We struggle to understand why people behave as they do, and why they choose dysfuntional, repetitive behaviours. We can't understand why some are habitually dependent, while others are exhaustingly self-sacrificing or unfairly unkind.If you want to improve your understanding of the Human race, the Drama Triangle will help.Once you understand three archetypal roles - the Victim, the Persecutor and the Rescuer, you can identify when you have been on the Drama Triangle in the past, if you are playing it now and who is inviting you to take up one of the roles in their Triangle.Essential reading for everyone, this book is easy to read and even easier to understand, providing a gentle introduction to this dynamic area of Transactional Analysis.

    They are the struggle to be heard in a world of media noise and clamor. Today, most brand messages and mass appeals for causes are drowned out before they even reach us. But a few consistently break through the din, using the only tool that has ever moved minds and changed behavior—great stories.With insights from mythology, advertising history, evolutionary biology, and psychology, viral storyteller and advertising expert Jonah Sachs takes readers into a fascinating world of seemingly insurmountable challenges and enormous opportunity. You’ll discover how:• Social media tools are driving a return to the oral tradition, in which stories that matter rise above the fray• Marketers have become today’s mythmakers, providing society with explanation, meaning, and ritual• Memorable stories based on timeless themes build legions of eager evangelists• Marketers and audiences can work together to create deeper meaning and stronger partnerships in building a better world• Brands like Old Spice, The Story of Stuff, Nike, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street created and sustained massive viral buzzWinning the Story Wars is a call to arms for business communicators to cast aside broken traditions and join a revolution to build the iconic brands of the future. It puts marketers in the role of heroes with a chance to transform not just their craft but the enterprises they represent. After all, success in the story wars doesn’t come just from telling great stories, but from learning to live them.

    Once powerful companies that haven’t gotten the message are faltering, while others, new and old, are thriving. In disarmingly simple and provocative terms, Treacy and Wiersema show what it takes to become a leader in your market, and stay there, in an ever more sophisticated and demanding world.

    While delighting us with the magic of Mickey Mouse, he also introduced corporate America to some innovative and brilliant new ways of doing business. And as everyone knows, the Disney companies have grown beyond anything even Walt himself could have imagined.Now this practical, hands-on book takes an in-depth look at Disney's business philosophy and the priciples behind it, demonstrating how today's managers can successfully apply them to their own businesses--no matter what the field.

    A Problem2. Peter Pigeonhole Prepared A Petition3. What's Your Problem?Part 2: What is The Problem?4. Billy Brighteyes Bests The Bidders5. Billy Bites His Tongue6. Billy Back To The BiddersPart 3: What is The Problem Really?7. The Endless Chain8. Missing The Misfit9. Landing On The Level10. Mind Your MeaningPart 4: Whose Problem Is It?11. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes12. The Campus That Was All Spaced Out13. The Lights At The End Of The TunnelPart 5: Where Does It Come From?14. Janet Jaworski Joggles A Jerk15. Mister Matczyszyn Mends The Matter16. Make-Works And Take-Credits17. Examinations And Other PuzzlesPart 6: Do We Really Want To Solve It?18. Tom Tireless Tinkers With Toys19. Patience Plays Politics20. A Priority Assignment

    

    If you want the superpower of solving better problems, read this book." -- Eric Schmidt, former CEO, GoogleAre you solving the right problems? Have you or your colleagues ever worked hard on something, only to find out you were focusing on the wrong problem entirely? Most people have. In a survey, 85 percent of companies said they often struggle to solve the right problems. The consequences are severe: Leaders fight the wrong strategic battles. Teams spend their energy on low-impact work. Startups build products that nobody wants. Organizations implement "solutions" that somehow make things worse, not better. Everywhere you look, the waste is staggering. As Peter Drucker pointed out, there's nothing more dangerous than the right answer to the wrong question.There is a way to do better.The key is reframing, a crucial, underutilized skill that you can master with the help of this book. Using real-world stories and unforgettable examples like "the slow elevator problem," author Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg offers a simple, three-step method - Frame, Reframe, Move Forward - that anyone can use to start solving the right problems. Reframing is not difficult to learn. It can be used on everyday challenges and on the biggest, trickiest problems you face. In this visually engaging, deeply researched book, you’ll learn from leaders at large companies, from entrepreneurs, consultants, nonprofit leaders, and many other breakthrough thinkers.It's time for everyone to stop barking up the wrong trees. Teach yourself and your team to reframe, and growth and success will follow.

