How can you become a more successful manager, a stronger team leader and a motivator who gets the best results from a group? Ken Blanchard's inspiring new book provides the answer. In a beguiling, sometimes humorous fashion, THE LEADERSHIP PILL conjures up a tantalizing possibility: What if there was a pill that could stimulate the natural powers of the mind and body to provide leadership? In the story, an amazing new pill heightens one leader's powers, but contains the wrong ingredients, stimulating him in a short-sighted direction. He is coercive, obsessed with immediate results and drives his team relentlessly until, after a brief spike in performance, they suffer early burnout. In contrast, the 'Effective Leader', working without a pill, inspires and supports his team. He supplies the right ingredients, earning the respect and trust of his team with a blend of integrity, partnership and affirmation. Ultimately it is recognised that there is more to effective leadership than a wonder 'pill'. Destined to be a transforming experience for thousands of readers, THE LEADERSHIP PILL shows how to apply the right techniques, no matter how pressured a business situation.

Paul Ballman has helped some of the biggest companies in the world get their leadership strategies on track. He has conducted detailed interviews with 2,000 leaders about what has worked for them and why. He has studied the simple success formulas and models that are peddled by gurus across the industry, and come to the conclusion that in the real world they just don't work. He now invites you to take the Red Pill and discover the truth about leadership. Why are the existing formulas for success continually found wanting? How can you tell a fad from enduring wisdom? What are the causes of the most spectacular leadership failures? And, most importantly, what can you do about it? Entertaining, insightful and practical. RED PILL lets you become your own guru.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A tour de force . . . a comprehensive and suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American healthcare . . . persuasive, shocking.”—The New York Times America’s Bitter Pill is Steven Brill’s acclaimed book on how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing—and failing to change—the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America’s largest, most dysfunctional industry. It’s a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his trailblazing Time magazine cover story continues, despite Obamacare. And it is the first complete, inside account of how President Obama persevered to push through the law, but then failed to deal with the staff incompetence and turf wars that crippled its implementation. But by chance America’s Bitter Pill ends up being much more—because as Brill was completing this book, he had to undergo urgent open-heart surgery. Thus, this also becomes the story of how one patient who thinks he knows everything about healthcare “policy” rethinks it from a hospital gurney—and combines that insight with his brilliant reporting. The result: a surprising new vision of how we can fix American healthcare so that it stops draining the bank accounts of our families and our businesses, and the federal treasury. Praise for America’s Bitter Pill “An energetic, picaresque, narrative explanation of much of what has happened in the last seven years of health policy . . . [Brill] has pulled off something extraordinary.”—The New York Times Book Review “A thunderous indictment of what Brill refers to as the ‘toxicity of our profiteer-dominated healthcare system.’ ”—Los Angeles Times “A sweeping and spirited new book [that] chronicles the surprisingly juicy tale of reform.”—The Daily Beast “One of the most important books of our time.”—Walter Isaacson “Superb . . . Brill has achieved the seemingly impossible—written an exciting book about the American health system.”—The New York Review of Books

A new paradigm for shaping and aligning processes, tools, and employees—to tap into the power and potential of your company. Through fifteen years of intense observation and analysis, Tony Gruebl, Jeff Welch, and Bryan Wolbert of advisory services firm Think Systems, Inc. identified a powerful controlling force hiding in plain sight—and now they reveal it in The Red Pill Executive. Tony, Jeff, and Bryan named their approach to harnessing this controlling force the Red Pill model. Every company has an invisible framework called culture. Red Pill Operators sense it where others are oblivious. Culture determines how business happens and what success looks like. Some cultures love growth; others, a perfect record in customer service. For some, it’s sales or P&L—regardless of tanking satisfaction or turnover. With culture as their blueprint, Red Pill Operators shape their processes, tools, language, staff, and every other aspect to align—not just with the strategy and mission, but with the culture as it exists in time. The Red Pill Executive offers operating executives and small business owners fresh insight into the grooming of their frontline managers who carry out critical initiatives. This new paradigm unlocks massive potential for Operations Executives and their team members who have the courage to embrace them. It showcases a new way of thinking that empowers operators to capture value and corrects the one-size-fits-all approach created by the project management industry in reaction to massive project failure. In The Red Pill Executive, Tony, Jeff, and Bryan use a straight-talking style—and some entertaining pop culture metaphors—to deliver their results in an engaging and readable style.

Is your leadership a competitive advantage, or is it costing you? How do you know? Are you developing your leadership effectiveness at the pace of change? For most leaders today, complexity is outpacing their personal and collective development. Most leaders are in over their heads, whether they know it or not. The most successful organizations over time are the best led. While this has always been true, today escalating global complexity puts leadership effectiveness at a premium. Mastering Leadership involves developing the effectiveness of leaders—individually and collectively—and turning that leadership into a competitive advantage. This comprehensive roadmap for optimal leadership features: Breakthrough research that connects increased leadership effectiveness with enhanced business performance The first fully integrated Universal Model of Leadership—one that integrates the best theory and research in the fields of Leadership and Organizational Development over the last half century A free, online self-assessment of your leadership, using the Leadership Circle Profile, visibly outlining how you are currently leading and how to develop even greater effectiveness The five stages in the evolution of leadership—Egocentric, Reactive, Creative, Integral, and Unitive—along with the organizational structures and cultures that develop at each of these stages Six leadership practices for evolving your leadership capability at a faster pace A map of your optimal path to greater leadership effectiveness Case stories that facilitate pragmatic application of this Leadership Development System to your particular situation This timeless, authoritative text provides a systemic approach for developing your senior leaders and the leadership system of your organization. It does not recommend quick fixes, but argues that real development requires a strategic, long-term, and integrated approach in order to forge more effective leaders and enhanced business performance. Mastering Leadership offers a developmental pathway to bring forth the highest and best use of yourself, your life, and your leadership. By more meaningfully deploying all of who you are every day, individually and collectively, you will achieve a leadership legacy consistent with your highest aspirations.

