What do Disney Imagineering and nonprofit organizations have in common? More than you think! Although nonprofits are rarely known as creative powerhouses, we’ll explore how to use the same principles that make Disney Imagineering the gold standard of imaginative thinking to transform your organization into an equally inventive and creative environment. The Nonprofit Imagineers explores how more innovation can happen at nonprofits, no matter how small the budget, how meager the staff, how tight the board oversight or how limited the time commitment. Using more than 100 real-life examples from theme parks, movies, and Walt Disney’s life, you will come away inspired to experiment with Disney Imagineering principles such as blue-sky meetings, storytelling, creative intent, kinetics, plussing, and weenies. Yes, weenies. This book is perfect for employees, managers, board members and volunteers at schools, faith-based organizations, community centers and assorted other organizations of all sizes looking to use creativity to improve their programming, fundraising and relationship with their families, members, and donors.

Listen, observe, test—these three words lie at the heart of a powerful method for businesses’ transformation. Behind this method is a deceptively simple idea: managers and management scholars must first take the pulse of a real business, get its case history, diagnose its problems, and only then solve them. Invented by the scholars who launched Harvard Business School, this medical model will still cure companies today. Damningly, during the last thirty years business schools embraced the presumptions of economists, game theorists, and other calculators of abstraction. The solving of real-world, real-time problems has atrophied and stagnated. In this book, renowned scholar and emeritus professor Jay W. Lorsch marshals evidence, history, and insights from his more than fifty-year career at Harvard Business School to make the case for a return to the medical model–the practices of listening, observing, and testing in which the fields of human relations and organizational behavior are rooted. By telling the history of the development of his field, Lorsch demonstrates how the medical model emerged in the years before World War II and for decades helped managers, management scholars, and consultants diagnose and solve the problems besetting companies large and small. Explaining the case studies that define the practice, he discusses how the model has been refined and reapplied by later generations and how it can continue to address issues such as diversity, leadership, competition, and optimal corporate board structures.

The Negotiation Edge is a two-part book that will make you a better negotiator. The first half is a negotiating tutorial complete with checklists and worksheets. It details on how-to engage, prepare, select a leader, build a support team, identify roles, set communication guidelines, instruct meeting behavior, read the other side, and determine the best strategies (compete | collaborate | compromise) using a three-act negotiating structure. The second half of the book is the author’s twenty-five best and worst negotiating experiences with his insightful lessons learned with Walmart, Amazon, Target, NFL, NBA, NHL, PBS, National Geographic, BBC, Netflix, Warner Bros., Disney, Universal, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate, Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, and Martha Stewart.

What if you could adapt rapidly to change, design your destiny, plot your own North, systematically design the roads you wish to travel and go the distance–improving your health, your work, and your life? Change means that you will have to create habits, and as both individuals and organizations have found, this is an extremely challenging venture. You may feel that procedures and methods, allied with inspiration, willpower, and motivation will be enough, but the up and down nature of the latter qualities can lead to repeated failed attempts. For individuals, leaders, managers, or anyone who wishes to build or change habits and behaviors and acquire new competencies, the answer lies in Warp Speed Habits, a revolutionary brain-based strategic-tactical approach to creating habits and changing behaviors. Intersecting neuroscience and psychology, this guide leverages business management lessons at an individual level, promotes the development of a “habit mindset” and reshapes environmental contexts. In this quest, as you learn to design, build, and implement sustainable habits, you will travel to worlds and dimensions in different realms. Ready? Begin your first voyage, but make no mistake, as you execute missions in your travels to different worlds, do not illude yourself by biographies of overnight success—these are myths that blur the mindset of energy and resilience you will require. But with the Warp Speed Habits practical and pragmatical roadmap, you will overcome brain traps and obstacles along the way, and ultimately contribute to thriving behaviors that deliver results!

Applied Leadership: Developing Stages for Creating Exceptional Leaders, is a comprehensive, self-development practical leadership book. Designed to be a complete self-training guide for individuals in all stages of leadership, from entry level to advance stages. For years, organizations and individuals have struggled with ineffective leadership training. It neither served to strengthen the current leaders in the organization, nor created future leaders for that organization, until NOW. Because great leadership is an evolutionary process, this publication will offer the reader a journey to become an exceptional leader. Individuals will be able to develop the practical skills necessary to be excellent leaders for any organization. No longer will organizations outsource costly training sessions that last for weeks or months for their staff, rather, this book will provide those necessary steps, skills, and knowledge needed at their own pace.

Nurturing Equanimity: Building A Caring Culture provides a much-needed blueprint for organizations looking to create a calm, balanced, and focused environment inviting people to thrive in both their personal and professional lives. This blueprint of nurturing equanimity to build a culture that cares is a necessity for any organization concerned about identifying, recruiting, and retaining the human capital required to create a sustainable future in today’s post-COVID marketplace. Securing the right people for any organization is difficult in most markets; doing so as the economy emerges from the pandemic induced global recession challenges even the most satisfied workplace cultures. The pandemic’s disruption and residue created an unstable and imbalanced culture across organizations of all sizes and in each industry that exposed numerous negative workplace characteristics many either knew, or never stopped to consider. Examples included low wages, long and unnecessary commutes, bad management, and unfulfilling work. These characteristics were symbolic of organizational cultures outdated, toxic, and imbalanced created by incompetence, inertia, and ineptitude. The pandemic allowed employees to pause, consider their life situation, and realize their lives had been imbalanced for far too long. Required reading for individuals from small-to-medium sized businesses, large corporations, non-profit organizations, and government offices, Nurturing Equanimity: Building A Culture That Cares offers employers and employees alike a valuable resource to use as they chart a course forward in a post-pandemic marketplace.

Leading from the Top is a journey through 90 years of American presidential history to glean lessons in issues management from those who dealt with the most complex issues, on the biggest stage and under the most intense scrutiny. Reading the book, you will learn why asking permission, reframing the issue, and knowing the length of your runway are all important components in successful issues management. This book uses history to build on common knowledge to accelerate recall of the concepts presented. It looks at fifteen presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Joe Biden, and examines one issue each managed. Each chapter ends by assessing success or failure through the lens of issues management consulting and providing succinct lessons that readers can draw from and apply to conflict resolution, problem-solving and crisis management. Leading from the Top is written for both aspiring and seasoned leaders to learn about or refine their issues management approaches as well as the reader who is interested in a different way to assess our presidents. This said, the book is not written to be prescriptive on any of the issues presented, but simply to provide perspective and tools to use to do your own assessments going forward.