    In The Pursuit of Wow!, Tom Peters offers readers the words, the tools, to survive in tumultuous business environments. In his groundbreaking book, In Search of Excellence changed the way business does business. Now it’s time to take the next leap into the cyberstage era. Getting to a place called excellence is no longer the idea. You’ve got to take that leap, then leap again—catapult their imaginations, blow their mindsets—in a word, wow! them. Once more the unconventional Peters stimulates corporate thought processes. Along with the best of his columns, Peters includes questions and rebuttals that come from readers and listeners, as well as his own candid responses. A must-read for every business person.

    Many of us are also teaching, even when it's not in our job descriptions. Whether it's giving a presentation, writing documentation, or creating a website or blog, we need and want to share our knowledge with other people. But if you've ever fallen asleep over a boring textbook, or fast-forwarded through a tedious e-learning exercise, you know that creating a great learning experience is harder than it seems.In Design For How People Learn, you'll discover how to use the key principles behind learning, memory, and attention to create materials that enable your audience to both gain and retain the knowledge and skills you're sharing. Using accessible visual metaphors and concrete methods and examples, Design For How People Learn will teach you how to leverage the fundamental concepts of instructional design both to improve your own learning and to engage your audience.

    It is a collection of essays by one of Canada's greatest historians, on a subject that opened broad new avenues of thought on the role of media in the creation of history. Marshall McLuhan, deeply influenced by these essays, led North America to a new awareness of the role of media in contemporary culture. The works of Harold Innis are seminal in the study of Canadian history; the essays in this volume continue to generate intense dabate among historians, communications scholars, and media theorists.

    As an avowed technology optimist, I'm grateful for Keen who makes me stop and think before committing myself fully to the social revolution." —Larry Downes, author of The Killer AppIn Digital Vertigo, Andrew Keen presents today's social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Fusing a fast-paced historical narrative with front-line stories from today's online networking revolution and critiques of "social" companies like Groupon, Zynga and LinkedIn, Keen argues that the social media transformation is weakening, disorienting and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age. The tragic paradox of life in the social media age, Keen says, is the incompatibility between our internet longings for community and friendship and our equally powerful desire for online individual freedom. By exposing the shallow core of social networks, Andrew Keen shows us that the more electronically connected we become, the lonelier and less powerful we seem to be.

    We negotiate with our spouses, children, parents and friends. We negotiate when we rent an apartment, buy a car, purchase a house and apply for a job. Your ability to negotiate might even be the most important factor in your career advancement.Negotiation is also the key to business success. No organization can survive without contracts that produce profits. At a strategic level, businesses are concerned with value creation and achieving competitive advantage. But the success of high-level business strategies depends on contracts made with suppliers, customers and other stakeholders. Contracting capability-the ability to negotiate and perform successful contracts-is the most important function in any organization.This book is designed to help you achieve success in your personal negotiations and in your business transactions. The book is unique in two ways. First, the book not only covers negotiation concepts, but also provides practical actions you can take in future negotiations. This includes a Negotiation Planning Checklist and a completed example of the checklist for your use in future negotiations.The book also includes (1) a tool you can use to assess your negotiation style; (2) examples of "decision trees," which are useful in calculating your alternatives if your negotiation is unsuccessful; (3) a three-part strategy for increasing your power during negotiations; (4) a practical plan for analyzing your negotiations based on your reservation price, stretch goal, most-likely target, and zone of potential agreement; (5) clear guidelines on ethical standards that apply to negotiations; (6) factors to consider when deciding whether you should negotiate through an agent; (7) psychological tools you can use in negotiations-and traps to avoid when the other side uses them; (8) key elements of contract law that arise during negotiations; and (9) a checklist of factors to use when you evaluate your performance as a negotiator.Second, the book is unique in its holistic approach to the negotiation process. Other books often focus narrowly either on negotiation or on contract law. Furthermore, the books on negotiation tend to focus on what happens at the bargaining table without addressing the performance of an agreement. These books make the mistaken assumption that success is determined by evaluating the negotiation rather than evaluating performance of the agreement. Similarly, the books on contract law tend to focus on the legal requirements for a contract to be valid, thus giving short shrift to the negotiation process that precedes the contract and to the performance that follows.In the real world, the contracting process is not divided into independent phases. What happens during a negotiation has a profound impact on the contract and on the performance that follows. The contract's legal content should reflect the realities of what happened at the bargaining table and the performance that is to follow. This book, in contrast to others, covers the entire negotiation process in chronological order beginning with your decision to negotiate and continuing through the evaluation of your performance as a negotiator.A business executive in one of the negotiation seminars the author teaches as a University of Michigan professor summarized negotiation as follows: "Life is negotiation!" No one ever stated it better. As a mother with young children and as a company leader, the executive realized that negotiations are pervasive in our personal and business lives. With its emphasis on practical action, and with its chronological, holistic approach, this book provides a roadmap you can use when navigating through your life as a negotiator.