A compendium of straightforward techniques on how to accentuate the positive and redirect the negative, increasing productivity at work and at home. What do your people at work and your spouse and kids at home have in common with a five-ton killer whale? Probably a whole lot more than you think, according to top business consultant and mega-bestselling author Ken Blanchard and his coauthors from SeaWorld. In this moving and inspirational new book, Blanchard explains that both whales and people perform better when you accentuate the positive. He shows how using the techniques of animal trainers -- specifically those responsible for the killer whales of SeaWorld -- can supercharge your effectiveness at work and at home. When gruff business manager and family man Wes Kingsley visited SeaWorld, he marveled at the ability of the trainers to get these huge killer whales, among the most feared predators in the ocean, to perform amazing acrobatic leaps and dives. Later, talking to the chief trainer, he learned their techniques of building trust, accentuating the positive, and redirecting negative behavior -- all of which make these extraordinary performances possible. Kingsley took a hard look at his own often accusatory management style and recognized how some of his shortcomings as a manager, spouse, and father actually diminish trust and damage relationships. He began to see the difference between "GOTcha" (catching people doing things wrong) and "Whale Done!" (catching people doing things right). In Whale Done!, Ken Blanchard shows how to make accentuating the positive and redirecting the negative the best tools to increase productivity, instead of creating situations that demoralize people. These techniques are remarkably easy to master and can be applied equally well at home, allowing readers to become better parents and more committed spouses in their happier and more successful personal lives.

Leverage your brand of leadership for maximum results Unleashing Your Inner Leader: Executive Coach Tells All presents the premise that there is a powerful leader inside each of us. The focus is on real life exercises and case studies to help you discover, release, and leverage your inner leader: to reach heights in your career that you never thought possible. The book discusses the individual’s impact on the organization and which professional behaviors most frequently demonstrate leadership competencies. Conduct a “forensic intervention” to find out what is going awry in your professional development, or what has gone wrong in the past, and craft a strategy to overcome obstacles, gain unmistakable clarity about yourself, and focus your abilities to match organizational needs. Great leaders start their assessments from the inside out, and their passion is so strong that it permeates their organizations and builds the culture, regardless of rank. They inspire their teams by sharing the spotlight and encouraging coworkers to excel, operating with clean authenticity to maximize results. Unleashing Your Inner Leader helps you recognize where you fall on the leadership spectrum, and provides practical advice for shaping your brand of leadership to capitalize on your authentic capability and potential. You’ll find expert insight as an executive business coach guides you to: Evaluate your strengths, values, and personal impact to craft a vision for the world around you Discover what’s holding you back from maximum effectiveness Tap into your undiscovered potential, and inspire your team to excellence Recognize what it will take to move you and your organization to the next level It is often very difficult for leaders to see their own greatness, unlock it, and use it in a practical way to get results. Be the spark that ignites your team, and steer your own development toward becoming an impactful leader with Unleashing Your Inner Leader.

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2020 ONE OF NPR's BEST BOOKS OF 2020 ONE OF THE A.V. CLUB'S 15 FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2020 From the widely acclaimed author of White Tears, a bold new novel about searching for order in a world that frames madness as truth. After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of Red Pill arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to accomplish anything at all. Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches Blue Lives--a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life--and soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all. Wannsee is a place full of ghosts: Across the lake, the narrator can see the villa where the Nazis planned the Final Solution, and in his walks he passes the grave of the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, who killed himself after deciding that "no happiness was possible here on earth." When some friends drag him to a party where he meets Anton, the creator of Blue Lives, the narrator begins to believe that the two of them are involved in a cosmic battle, and that Anton is "red-pilling" his viewers--turning them toward an ugly, alt-rightish worldview--ultimately forcing the narrator to wonder if he is losing his mind.

A Chicago Tribune "Best Books of 2014" • A Slate "Best Books 2014: Staff Picks" • A St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Best Books of 2014" The fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid. Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.

The president of Catalyst Leader believes that the most impactful and most influential leaders are the ones who lead from who they truly are, not who they pretend or wish to be. With clear biblical teaching and personal accounts, Tyler Reagin not only demonstrates the necessity of life-giving leadership, but also provides the steps you'll need to begin knowing and leading from your truest self. From his experiences in high-impact leadership roles at some of our nation's largest churches and ministries, Reagin has learned firsthand the importance of identity-based leadership. His desire is to help each reader become an empowered, confident leader that brings life and vibrancy to every room they enter. Whether you've got the corner office or you're just getting started, Reagin gives you the tools you need to become an impactful and unique influencer right where you are!