The Soul Of The Firm

'Bill Pollard speaks with a voice of experience. His book deals with the practice of leadership- over time, under pressure, living with reality, getting the desired results. The Soul of the Firm tells how ServiceMaster has successfully grapple with the key issues of leadership. That is why it is so worthwhile.' -Max De Pree 'Bill Pollard demonstrates in great detail ServiceMaster's value system, a system that emphasizes the importance of the dignity of the individual. Readers will benefit greatly from Bill's wisdom. This is an important book that should be widely read.' -W. Earl Sasser, James L. Heskett, and Leonard A. Schlesinger 'Rarely are we given an open and generous look inside the corporate leader who is the embodiment of the mission and values of the enterprise. . . A powerful book.' -Frances Hesselbein 'A fascinating story about servant leadership and an extraordinary culture at ServiceMaster.' -Richard L. Thomas 'A remarkable book. . . . ServiceMaster invented 'lea production' for the service sector by listening to and empowering its employees on the front line. This book is the moving story of the wellspring of that culture and philosophy, told by a reflective, modest corporate leader.' -Elmer Johnson

From old-fashioned bricks-and-mortars to cutting-edge startups, businesses are moving into uncharted territory as they determine how to move from an analog past to a digital future effectively. How can you make sure not to leave human instinct behind? Businesses are leaving behind traditional meetings in favor of virtual ones, transitioning from surveys and studies to analytics and algorithms. The startling and often unacknowledged truth is that?the promise of digital transformation can only be realized when we find a way to balance it with the promise of people.?In the end, it’s the people that matter, and companies must never forget the soul that drives them. In Restoring the Soul of Business, business leader Rishad Tobaccowala?teaches you to: Understand how to unleash the significant benefit that can be realized by combining emotion and data, human and machine, analog and digital. Spot the warning signs of data-blinded companies: cold cultures with little human interaction, poor innovation stemming from discouraged employees who don’t contribute ideas, and poor customer service due to automated, robotic processes. Explore how organizations of various sizes and from different industries have successfully reoriented their thinking on how to fuse technology and humanity. Gain skills to become an expert in connections critical to growth and success, including the connection between being creative and using technology. Everyone working in an organization will find penetrating observations and guidance about how and why establishing the proper balance between human intuition and creativity and data-driven insights can lead to increased revenue, profitability, retention—and even joy—in their careers and business. Restoring the Soul of Business provides practical tools and techniques that every organization can and should implement, and challenges you to move forward with the kind of balance that capitalizes transformation and produces one great success after another.

"Drawing on real-life stories from the world's most prominent companies, the authors show how identity can be an extraordinarily valuable asset - and how, if not properly managed, it can become a huge liability. Discover how your firm's identity is related to - and different from - its organizational culture, brand positioning, and reputation. Learn how to diagnose and manage the often unconscious shared beliefs that constitute your company's soul, how to face the enormous identity challenges that arise in mergers, alliances, spin-offs, and the creation of new brands, and above all, how to lead and inspire in this new Age of Identity."--Jacket.

To succeed, the business of the future must have soul. Building Corporate Soul answers the most pressing questions for leaders today: How do I build and sustain a human-centric performance culture? At a time when 10,000 baby boomers retire every day, 79% of employees quit their jobs because they don't feel appreciated at their workplace, and 69% of millennials see a lack of potential for leadership development in their companies, Building Corporate Soul sets out to transform the performance and value of organizations—and to make soulless companies a thing of the past. Ralf Specht’s unique framework, The Soul System™, aligns value-creating employee behaviors with corporate strategy through shared understanding and shared purpose. Based on the latest research and real-life cases, this actionable framework shows how to build a culture at the workplace that is both human centric and success driven. Specht proves that leadership behaviors that build soul are synonymous with the behaviors that build success. His performance ranking, The Soul Index, confirms that companies that operate within this framework outperform their peers by a factor of 2.6 compared with Dow Jones over 5 years. Building Corporate Soul helps leaders at every level move beyond their current thinking and create an environment in which business goals are well understood and corporations walk their talk. Both this shared understanding and the subsequent shared behavior are critical to turn a company´s purpose into a real means to an end: superior success and a truly motivated workforce that is proud of its role inside the organization and of its impact on the local community and society overall. You'll see how companies of all sizes (startups and legacy corporations) have made this happen. You'll also learn how every leader, no matter the industry, can ignite (or re-ignite) the corporate soul in their firm. Ralf Specht is a visionary business leader and creator of the Soul System™, a framework that aligns value-creating employee action with broader corporate strategy through shared understanding and shared purpose. As a founding partner of Spark44, he was the architect of an innovative, industry-first joint venture with Jaguar Land Rover, which grew under his leadership to a global revenue of $100+m and 1,200 employees before it joined forces with Accenture Interactive in 2021. Previously, he consulted with global companies and brands for more than two decades with McCann Erickson. Besides Building Corporate Soul: Powering Culture & Success with the Soul System™, he is the author of the forthcoming book Beyond the Startup: Sparking Operational Innovations for Global Growth.

