Johnny C. Taylor

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

District of Columbia

A Leader's Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval

From the CEO and President of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) comes the ultimate book on transforming the way we select, retain and train our employees in a radically changed business environment. With the growth of remote work and an increased focus on diversity and inclusion, companies are increasingly finding themselves in "wars for talent" as they source and recruit candidates from all over the world. They need to find new ways to contact people and new sources of talent. They need to create an enduring and tangible culture that helps everyone feel empowered to do their best work. And they need to develop inclusive organizations that leverage differences for growth and innovation. Informed by more than 70 years of experience and expertise and propelled by extensive original SHRM research, Reset delivers a candid and forward-thinking vision for leaders to reimagine their company cultures in a time of global upheaval. Part call to action, part strategic roadmap, Reset challenges business leaders' underlying assumptions about workers and the workplace, delivers practical strategies for finding and keeping the talent needed to make businesses successful, and introduces dynamic tools to sustain that success over the long haul. Now is the time for leaders to completely reimagine, reorganize, and Reset their operations to create a more daring, resilient and sustainable future. This is the book that will guide them exactly when they most need it.

Reset

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Daniel Coyle

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

"Coyle spent three years researching the question of what makes a successful group tick, visiting some of the world's most productive groups--including Pixar, Navy SEALs, Zappos, IDEO, and the San Antonio Spurs. Coyle discovered that high-performing groups ... generate three key messages that enable them to excel: 1. Safety (we are connected), 2. Shared risk (we are vulnerable together), 3. Purpose (we are part of the same story)"--

The Culture Code

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Daniel M. Cable

The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do

Part I. The seeking system: Introduction: our organizations are letting us down -- The way things ought to be -- The way things are - and how to make them better -- Part II. Self expression: Encouraging people to bring their best selves to work -- Promoting self-expression -- Part III. Experimentation: Encouraging serious play -- Expanding on freedom and creativity -- Humble leadership and employees' seeking systems -- Part IV. Purpose: Helping employees see the impact of their work -- Creating narratives about purpose

Alive at Work

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Adam Harris

Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal--And How to Set Them Right

"A book that both taught me so much and also kept me on the edge of my seat. It is an invaluable text from a supremely talented writer." --Clint Smith, author of How the Word is Passed

The definitive history of the pervasiveness of racial inequality in American higher education

America's colleges and universities have a shameful secret: they have never given Black people a fair chance to succeed. From its inception, our higher education system was not built on equality or accessibility, but on educating--and prioritizing--white students. Black students have always been an afterthought. While governments and private donors funnel money into majority white schools, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and other institutions that have high enrollments of Black students, are struggling to survive, with state legislatures siphoning away federal funds that are legally owed to these schools. In The State Must Provide, Adam Harris reckons with the history of a higher education system that has systematically excluded Black people from its benefits.

Harris weaves through the legal, social, and political obstacles erected to block equitable education in the United States, studying the Black Americans who fought their way to an education, pivotal Supreme Court cases like Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, and the government's role in creating and upholding a segregated education system. He explores the role that Civil War-era legislation intended to bring agricultural education to the masses had in creating the HBCUs that have played such a major part in educating Black students when other state and private institutions refused to accept them.

The State Must Provide is the definitive chronicle of higher education's failed attempts at equality and the long road still in front of us to remedy centuries of racial discrimination--and poses a daring solution to help solve the underfunding of HBCUs. Told through a vivid cast of characters, The State Must Provide examines what happened before and after schools were supposedly integrated in the twentieth century, and why higher education remains broken to this day. 

The State Must Provide

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Carol Anderson

Dick Durbin

How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

Long-listed for the National Book Award in Nonfiction From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, the startling--and timely--history of voter suppression in America, with a foreword by Senator Dick Durbin. In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice. Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans as the nation gears up for the 2018 midterm elections.

One Person, No Vote

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Safi Bahcall

How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

What do James Bond and Lipitor have in common? Why do traffic jams appear out of nowhere on highways? What can we learn about innovation from a glass of water? In Loonshots, physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior and the challenges of nurturing radical breakthroughs.Drawing on the science of phase transitions, Bahcall shows why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing wild new ideas to rigidly rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice. Oceans of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice.Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how this new kind of science helps us understand the fate of companies and empires. Loonshots distills these insights into lessons for creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries everywhere.Over the past decade, researchers have been applying the tools and techniques of phase transitions to understand how birds flock, fish swim, brains work, people vote, criminals behave, ideas spread, diseases erupt, and ecosystems collapse. If twentieth-century science was shaped by the search for fundamental laws, like quantum mechanics and gravity, the twenty-first will be shaped by this new kind of science. Loonshots is the first to apply this science to help all of us unlock our potential to create and nurture the crazy ideas that change the world.

