Build trust and achieve high performance in your business by redefining team culture. Have you ever been on a team where the talent was strong, but the team wasn’t very good? On the flip side, have you ever been on a team where not every single member was a rock star, but something about the team just worked? In this book, corporate consultant Mike Robbins dives deep into the ways great businesses build trust, collaborate, and operate at their peak level. As an expert in teamwork, leadership, and emotional intelligence, Mike draws on more than 20 years of experience working with top companies like Google and Microsoft, as well as his baseball career with the Kansas City Royals. And, while each team and organization have their own unique challenges, goals, and dynamics, there are some universal qualities that allow teams to truly come together and thrive. The book’s core principles include facilitating an environment of psychological safety, fostering inclusion and belonging, addressing and navigating conflict, and maintaining a healthy balance of high expectations and empathy. Throughout, Mike shares powerful exercises and tools he’s successfully utilized in the keynote speeches, group sessions, and corporate retreats that he delivers, so that you and your team can communicate more authentically, give and receive feedback with skill, and create deeper connections. “Mike Robbins shares tangible techniques that leaders and teams can use to excel, backs up his ideas with important research, and provides a road map for creating a team environment of personal connection and optimal performance.” — Tom Rath, New York Times best-selling co-author of How Full is Your Bucket?

Imaginative, gripping stories, along with the brilliant title novella set in Maine after the 2000 election, carry the weight of real emotion and revelation and showcase the impressive versatility of a rising talent. Owen King is a writer interested in the choices we make when we're most conflicted. A young husband must decide whether or not to commit a ghoulish crime; a baseball player in a fantastic 1930s Coney Island is assailed by the guilt of an illicit romance; a nineteenth-century itinerant dentist finds himself snowed in with a group of trappers for a long evening of primitive surgery and laughing gas reveries. Whether they're set in the past or the present, tinged with the macabre, the solemn, or the absurd, all of the stories in this collection carry the weight of real emotion and revelation and showcase King's impressive versatility. In his novella, King tells the story of George, the teenage son of a single mother, and the only grandson of a family of union organizers in Maine. George's grandfather Henry, obsessed with the outcome of the 2000 election, has planted a giant billboard of homage to Al Gore in his front yard that he suspects has been defaced by the paperboy, now a sworn enemy. Meanwhile, George's mother is about to marry Dr. Vic, who, besides being possessed of an almost royal obliviousness, may even have voted for George W. Bush. George is a nervous accomplice to his grandfather's increasingly unhinged behavior, and a righteous adversary at war with his mother over her marriage. George's struggle is a funny and moving parallel for our times: How will we fight? All together, or all alone? Funny, insightful, and always entertaining, We're All in This Together launches the career of an extraordinarily talented writer.

Brave, bighearted... An absolutely absorbing book of challenging power, a story of almost unbearable tensions. A modern life played out against the chaos of "me" and the divine order of "we." Marie Dadisman The observations made in this work regarding the social impact of our current social strategies are poignant observations that beckon the reader to evaluate whether, or not, they wish to embrace and support our current paradigms for social order.

When the Disney Channel aired its original movie High School Musical in January 2006, they were expecting a solid ratings response. What they got was a cultural phenomenon that not only launched the film into the stratosphere - it also turned its young cast into superstars. With spinoffs multiplying and stage shows poised to rake in yet more cash, Edward Gross takes readers on a comprehensive tour through the creation and making of this landmarkl film. Unmissable.

A biting and original history which places culture front and centre to explain how our country went to pieces.

Monica Achter feels like her world is collapsing all around her. After being put in isolation and quarantine away from her parents and family, the discovery of COVID-19 on the Grand Princess cruise ship would put her life into a tailspin. She is all alone, scared and unsure of what lies ahead. She is suddenly faced with a difficult choice: either become a victim and let the darkness set in or try and see the current situation in a bright and positive way. This was her very first cruise and the first time she had been away from her husband and family. She was having a fun and enjoyable time with her aging parents until that moment she wondered maybe it would be the last time she would ever see them again. Would she get the virus? Would her parents get it? Would they die on the ship? This is a must read for anyone struggling to find the good and positive in such a challenging world. Read this compelling story to find out what happened on the Grand Princess cruise ship in March 2020.