Minds At Work

Unlock your potential and finally move forward. A recent study showed that when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don't change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through successfully. Desire and motivation aren't enough: even when it's literally a matter of life or death, the ability to change remains maddeningly elusive. Given that the status quo is so potent, how can we change ourselves and our organizations? In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey show how our individual beliefs--along with the collective mind-sets in our organizations--combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us. This persuasive and practical book, filled with hands-on diagnostics and compelling case studies, delivers the tools you need to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.

The only sustainable advantage in our hypercompetitive marketplace is the ability to learn and adapt faster than everyone else. Companies that cling to management practices of a bygone era continue to fade away. They desperately need managers who empower people to seek out learning at a moment’s notice. Minds at Work can help you be that manager. This book captures the role managers play in the knowledge economy—where uninhibited, on-demand learning inspires employees to achieve higher levels of performance. Authors David Grebow and Stephen J. Gill describe how managers can move from a traditional “command and control” position to become advocates of communication and collaboration. They share what happens when managers help their direct reports grow as people and use technology to pull the learning they need when they need it. Minds at Work illustrates this shift to a learning community with success stories from forward-looking companies. With this better way to manage, these companies have unearthed those “aha!” moments as the dots connect after continuous problem solving, trial and error, and innovation. Each has redefined norms, made knowledge sharing flat, and created a workplace culture built to last. Use this book to embrace learning anytime, anywhere. Nurture the minds at work, and you’ll win the hearts of your organization.

Featuring a new preface for the 10th anniversary As did the national bestseller Nickel and Dimed, Mike Rose’s revelatory book demolishes the long-held notion that people who work with their hands make up a less intelligent class. He shows us waitresses making lightning-fast calculations, carpenters handling complex spatial mathematics, and hairdressers, plumbers, and electricians with their aesthetic and diagnostic acumen. Rose, an educator who is himself the son of a waitress, explores the intellectual repertory of everyday workers and the terrible social cost of undervaluing the work they do. Deftly combining research, interviews, and personal history, this is one of those rare books that has the capacity both to shape public policy and to illuminate general readers.

In this groundbreaking and highly practical book,Number Sense Routines: Building Numerical Literacy Every Day in Grades K-3, author Jessica Shumway proposes that all children have innate number sense which can be developed through daily exercise. Shumway createda series of math routines designed to help young students strengthen and build their facility with numbers. These quick 5, 10, or 15 minute exercises are easy to implement as an add-on to any elementary math curriculum. Understanding Number Sense: Students with strong number sense understand numbers, how to subitize, relationships among numbers, and number systems. They make reasonable estimates, compute fluently, use reasoning strategies, and use visual models to solve problems. Number Sense Routines supports the early learner by instilling the importance of daily warm-ups and explains how they benefit developing math minds for long-term learning. Real Classroom Examples: Shumway compiled her classroom observations from around the country. She includes conversations among students who practice number sense routines to illustrate them in action, how children's number sense develops with daily use, and math strategies students learn as they develop their numerical literacy through self-paced practice. Assessment Strategies: Number Sense Routines demonstrates the importance of listening to your students and knowing what to look for. Teachers will gain a deeper understanding of the underlying math skills and strategies students learn as they develop numerical literacy. Shumway writes, As you read, you will step into various classrooms and listen in on students' conversations, which I hope will give you insight into the power of number sense routines and the impact they have on students' number sense development. My hope is that going into the classroom, into students' conversations, and into their thought processes, you will come away with new ideas and tools to use in your own classroom.

Drawing on his 30 years of experience as an organizational consultant, Karl Albrecht delivers a whack on the head to today's leaders: we've got to make our organizations smarter. He coined Albrecht's Law to express the problem: "Intelligent people, when assembled into an organization, will tend toward collective stupidity." Using a wide variety of personal experiences, success and failure stories, and real cases, he lays out a manifesto for escaping from collective stupidity and achieving collective intelligence - in short, organizational intelligence, or "OI." While some might argue that OI is an oxymoron, or contradiction in terms, Karl Albrecht argues that it can - and must - be achieved if our business enterprises are to move to the next level of performance of which they are capable. He defines and explains seven key dimensions of OI, and devotes a full chapter to each one. Each chapter poses seven diagnostic questions that help you evaluate the OI status of your organization on that dimension. Put all 49 questions together and you have the complete Organizational Intelligence Profile, which you can also download in ready-to-use format (.pdf) from the KAI website. Prof. Warren Bennis of USC (author of On Becoming a Leader) says, "This is a book about how organizations can release and deploy human imagination. What can be more important?" Provide a copy of Minds at Work to each of your executives, managers, and team leaders.

The burnout epidemic is taking on unseen proportions. Our hectic lives and the extent of digitization form great challenges for the brain, which is showing serious signs of neglect. But there is a solution: the greater your mental resilience, the better you are protected against stress, burnout and other mental problems. In this revelatory book, brain expert Elke Geraerts sets out the most important components of mental resilience on the basis of new insights from recent scientific research. She shows how we can better our minds, and how this helps us increase our own mental capital and that of our employees. The result is an absolute must-read for everyone who wants to prepare his or her brain for the challenges of the 21st century.

Surely you know plenty of people who need to make a change. But despite your well-intentioned efforts, they resist—because even when it’s in their best interest, people fundamentally fear change. As a salesman, father, friend, and consultant, Rob Jolles knows this scenario all too well. Drawing on his highly successful sales background and decades of research, he lays out a simple, repeatable, predictable, and ethical process that will enable you to lead others to discover for themselves what and why they need to change. Whether you hope to make a sale or improve a relationship, Jolles’s wise advice—illustrated through a bevy of sometimes funny, sometimes moving, always illuminating stories—will help you ensure that influencing someone is never an act of coercion but rather one of caring and compassion. This enhanced edition contains ten videos totaling over 25 minutes in length. For many of the skills taught in this book, the author provides a video role-play showing that skill in action. In other videos, he underlines the crucial ethical nature of persuasion, and even shares an inspirational story cut from the original book. The full How to Change Minds deluxe experience is not to be missed.

Albrecht, a noted management consultant, speaker, and author, draws on his experiences working with organizations around the world to define what organizational intelligence is and how it can be developed. Taking a critical look at organizations that have and have not achieved organizational intelligence, including Disney, Apple, Ford, and NASA, he defines seven components of organizational intelligence and uses them to analyze situations and identify the kinds of conditions necessary to nurture organizational intelligence. He also identifies 17 dysfunctional syndromes that keep companies from mobilizing their collective brain power. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR