, across industries.




The Ordinary Leader


Book Description

An ordinary leader is someone who leads a small organization or team that is doing great things. They manage the majority of the world’s workforce, but they don’t lead large corporations or big government agencies. Ordinary leaders are rarely written about in books or quoted in magazines. They are, however, important. Maybe not globally, but in their own realm of influence, their leadership makes a difference. The term “ordinary” is also used to highlight the belief that no one ever arrives as a leader. In fact, if someone thinks of themselves as extraordinary, they will not be a very effective leader. Author Randy Grieser presents 10 key insights for building and leading a thriving organization. These are the principles he identifies as instrumental to success as a leader. Writing for leaders everywhere, he inspires, motivates, and explains how to make each insight a reality in your organization. Become a more passionate, productive, and visionary leader by exploring and embracing these 10 insights: Motivation and Employee Engagement: Organizations flourish when employees go beyond what is expected of them. Passion: A passionate, inspired workforce begins with the leader. Vision: Visionary leaders energize and inspire people to work towards a future goal. Self-Awareness: Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is vital for leading any organization. Talent and Team Selection: The right employees must, first and foremost, fit the workplace culture. Organizational Health: Employees are most engaged when leaders are committed to the emotional well-being of everyone. Productivity: Focusing on how and what things get done increases efficiency. Creativity and Innovation: Building processes for innovation puts creativity to work. Delegation: As you free up your time, you will also increase employee engagement. Self-Improvement: Personal development makes all the other principles easier to achieve. Also included are the perspectives of 10 ordinary leaders from a range of professions, survey feedback from over 1,700 leaders and employees, and a resource section that provides detailed guidance and examples for putting these ideas into action.




Applied Empathy


Book Description

Michael Ventura, entrepreneur and CEO of award-winning strategy and design firm Sub Rosa, shares “how to unlock our ability to design solutions, spark innovation, and solve tough challenges with empathy at the center” (Arianna Huffington). Having built his career working with iconic brands and institutions such as General Electric, Google, Nike, Warby Parker, and also The United Nations and the Obama Administration, Michael Ventura offers entrepreneurs and executives a radical new business book and way forward. Empathy is not about being nice. It’s not about pity or sympathy either. It’s about understanding—your consumers, your colleagues, and yourself—and it’s a direct path to powerful leadership. As such, Applied Empathy presents real strategies, based on Sub Rosa’s design work and the popular class Ventura and his team have taught at Princeton University, on how to make lasting connections and evolve your business internally (your employees, culture, and product/services) as well as externally (your brand, consumers, and value). “The most neglected fact in business is we’re all human. Michael Ventura makes a powerful argument that empathy is the secret sauce of 21st century business. The more digital we get, the more empathy we need” (Chip Conley, New York Times bestselling author of Emotional Equation). For leaders of all levels, this groundbreaking guide lays the foundation to establish a diverse, inventive, and driven team that can meet the challenges of today’s ever-evolving marketplace. If you want to connect to the people you work with, you have to understand them first.




The Change Monster


Book Description

A Powerful Look at Corporate Change and Why Mergers, Reorganizations, and Transformations Succeed or Fail “[One of the] best business books of 2001 . . . [a] useful and intelligent tool for coping with the inevitable metamorphoses of business (and life).” —Miami Herald “Provocative imagery . . . useful questions for managers to ask themselves.” —Harvard Business Review “The Change Monster not only talks intelligently about the social dynamics and emotions of people [in change efforts], it does so with wisdom, insight, and practicality.”—Daniel Leemon, executive vice president and chief strategy officer, Charles Schwab Corporation “A practitioner’s primer on revitalization that puts you in the shoes of some who have failed and others who have succeeded. In doing so, Jeanie Daniel Duck graphically delivers her main message to management: Learn to master the emotions and obsessions of those who stand in the way of change, including your own, and once you do, you have your hands on a miraculous engine for change.” —Michael Useem, professor of management and director of the Center for Leadership and Change at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Leadership Moment and Leading Up “Duck is an acute and empathetic observer of the changes erupting in the workplace from the convulsive nature of corporate evolution. . . . Jeanie Duck’s terrific book is a . . . useful and intelligent tool for coping with the inevitable metamorphoses of business (and life). Sensitive but tough, Duck’s compassionate wisdom is street smart without a trace of glibness.” —Miami Herald




7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change


Book Description

Change is difficult but essential—Esther Derby offers seven guidelines for change by attraction, an approach that draws people into the process so that instead of resisting change, they embrace it. Even if you don't have change management in your job description, your job involves change. Change is a given as modern organizations respond to market and technology advances, make improvements, and evolve practices to meet new challenges. This is not a simple process on any level. Often, there is no indisputable right answer, and responding requires trial and error, learning and unlearning. Whatever you choose to do, it will interact with existing policies and structures in unpredictable ways. And there is, quite simply, a natural human resistance to being told to change. Rather than creating more rigorous preconceived plans or imposing change by decree, agile software developer turned organizational change expert Esther Derby offers change by attraction, an approach that is adaptive and responsive and engages people in learning, evolving, and owning the new way. She presents a set of seven heuristics—guides to problem-solving—that empower people to achieve outcomes within broad constraints using their personal ingenuity and creativity. When you work by attraction, you give space and support for people to feel the loss that comes with change and help them see what is valuable about the future you propose. Resistance fades because people feel there is nothing to push against—only something they want to move toward. Derby's approach clears the fog to provide a new way forward that honors people and creates safety for change.




Rules of Play


Book Description

An impassioned look at games and game design that offers the most ambitious framework for understanding them to date. As pop culture, games are as important as film or television—but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games. Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like "play," "design," and "interactivity." They look at games through a series of eighteen "game design schemas," or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance. Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.




The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers


Book Description

The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers is unique in providing, in one volume, an in-depth guide to each of the multiple approaches available for coding qualitative data. In total, 29 different approaches to coding are covered, ranging in complexity from beginner to advanced level and covering the full range of types of qualitative data from interview transcripts to field notes. For each approach profiled, Johnny Saldaña discusses the method’s origins in the professional literature, a description of the method, recommendations for practical applications, and a clearly illustrated example.




The Age of Surveillance Capitalism


Book Description

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.