Loonshots

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Evan Osnos

The Making of America's Fury

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

After a decade abroad, the National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Evan Osnos returns to three places he has lived in the United States--Greenwich, CT; Clarksburg, WV; and Chicago, IL--to illuminate the origins of America's political fury.

Evan Osnos moved to Washington, D.C., in 2013 after a decade away from the United States, first reporting from the Middle East before becoming the Beijing bureau chief at the Chicago Tribune and then the China correspondent for The New Yorker. While abroad, he often found himself making a case for America, urging the citizens of Egypt, Iraq, or China to trust that even though America had made grave mistakes throughout its history, it aspired to some foundational moral commitments: the rule of law, the power of truth, the right of equal opportunity for all. But when he returned to the United States, he found each of these principles under assault.

In search of an explanation for the crisis that reached an unsettling crescendo in 2020--a year of pandemic, civil unrest, and political turmoil--he focused on three places he knew firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois. Reported over the course of six years, Wildland follows ordinary individuals as they navigate the varied landscapes of twenty-first-century America. Through their powerful, often poignant stories, Osnos traces the sources of America's political dissolution. He finds answers in the rightward shift of the financial elite in Greenwich, in the collapse of social infrastructure and possibility in Clarksburg, and in the compounded effects of segregation and violence in Chicago. The truth about the state of the nation may be found not in the slogans of political leaders but in the intricate details of individual lives, and in the hidden connections between them. As Wildland weaves in and out of these personal stories, events in Washington occasionally intrude, like flames licking up on the horizon.

A dramatic, prescient examination of seismic changes in American politics and culture, Wildland is the story of a crucible, a period bounded by two shocks to America's psyche, two assaults on the country's sense of itself: the attacks of September 11 in 2001 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Following the lives of everyday Americans in three cities and across two decades, Osnos illuminates the country in a startling light, revealing how we lost the moral confidence to see ourselves as larger than the sum of our parts.

Wildland

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John A. White

Reflections on Practical Leadership

Teachers are Leaders and Leaders are Teachers In Why It Matters, John A. White draws on a wealth of expertise acquired across his six-decade career as a corporate leader, chancellor, dean, educator, engineer, and consultant to create a thorough and thought-provoking treatise on leadership philosophy. Based in part on Leadership Practices and Principles, the award-winning course he designed and taught at the University of Arkansas, Why It Matters brilliantly weaves Dr. White's inspiring personal story and observations on leadership with a treasure trove of leadership philosophy from some of the nation's most respected corporate, military, and political leaders. After stepping down as chancellor of the University of Arkansas, Dr. White was encouraged by faculty colleagues to offer a course on leadership. Though he'd been an engineering educator for forty-five years by then and had never taught a course that wasn't based on equations, he was intrigued by the idea of sharing his leadership journey with students. For the following nine years, Dr. White taught Leadership Practices and Principles to seniors and graduate students from every discipline, introducing them to fifteen guest leaders over the course of each semester and holding in-depth, frank, and often emotional conversations about the challenges, joys, heartbreaks, and diversity of approaches to successful leadership. Dr. White recounts dozens of these conversations in Why It Matters while reflecting on his own leadership journey in business, government, nonprofit organizations, and universities. Drawing on numerous challenging leadership experiences while serving on six boards of directors for publicly traded companies and leading the University of Arkansas, Georgia Tech's engineering college, National Science Foundation's engineering directorate, and numerous professional associations, he provides practical guidance on navigating your leadership journey. Why It Matters is required reading for current and aspiring leaders alike, as well as anyone with an interest in a plainspoken and truly comprehensive compendium of leadership thought and philosophy.

Why It Matters

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James Comey

Truth, Transparency, and Trust

James Comey, former FBI Director and New York Times bestselling author of A Higher Loyalty, uses his long career in federal law enforcement to explore issues of justice and fairness in the US justice system. James Comey might best be known as the FBI director that Donald Trump fired in 2017, but he’s had a long, varied career in the law and justice system. He knows better than most just what a force for good the US justice system can be, and how far afield it has strayed during the Trump Presidency. In his much-anticipated follow-up to A Higher Loyalty, Comey uses anecdotes and lessons from his career to show how the federal justice system works. From prosecuting mobsters as an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York in the 1980s to grappling with the legalities of anti-terrorism work as the Deputy Attorney General in the early 2000s to, of course, his tumultuous stint as FBI director beginning in 2013, Comey shows just how essential it is to pursue the primacy of truth for federal law enforcement. Saving Justice is gracefully written and honestly told, a clarion call for a return to fairness and equity in the law.

Saving Justice

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Tim Bakken

Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure in the U. S. Military

A courageous and damning look at the destruction wrought by the arrogance, incompetence, and duplicity prevalent in the U.S. military—from the inside perspective of a West Point professor of law.

