One of the nation's premier talent agents and career advisors shows you how to catapult your career and your life forward with three key communication strategies—Authority, Warmth, and Energy. A self-empowerment guide to achieving your fullest professional and personal potential, Don’t Take YES for An Answer explains why positive feedback limits personal and professional growth and then teaches you how to embrace hard truths and critical feedback to escape mediocrity and break away from the pack. To stand out, to attract the attention of those who can raise your profile, to protect yourself during lean times, or to gain the interest of future employers, you must harness three critical communication traits that human beings respond to most: AWE: A—Authority. W—Warmth. E—Energy. When all else is equal—education, work ethic, intelligence, experience, ambition—the single biggest factor in winning business, promotions, friendships, or followers hinges on our ability to communicate and connect. Mastering AWE gives you an unparalleled advantage over the competition, no matter your field. Herz, who has represented and coached dozens of sports, media, and entertainment leaders over the course of nearly three decades, delivers a step-by-step program that helps you understand and hone your AWE skills. Packed with inspiring success stories, grounded in the latest social psychology and scientific research, and featuring "insider" anecdotes from some of the most popular entrepreneurs and professionals in broadcasting, sports, and the corporate world—many personally coached by Herz—Don’t Take YES for An Answer provides invaluable suggestions and practical techniques for “upping” your AWE in every aspect of your life.

Harvard Business School's Michael Roberto draws on powerful decision-making case studies from every walk of life, showing how to promote honest, constructive dissent and skepticism; use it to improve decisions; and align organizations behind those decisions. Learn from disasters like the Space Shuttle Columbia and JFK's Bay of Pigs Invasion, from successes like Sid Caesar and Bill Parcells, from George W. Bush's decision-making after 9/11. Roberto complements his compelling case studies with extensive new research on executive decisionmaking. Discover how to test and probe a management team; when 'yes' means 'yes' and when it doesn't; and how to build real consensus that leads to action. Gain important new insights into managing teams, mitigating risk, promoting corporate ethics, and much more.

Problems remain hidden in organizations for a number of reasons, including fear, organizational complexity, gatekeepers who insulate leaders from problems that are coming up, and finally, an overemphasis on formal analysis in place of intuition and observation. This book lays out the key skills and capabilities required to ensure that problems do not remain hidden in your organization. It explains how leaders can become effective problem finders, unearthing problems before they destroy an organization. The book explains how leaders can become an anthropologist, going out and observe how employees, customers, and suppliers actually behave. It then goes on to present how they can circumvent the gatekeepers, so they can go directly to the source to see and hear the raw data; hunt for patterns, including refining your individual and collective pattern recognition capability; "connect the dots" among issues that may initially seem unrelated, but in fact, have a great deal in common; give front-line employees training in a communication technique; encourage useful mistakes, including create a "Red Pencil Award"; and watch the game film, where leaders reflect systematically on their own organization's conduct and performance, as well as on the behavior and performance of competitors.

George Kohlrieser—an international leadership professor, consultant, and veteran hostage negotiator—explains that it is only by openly facing conflict that we can truly progress through the most difficult business challenges. In this provocative book, he reveals how the proven techniques and psychological insights used in hostage negotiation can be applied successfully to any personal or business relationship. Step by step, he outlines the seven key factors that anyone can use to remove the blocks that stand in the way of resolving tough problems and shows how business leaders, in particular, can develop and access the skills they need to create trust and a positive mind-set in their companies.

‘NO’ is RJ’s least favorite word . . . and he tries his best to convince his dad, his mom, and his teacher to turn “No” into “Maybe” or “We’ll see” or “Later” or “I’ll think about it.” Author Julia Cook helps K-6 readers laugh and learn along with RJ as he understands the benefits of demonstrating the social skills of accepting “No” for an answer and disagreeing appropriately. Tips for parents and educators on how to teach and encourage kids to use these skills are included in the book. I Just Don’t Like the Sound of NO! is another in the BEST ME I Can Be! series of books from the Boys Town Press that teach children social skills.

"In 1974 I told the man in the dole office that had verbally gripped my balls and my life, that I would look after my family myself. There was no way on this earth that I would go cap in hand to him or anyone like him ever again."

This book directly confronts uncomfortable questions that many prefer to brush aside: if economists and other scholars, politicians, and business professionals understand the causes of economic crises, as they claim, then why do such damaging crises continue to occur? Can we trust business and intellectual elites who advocate the principles of Realpolitik and claim the "public good" as their priority, yet consistently favor maximization of profit over ethical issues?Former deputy prime minister of Russia Grigory Yavlinsky, an internationally respected free-market economist, makes a powerful case that the often-cited causes of global economic instability--institutional failings, wrong decisions by regulators, insufficient or incorrect information, and the like--are only secondary to a far more significant underlying cause: the failure to understand that universal social norms are essential to thriving businesses and social and economic progress. Yavlinsky explores the widespread disregard for moral values in business decisions and calls for restoration of principled behavior in politics and economic practices. The unwelcome alternative, he warns, will be a twenty-first-century global economy in the grip of unending crises.