Over the course of the 20th century, America's giant corporations underwent an astonishing change, from being reviled as dangerous leviathons, to being respected, and somethimes revered. This text examines the reasons for this tranformation.

In this groundbreaking book, parenting expert and acclaimed author of the bestselling book Simplicity Parenting Kim John Payne, M.Ed., flips the script on children’s challenging or defiant behavior and lays out an elegantly simple plan to support parents in establishing loving, age-sensitive boundaries that help children feel safe and settled. In short: What looks like misbehavior is actually your children’s signal that they’re feeling lost, that they are trying to find direction and looking to you to guide them back on course. Payne gives parents heartwarming help and encouragement by combining astute observations with sensitive and often funny stories from his long career as a parent educator and a school and family counselor. In accessible language, he explains the relevance of current brain- and child-development studies to day-to-day parenting. Breaking the continuum of childhood into three stages, Payne says that parents need to play three different roles, each corresponding to one of those stages, to help steer children through their emotional growth and inevitable challenging times: • The Governor, who is comfortably and firmly in charge—setting limits and making decisions for the early years up to around the age of eight • The Gardener, who watches for emotional growth and makes decisions based on careful listening, assisting tweens in making plans that take the whole family’s needs into account • The Guide, who is both a sounding board and moral compass for emerging adults, helping teens build a sense of their life’s direction as a way to influence healthy decision making Practical and rooted in common sense, The Soul of Discipline gives parents permission to be warm and nurturing but also calm and firm (not overreactive). It gives clear, doable strategies to get things back on track for parents who sense that their children’s behavior has fallen into a troubling pattern. And best of all, it provides healthy direction to the entire family so parents can spend less time and energy on outmoded, punitive discipline and more on connecting with and enjoying their kids. Advance praise for The Soul of Discipline “The Soul of Discipline offers practical tools for helping parents implement discipline that’s respectful and effective, but the book is so much more. Kim John Payne offers a framework to guide parents in making decisions about why, when, and how to hold tighter reins as we build skills in our children, and why, when, and how to loosen the reins as we scaffold freedom.”—Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D., co-author of No-Drama Discipline “This book gets deep inside the challenge of getting along with children and teens and thinks deeply about what they need from us to become strong and self-managing. It elevates discipline to what it should be—a caring process of helping kids orient to the world and live in it happily and well.”—Steve Biddulph, author of The New Manhood “Kim Payne provides a useful model for choosing our parenting stance—Governor, Gardener, or Guide—depending on the situation. Most powerfully, Payne begins with the radical view that children are not disobedient but rather disoriented. The upshot of this shift in perspective is that discipline is about helping children orient themselves effectively, not about controlling or chastising.”—Lawrence J. Cohen, Ph.D., author of Playful Parenting

A New World Order has begun for trade and globalization. Inundated with constant information, new concepts, and endless data, individuals are caught in the whirlwind of a fast-paced world, often without the ability to stop and think, particularly when it comes to issues of the soul. I consider the soul the center of our activities and inspirations. If one says of an individual, “his soul has left him,” one connotes death. This also will apply to societies and corporations. Are we willing to permit the gradual march toward solitude with all the accompanying sharp cutting edges? Will the balloon go up? The reader can judge. I hope to supply the content here. With a foreword by Ambassador Laszlo Szabo, a preface by the Rev. Horkan, and the humorous yet pensive illustrations by award-winning cartoonist David Clark, this book increases one’s ability to gain a comprehensive understanding of the most pressing international business and trade issues that the world faces today.

Soul in the Game is a book of inspiring stories and hard-won lessons on how to live a meaningful life, crafted by investor and writer Vitaliy Katsenelson. Drawing from the lives of classical composers, ancient Stoics, and contemporary thinkers, Katsenelson weaves together a tapestry of practical wisdom that has helped him overcome his greatest challenges: in work, family, identity, health—and in dealing with success, failure, and more. Part autobiography, part philosophy, part creativity manual, Soul in the Game is a unique and vulnerable exploration of what works, and what doesn’t, in the attempt to shape a fulfilling and happy life.