The Cost of Loyalty

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Fiona Hill

Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

A celebrated foreign policy expert and key impeachment witness reveals how declining opportunity has set America on the grim path of modern Russia--and draws on her personal journey out of poverty, and her unique perspectives as an historian and policy maker, to show how we can return hope to our forgotten places.

There Is Nothing for You Here

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Nicole Perlroth

The Cyberweapons Arms Race

Describes the dark market that pits nation states, defense contractors, cybercrimes and security defenders against each other for a "zero day" computer bug.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

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Alaa Garad

Jeff Gold

How to Develop an Organizational Learning Ecosystem

Drawing upon original academic research and in-depth case studies, this is a comprehensive guide to developing a culture of learning and education within your business.

The Learning-Driven Business

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Note and signature from previous owner on first blank page of book

The Talent Code

Bill Burnett

Dave Evans

How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work

The authors of #1 New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life taught readers how to use design thinking to build meaningful, fulfilling lives. Now, in the original DESIGNING YOUR WORK LIFE, they apply that transformative thinking to the place we spend more time than anywhere else—work—and show readers how to create the job they want, without necessarily leaving the job they already have. Designing Your Work Life teaches readers how to create the job they want—without necessarily leaving the job they already have. “Increasingly, it’s up to workers to define their own happiness and success in this ever-moving landscape,” they write, and chapter by chapter, they demonstrate how to build positive change, wherever you are in your career. Whether you want to stay in your job and make it a more meaningful experience, or if you decide it’s time to move on, Evans and Burnett show you how to visualize and build a work-life that is productive, engaged, meaningful, and more fun.

Designing Your Work Life

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Dan Heath

The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen

New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath explores how to prevent problems before they happen, drawing on insights from hundreds of interviews with unconventional problem solvers. So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of response. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems. Cops chase robbers, doctors treat patients with chronic illnesses, and call-center reps address customer complaints. But many crimes, chronic illnesses, and customer complaints are preventable. So why do our efforts skew so heavily toward reaction rather than prevention? Upstream probes the psychological forces that push us downstream—including “problem blindness,” which can leave us oblivious to serious problems in our midst. And Heath introduces us to the thinkers who have overcome these obstacles and scored massive victories by switching to an upstream mindset. One online travel website prevented twenty million customer service calls every year by making some simple tweaks to its booking system. A major urban school district cut its dropout rate in half after it figured out that it could predict which students would drop out—as early as the ninth grade. A European nation almost eliminated teenage alcohol and drug abuse by deliberately changing the nation’s culture. And one EMS system accelerated the emergency-response time of its ambulances by using data to predict where 911 calls would emerge—and forward-deploying its ambulances to stand by in those areas. Upstream delivers practical solutions for preventing problems rather than reacting to them. How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because we’ve forgotten that we can fix them?

Upstream

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Gary Hamel

Michele Zanini

Creating Organizations As Amazing As the People Inside Them

A Wall Street Journal Bestseller

In a world of unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges, we need organizations that are resilient and daring.

Unfortunately, most organizations, overburdened by bureaucracy, are sluggish and timid. In the age of upheaval, top-down power structures and rule-choked management systems are a liability. They crush creativity and stifle initiative. As leaders, employees, investors, and citizens, we deserve better. We need organizations that are bold, entrepreneurial, and as nimble as change itself. Hence this book.

In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for excising bureaucracy and replacing it with something better. Drawing on more than a decade of research and packed with practical examples, Humanocracy lays out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings inside them.

Critical building blocks include:

Motivation: Rallying colleagues to the challenge of busting bureaucracy
Models: Leveraging the experience of organizations that have profitably challenged the bureaucratic status quo
Mindsets: Escaping the industrial age thinking that frustrates progress
Mobilization: Activating a pro-change coalition to hack outmoded management systems and processes
Migration: Embedding the principles of humanocracy--ownership, markets, meritocracy, community, openness, experimentation, and paradox--in your organization's DNA

If you've finally run out of patience with bureaucratic bullshit . . .
If you want to build an organization that can outrun change . . .
If you're committed to giving every team member the chance to learn, grow, and contribute . . .
. . . then this book's for you.

Whatever your role or title, Humanocracy will show you how to launch an unstoppable movement to equip and empower everyone in your organization to be their best and to do their best. The ultimate prize: an organization that's fit for the future and fit for human beings.

Humanocracy

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Whitney Johnson

How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company

A Wall Street Journal bestseller

Named one of 10 Best New Management Books for 2022 by Thinkers50

Creating a culture of learning and growth.

Growth is the goal. Helping people develop their potential--enabling them to articulate and become the self they want to be, are capable of being, and that best serves them and others in the short and long term--is what we as individuals and leaders strive toward.

