Archives: Books

Reclaiming the Jewel of Africa

‘A living manual for the renaissance of an eminent African country!’ Thabo Mbeki President of South Africa, 1999–2008

A practical roadmap for transforming the largest economy in Africa.

Reclaiming the Jewel of Africa is an insider’s account of how to take Nigeria and Africa from potential to prosperity.

Drawing on long experience in both the private sector and government, Olusegun Aganga provides practical and pragmatic insights that all Nigerians, and anyone concerned about the broader economic future of Africa, should consider.

The Great Revitalization

Life and work continue to evolve, and so must your leadership. Thriving in today’s business environment requires conscious, inspirational leadership, a fresh understanding of the world we find ourselves in, and a whole new playbook anchored in meaning and purpose. You need a set of strategies and applications that enable you to create an experience in your organization where your people give their best, feel fulfilled in their work and relationships, can work toward realizing their potential, and will persevere alongside you in service of the company’s mission.

Not only will you and your team be completely rejuvenated and elevated by exercising this kind of agency, but your business will be transformed to perform at much higher levels of productivity, creativity, and results. Meaning and purpose are essential ingredients to unleash the potential of everyone in your stakeholder community, powerfully uniting them, to increase your organizational impact and relevance. Here is your opportunity to transform the Great Resignation into your Great Revitalization.

DR ALISE CORTEZ is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose, an organizational logotherapist, the host of Working on Purpose radio and Chief Purpose Officer at Dr Alise Cortez and Associates. She works with forward-reaching organizations to develop conscious, inspirational leaders and enable them to transform their organizations into high functioning, profitable enterprises by activating meaning and purpose.

Once Upon a Deal…

Negotiation is everywhere. Even though we use it all the time – at work, at home, with family and friends – many of us are negotiating without realising it. Negotiation can be described as the process of getting what we want, from people who want something from us and is an art built around the science of a defined process, the Scotwork 8-Step Framework.

For a number of years, our negotiation experts have written about the issues of the day and have compiled a selection of negotiation stories for this book. Once Upon a Deal… brings colour to our framework to help you think differently about negotiation and help you be more in control and confident to enable you to get what you want and contribute to enhanced collaborative interactions.

Get ready…

SCOTWORK has been in the business of developing capability in commercial negotiation for nearly 50 years: these entertaining stories are drawn from the team’s extensive and rich experience across many sectors and situations

Collabor(h)ate

“We’ve all gotten stuck working with people we don’t like. Thankfully, Deb Mashek has written a lively, actionable book to fix that. Combining her expertise as a psychologist and her experience as a consultant, she reveals how we can earn trust, repair relationships, and create collaborations that bring out the best in us.”
Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

Many people have mixed feelings about workplace collaboration. On the one hand, they know collaboration is essential to achieve complex goals. On the other hand, they know collaboration is a slog. People pull in different directions. There’s desperately little communication and even less follow through. One person ends up doing all the work. The result? Friction mounts. Projects fizzle. Great people walk.

Here’s why: very few of us ever receive any formal training in how to collaborate well.

In Collabor(h)ate, Deb Mashek draws on her deep experience as a relationships researcher and collaboration facilitator to reveal everything you need to know to make workplace collaborations less painful and more productive.

Dr Deb Mashek is an experienced business consultant, professor, higher education administrator, and national nonprofit executive. She applies relationship science to help people collaborate better.
Learn more at: www.collaborhate.com

The Way We Talk Around Here

You can’t transform what you can’t get hold of, and organisational culture is slippery and hard to pin down. But it’s powerful. So how can you catch hold of your culture to understand and work on it, without destroying its essence or value?

The unspoken rules and unquestioned assumptions that make up corporate culture are so well hidden that, once we become insiders, we stop noticing them. But our shared language, ‘the way we talk around here’, contains the patterns of thought and behaviour that make up culture – ‘the way we do things around here’ – and offers a powerful and pragmatic approach to culture analysis.

Gill Ereaut describes how to get to grips with organisational and team cultures through paying close attention to their language.

Discover:

  • how analysing internal language uncovers the silent assumptions that drive a culture
  • how to identify shared unconscious rules and norms, often rooted in the past, and collectively consider which do and don’t still serve you well
  • practical tools for helping everyone involved to reshape unhelpful habits of thinking, to kickstart effective, lasting change.

If you’re responsible for managing an organisation’s or a team’s culture – or trying to thrive within one – find out how listening to language can help you map, understand and even transform that culture.

Gill Ereaut founded UK consultancy Linguistic Landscapes Ltd. in 2002, pioneering the commercial application of language analysis to organisational challenges.

You can’t transform what you can’t get hold of, and organisational culture is slippery and hard to pin down. But it’s powerful. So how can you catch hold of your culture to understand and work on it, without destroying its essence or value?

The unspoken rules and unquestioned assumptions that make up corporate culture are so well hidden that, once we become insiders, we stop noticing them. But our shared language, ‘the way we talk around here’, contains the patterns of thought and behaviour that make up culture – ‘the way we do things around here’ – and offers a powerful and pragmatic approach to culture analysis.

Gill Ereaut describes how to get to grips with organisational and team cultures through paying close attention to their language.

Discover:

  • how analysing internal language uncovers the silent assumptions that drive a culture
  • how to identify shared unconscious rules and norms, often rooted in the past, and collectively consider which do and don’t still serve you well
  • practical tools for helping everyone involved to reshape unhelpful habits of thinking, to kickstart effective, lasting change.

