We live in a world of illusion. Our eyes are lying to us every day of our lives. While many of these illusions are fun to witness, in the realm of leadership, a person living in a world of illusion can find themselves quickly out of business. Leadership Illusions will clearly outline twenty-one common illusions and help you see the reality of true leadership in a transformative way. Through stories, quotes, and illustrations, Ken Hartley pulls back the curtain on how real leaders lead with excellence and shows you where the smoke and mirrors are and how to avoid the pitfalls so prevalent in the world today. Ken Hartley is a keynote speaker, best-selling author, and a transformation agent. He lives to help organizations and individuals unlock their potential in the areas of personal growth, communication, and leadership.

People need a degree of free choice for creativity and change to happen. But they must also have boundaries. At one level this is what politics and business are all about. Too much of the wrong sort of control and the system becomes bureaucratic or tyrannical, too little and it becomes arbitrary and chaotic.

We may say we want to be inclusive, but what if we really don’t? What if our brains are hard-wired for selfishness and similarity and not for diversity and altruism? Having a diverse workforce is no guarantee that the work environment is inclusive. Companies hire for diversity and manage for similarity. We hire people for their difference and then teach them directly and indirectly what they have to do to fit in to the corporate culture. The Illusion of Inclusion exposes a myriad of diverse reasons why people are not more fully engaged and offers you the key to unlock the “Geometry of Inclusion”. This book takes the lid off Pandora’s box and explores the complexity of inclusion; where affinity bias or “mini-me” syndrome and the need to fit in are unconsciously blocking our ability to be inclusive. It offers a road map and an easy to comprehend model on how to minimize the impact of unconscious and conscious biases in order to embed an inclusive organizational culture.

While in grad school in the early 1990s, Chris Niebauer began to notice striking parallels between the latest discoveries in psychology, neuroscience, and the teachings of Buddhism, Taoism, and other schools of Eastern thought. When he presented his findings to a professor, his ideas were quickly dismissed as “pure coincidence, nothing more.” Fast-forward 20 years later and Niebauer is a PhD and a tenured professor, and the Buddhist-neuroscience connection he found as a student is practically its own genre in the bookstore. But according to Niebauer, we are just beginning to understand the link between Eastern philosophy and the latest findings in psychology and neuroscience and what these assimilated ideas mean for the human experience. In this groundbreaking book, Niebauer writes that the latest research in neuropsychology is now confirming a fundamental tenet of Buddhism, what is called Anatta, or the doctrine of “no self.” Niebauer writes that our sense of self, or what we commonly refer to as the ego, is an illusion created entirely by the left side of the brain. Niebauer is quick to point out that this doesn't mean that the self doesn't exist but rather that it does so in the same way that a mirage in the middle of the desert exists, as a thought rather than a thing. His conclusions have significant ramifications for much of modern psychological modalities, which he says are spending much of their time trying to fix something that isn’t there. What makes this book unique is that Niebauer offers a series of exercises to allow the reader to experience this truth for him- or herself, as well as additional tools and practices to use after reading the book, all of which are designed to change the way we experience the world—a way that is based on being rather than thinking.

What is this place called the comfort zone? Where does the comfort zone exist? Why is stepping outside of the comfort zone so frightening? "The Comfort Zone Illusion" answers those questions by taking you on a journey of discovery to uncover the mystery of the very personal space we call our comfort zone. It is an exploration through the stages of change, beginning with the very first step outside of the comfort zone to exposing the five walls of fear that create barriers to change. This book looks beyond the illusion of comfort to the stark reality of the discomfort of change, and offers strategies to transform fear to energy, break down the brick walls of fear, develop movement habits, and create success enablers. Every breakthrough exercise provides a reflective understanding of your comfort zone, and although the exercises have a specific purpose, each offers a chance to reveal an "a-ha" moment. One of those moments is the turning point, the awakening to move you out of being stuck in the comfort of where you are to where you are meant to be.

Leaving your comfort zone is frightening, and fear can stifle action, inhibit the ability to attempt a new approach, and can create unnecessary stress, making you less likely to welcome change as an opportunity for discovery, growth, and personal development. The author, Susan Neustrom, shares numerous stories about confusion, uncertainty, anxiety, and success derived from her life-changing experience of facing her fear of educational failure from being a high-school dropout at sixteen by returning to school at forty-eight to earn a GED and then a doctorate. Susan conveys her thoughts, feelings, and unbelievable discomfort with leaving her comfort zone, as well as many "a-ha" moments, in her personal transformation of abandoning a twenty-two-year career to follow her vision to do work with greater purpose and meaning. Not only does she offer her personal account, she also shares the stories of people in a variety of situations, and from experts who clearly understand change.

If you are stuck in your comfort zone, ready for change, but walls of "I can't" stand in your way, this book shows you how leaving your comfort zone is not so hard after all. "The Comfort Zone Illusion" truly demonstrates that possibilities are endless once you learn how to get out of the discomfort of being in your comfort zone, eliminate fear, and unleash purpose, passion, and potential.

The bestselling author of Beyond Greed and Fear puts behavioral concepts into corporate practice Psychologically smart companies manage both the pluses and minuses of human psychology through well-structured systems and processes. In Ending the Management Illusion, behavioral finance pioneer Hersh Shefrin addresses the biases that can take you or your organization off course and shows how to run psychologically smart businesses-specifically as it affects your bottom line. Shefrin explores the psychological barriers you experience, and delivers concrete debiasing techniques for breaking through these barriers. This allows you to integrate your processes for accounting, planning, incentives, and information sharing-the main elements for optimizing corporate value.

*Major New York Times Bestseller *More than 2.6 million copies sold *One of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year *Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year *Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient *Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.