But how do we grow? It turns out it happens in a predictable way, which means we can understand where we are in our growth and chart a way forward. In this compact, complete guide, Whitney Johnson dives more deeply than ever into the S Curve of Learning so that you can envision how growth happens and direct yourself and others in your organization to create a culture that fosters it.

The growth and learning journey comes in three phases: the Launch Point, the Sweet Spot, and Mastery. Compelling examples of successful people will show you when and why growth is slow, how to keep going, what to do when growth and learning are almost too fast to keep up with, and how to leap from one growth journey to another.

As individuals grow, so do organizations and societies. Growth is learning put into action--action that betters the world as we better ourselves and our small niches, both personal and professional, within it. Growth occurs when learning is internalized--when we try something new and invest the effort to move it from being something we do to something we are.

Smart Growth

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Luma Mufleh

One Woman's Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children

A visionary leader's story of the nation's first school network for refugee children--a moving blueprint for change that will inspire schools and communities across America Luma Mufleh's compelling story begins when she--a Muslim woman, a gay refugee from hyper-conservative Jordan--joins a pick-up game of soccer in Clarkston, Georgia. One player, 12-year-old Oosman, from war-torn Liberia, is a talented goalie with missing fingers, courtesy of the Taliban. Lewis, an 11-year-old refugee from Sudan, has attended local schools for several years. To the surprise of Mufleh, a graduate of elite Smith College still traumatized by her own struggles to assimilate, few of the players can read a word. She asks, "Where was the America that had taken me in? That protected me? How could I get these kids to that America?" For readers of Malala, Tara Westover, Paul Tough, and Bryan Stevenson, Learning America is the moving and insight-packed story of how a soccer team grew into a nationally acclaimed network of schools--by honing laser-like on what traumatized students need in order to learn. Fugees accepts only those most in need: students recruit other students, and all share a background of war, poverty, and trauma. No student passes a grade without earning it; the failure of any student is the responsibility of all. Most foundational, everyone takes art and music and everyone plays soccer, areas where students make the leaps that can and must happen--as this gifted educator convinces--even for America's most left-behind.

Learning America

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Don A. Moore

Max H. Bazerman

Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

"Leadership doesn't look like it used to. Expanding on the lessons learned from Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein's best-selling Nudge, this book brings together research from the behavioral sciences to demonstrate how effective leadership works. While leaders have historically been lauded for their own behaviors, attributes, and decisions, this approach ignores the leader's mission to empower others. Don A. Moore and Max H. Bazerman show how effective leadership enables everyone, not just the leader, to make wise, ethical decisions consistent with their highest values. As a result, a leader's impact becomes greater because it ripples out instead of relying heavily on him or her to play the part of heroic figure. Filled with real-life stories and examples of the structures, incentives, and systems that successful leaders have used to equip others to make decisions, this study also includes cautionary tales of the consequences of ignoring these practices"--

Decision Leadership

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Mariana Mazzucato

Rosie Collington

How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies

A vital and timely investigation into the opaque and powerful consulting industry--and what to do about it

There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today that must change. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies' reliance on companies such as McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown.

The "Big Con" describes the confidence trick the consulting industry performs in contracts with hollowed-out and risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. It grew from the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of reforms by the neoliberal right and Third Way progressives, and it thrives on the ills of modern capitalism, from financialization and privatization to the climate crisis. It is possible because of the unique power that big consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks--as advisors, legitimators, and outsourcers--and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. In the end, the Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments, and warps our economies.

In The Big Con, Mazzucato and Collington throw back the curtain on the consulting industry. They dive deep into important case studies of consultants taking the reins with disastrous results, such as the debacle of the roll out of HealthCare.gov and the tragic failures of governments to respond adequately to the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is an important and exhilarating intellectual journey into the modern economy's beating heart. With peerless scholarship, and a wealth of original research, Mazzucato and Collington argue brilliantly for building a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good.

The Big Con

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Derek’s Nonfiction Den

Browse by categories

Johnny C. Taylor

Reset

Daniel Coyle

The Culture Code

Daniel M. Cable

Alive at Work

Adam Harris

The State Must Provide

Carol Anderson; Dick Durbin

One Person, No Vote

Safi Bahcall

Loonshots

Evan Osnos

Wildland

John A. White

Why It Matters

James Comey

Saving Justice

Tim Bakken

The Cost of Loyalty

Fiona Hill

There Is Nothing for You Here

Nicole Perlroth

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

Alaa Garad; Jeff Gold

The Learning-Driven Business

Daniel Coyle

The Talent Code

Bill Burnett; Dave Evans

Designing Your Work Life

Dan Heath

Upstream

Gary Hamel; Michele Zanini

Humanocracy

Whitney Johnson

Smart Growth

Luma Mufleh

Learning America

Don A. Moore; Max H. Bazerman

Decision Leadership

Mariana Mazzucato; Rosie Collington

The Big Con

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