    In each case he identifies three principal arguments invariably used: (1) the perversity thesis, whereby any action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order is alleged to result in the exact opposite of what was intended; (2) the futility thesis, which predicts that attempts at social transformation will produce no effects whatever--will simply be incapable of making a dent in the status quo; (3) the jeopardy thesis, holding that the cost of the proposed reform is unacceptable because it will endanger previous hard-won accomplishments. He illustrates these propositions by citing writers across the centuries from Alexis de Tocqueville to George Stigler, Herbert Spencer to Jay Forrester, Edmund Burke to Charles Murray. Finally, in a lightning turnabout, he shows that progressives are frequently apt to employ closely related rhetorical postures, which are as biased as their reactionary counterparts. For those who aspire to the genuine dialogue that characterizes a truly democratic society, Hirschman points out that both types of rhetoric function, in effect, as contraptions designed to make debate impossible. In the process, his book makes an original contribution to democratic thought.The Rhetoric of Reaction is a delightful handbook for all discussions of public affairs, the welfare state, and the history of social, economic, and political thought, whether conducted by ordinary citizens or academics.

    I would awkwardly blunder my way through conversations and always end up embarrassing myself. However, instead of accepting my awful social skills as “part of me” I decided to overcome them and master small talk. And You Can Master Small Talk Too… In this book I detail everything I did to overcome my fear and inability to make small talk, so that you can do it too. You can pick up this book, read through it and have an actionable step-by-step structure to follow so you can master small talk. If you follow the simple structure and easy strategies I lay out then you will be able to converse with anyone, anytime, anywhere. I studied everything from esteemed psychologists all the way to pick-up artists so I could find the simplest ways to conquer my fears. Everything in this book has been boiled down to its simplest form and then molded into actionable steps. This means you don’t need to spend countless hours researching, reading and testing techniques, I did all that for you. You just need to read this book. As you work through the book you will learn the following: - The simplest, most actionable strategies for mastering small talk - How to effortlessly ‘open’ any conversation, no matter where you are - How to control your body language to make people want to talk to you - How to use small talk to get ahead in life - Simple psychological hacks to instantly improve your mood and radiate confidence - How to make other people want to talk to you And much, much more. But Why is Small Talk So Important Well, here's the funny thing… Most people don’t think small talk is important at all, but that’s because they aren’t aware just how powerful it is. If you learn to master small talk then you can use it to better your life in an almost infinite number of ways. Small talk can be used to do any of the following, and much more: - Get a new promotion at work - Meet a new romantic partner - Network with incredible people - Avoid being the awkward one at the party And that is only scratching the surface. So, if you hate how awkward you are in social situations and wish you could change, let me help you. I wrote this book to help people who were in the exact situation I was in just a few years ago. So, don’t let your poor social skills hold you back in life and cripple you. Instead, learn to master small talk. Buy the book now and learn how to make effortless small talk with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Click the “buy now” button and start conquering your fears and inabilities right now. I look forward to helping you on your journey.

    Through the telling of his life story, Jaworski posits that a real leader sets the stage on which "predictable miracles, " seemingly synchronistic in nature, can - and do - occur. He shows that this capacity has more to do with our being - our total orientation of character and consciousness - than with what we do. Leadership, he explains, is about creating - day by day - a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and are able to participate in shaping the future. He describes three basic shifts of mind required if we are to create and discover an unfolding future - shifts in how we see the world, how we understand relationships, and how we make commitments - and offers a new definition of leadership that applies to all types of leaders.