If you’re responsible for managing an organisation’s or a team’s culture – or trying to thrive within one – find out how listening to language can help you map, understand and even transform that culture.

Gill Ereaut founded UK consultancy Linguistic Landscapes Ltd. in 2002, pioneering the commercial application of language analysis to organisational challenges.

The Brave Leader

Your business needs you to be brave when it comes to inclusion. David McQueen has coached leaders across all sectors to step up to inclusive leadership, transforming their processes, policies and ways of working to support diversity and reap the rewards.

Many leaders are terrified of doing the wrong thing, so they do nothing. That is not an option. Discover how to think strategically about problem-solving and decision-making so that you embed inclusivity in your organization, no matter the pace of change you face, and future-proof your talent management, product development, customer experience and more.

David McQueen is a leadership coach, international speaker and facilitator. He is the cofounder of professional development company Q Squared Ltd, the host of The BRAVE Leader podcast and a blogger on all things leadership and culture change.

A Stuttering Revolution

Feel like your stutter dominates every waking second of your life?

You’re not alone. An estimated 70 million adults world-wide have a stutter. Many believe their lives will be significantly limited by the way they speak, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Paul Gaskin stopped trying to ‘fix’ his own stutter aged 17, and over a long and successful career has designed a unique, five-step road map to help him become so much more than his stutter: it can help you do the same.

This is a powerful and practical book that focuses on what you love to do and guides you to create the live you really want and deserve.

Feel like your stutter dominates every waking second of your life?

You’re not alone. An estimated 70 million adults world-wide have a stutter. Many believe their lives will be significantly limited by the way they speak, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Paul Gaskin stopped trying to ‘fix’ his own stutter aged 17, and over a long and successful career has designed a unique, five-step road map to help him become so much more than his stutter: it can help you do the same.

This is a powerful and practical book that focuses on what you love to do and guides you to create the live you really want and deserve.

Find Your 9others

If you could sit down to dinner with some of the world’s most ambitious startup entrepreneurs, what would you ask them?

Since 2011, 9others has hosted over 5,000 entrepreneurs at 500 events in over 45 cities around the world and asked one simple question: what’s keeping you up at night? We’ve heard the challenges that entrepreneurs all around the world have faced; their thinking and the behavioural traits that helped them overcome those challenges.

In this book, 9others founders Katie Lewis and Matthew Stafford will help you discover the questions you should be asking yourself as you start and scale your own start up, and why you should go on your own journey to find your 9others.

The FIRED Leader

To survive disruption, organizations need disruptive leaders.
So they hire them. And then they fire them.

It’s the open secret everyone in the leadership industry knows but nobody is addressing: leadership culture is toxic, and leadership systems have failed. Publicly, organizations say they want leaders to be innovative thinkers who challenge the status quo. Privately, conventional leadership culture wants nothing of the sort. Leaders deemed as ‘a bad culture fit’ quickly find themselves marginalized, ostracized, and even exorcised. The qualities that get them hired are the ones that get them fired. Yet, these rebels and nonconformists often embody the very leadership qualities that organizations so desperately need to navigate disruption and adapt to the “new normal” of constant change.

Radically refreshing and practical, this book identifies five leadership qualities (F.I.R.E.D. Leadership™) that are key to tomorrow’s leadership success and offers a step-by-step blueprint to show organizations how to integrate these five crucial qualities into their current leadership identification, recruitment, onboarding, and development processes.

Leadership renegade Paul McCarthy shows organizations how to reframe how they view their troublemakers, agitators, rebels, oddballs and shit-stirrers – to see the hidden leadership qualities driving those behaviors, and why they need them so desperately.

To survive disruption, organizations need disruptive leaders.
So they hire them. And then they fire them.

It’s the open secret everyone in the leadership industry knows but nobody is addressing: leadership culture is toxic, and leadership systems have failed. Publicly, organizations say they want leaders to be innovative thinkers who challenge the status quo. Privately, conventional leadership culture wants nothing of the sort. Leaders deemed as ‘a bad culture fit’ quickly find themselves marginalized, ostracized, and even exorcised. The qualities that get them hired are the ones that get them fired. Yet, these rebels and nonconformists often embody the very leadership qualities that organizations so desperately need to navigate disruption and adapt to the “new normal” of constant change.

Radically refreshing and practical, this book identifies five leadership qualities (F.I.R.E.D. Leadership™) that are key to tomorrow’s leadership success and offers a step-by-step blueprint to show organizations how to integrate these five crucial qualities into their current leadership identification, recruitment, onboarding, and development processes.

Leadership renegade Paul McCarthy shows organizations how to reframe how they view their troublemakers, agitators, rebels, oddballs and shit-stirrers – to see the hidden leadership qualities driving those behaviors, and why they need them so desperately.

The Gift of Sensitivity

Sensitivity is a superpower.

This is the era of emotion: EQ training for employees, empathy in leadership, the Experience Economy of consumers. But how do we access the full potential of creativity, originality, innovation, intuition, flexibility, and inclusiveness that emotions can unlock? Through sensitivity.

Sensitivity is the degree to which we sense and perceive the world. For too long we have seen it as a weakness, especially in business: Elena Amber demonstrates that it is the source of our most authentic strength, and our superpower for the future.

Elena Amber brings her years of research in human experience and psychology, focused particularly on emotional engagement, her international business experience and her profound meditation practice to show how connecting to emotions by embracing sensitivity unlocks our most extraordinary and profound faculties.