Uncover your blind spots and reset your leadership approach for long-lasting success in any businessFar too many business leaders today are using outdated practices to engage and motivate their people―and they’re failing miserably. Truly resilient, thriving organizations are those that are purpose driven and focus on more than pure profits. Purpose, or an underlying company philosophy, not only drives strategic change, but also encourages customer loyalty and employee engagement. In order to succeed, leaders must be willing to discard old ways of thinking and detrimental business habits—and recognize their blind spots. Authors Jim Haudan and Rich Berens identify the five most common leadership blind spots that hamper success: Purpose, Story, Engagement, Trust, and Truth. They take you straight into the board room of well-known leadership teams to illustrate how these blind spots play out and the impact they have on organizations. You’ll learn how to identify and overcome your own blind spots and embrace positive, forward-thinking new practices. What Are Your Blind Spots equips you with the tools needed for a personal leadership reset. You’ll discover how to increase engagement, productivity, and growth in your own organization. This is an invaluable guide for executives, managers, team leaders, and human resource professionals looking for an effective way to engage and motivate employees at every level of an organization.

Build bridges, foster better relationships, and establish a more inclusive school community. In her direct yet conversational style, Hedreich Nichols examines discriminatory classroom practices and offers strategies for eliminating them. You'll acquire the knowledge and skills to identify biases that adversely affect your practice and learn how to move beyond those biases to ensure a more equitable, inclusive campus culture. Recognize your own personal biases and how they affect the classroom. Learn how your language can reinforce discrimination and how to choose inclusive language instead. Understand gender and sexuality and how they relate to identity. Discover ways to celebrate and foster diversity daily. Identify microaggressions and how they create barriers to relationships. Contents: Foreword Introduction Chapter 1: Bias and Belonging Chapter 2: Bias, Guilt, and Accountability Chapter 3: Bias, Language, and Labels Chapter 4: Bias in Curriculum Chapter 5: Bias and Cultural Expression Chapter 6: Bias and Gender Equality Chapter 7: Bias and Representation Chapter 8: Bias in Action--What Not to Do and Say Conclusion References and Resources Index

Why absolute certainty is impossible in science In today's unpredictable and chaotic world, we look to science to provide certainty and answers—and often blame it when things go wrong. The Blind Spot reveals why our faith in scientific certainty is a dangerous illusion, and how only by embracing science's inherent ambiguities and paradoxes can we truly appreciate its beauty and harness its potential. Crackling with insights into our most perplexing contemporary dilemmas, from climate change to the global financial meltdown, this book challenges our most sacredly held beliefs about science, technology, and progress. At the same time, it shows how the secret to better science can be found where we least expect it—in the uncertain, the ambiguous, and the inevitably unpredictable. William Byers explains why the subjective element in scientific inquiry is in fact what makes it so dynamic, and deftly balances the need for certainty and rigor in science with the equally important need for creativity, freedom, and downright wonder. Drawing on an array of fascinating examples—from Wall Street's overreliance on algorithms to provide certainty in uncertain markets, to undecidable problems in mathematics and computer science, to Georg Cantor's paradoxical but true assertion about infinity—Byers demonstrates how we can and must learn from the existence of blind spots in our scientific and mathematical understanding. The Blind Spot offers an entirely new way of thinking about science, one that highlights its strengths and limitations, its unrealized promise, and, above all, its unavoidable ambiguity. It also points to a more sophisticated approach to the most intractable problems of our time.

“Accessible and authoritative . . . While we may not have much power to eradicate our own prejudices, we can counteract them. The first step is to turn a hidden bias into a visible one. . . . What if we’re not the magnanimous people we think we are?”—The Washington Post I know my own mind. I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way. These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. “Blindspot” is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases. Writing with simplicity and verve, Banaji and Greenwald question the extent to which our perceptions of social groups—without our awareness or conscious control—shape our likes and dislikes and our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential. In Blindspot, the authors reveal hidden biases based on their experience with the Implicit Association Test, a method that has revolutionized the way scientists learn about the human mind and that gives us a glimpse into what lies within the metaphoric blindspot. The title’s “good people” are those of us who strive to align our behavior with our intentions. The aim of Blindspot is to explain the science in plain enough language to help well-intentioned people achieve that alignment. By gaining awareness, we can adapt beliefs and behavior and “outsmart the machine” in our heads so we can be fairer to those around us. Venturing into this book is an invitation to understand our own minds. Brilliant, authoritative, and utterly accessible, Blindspot is a book that will challenge and change readers for years to come. Praise for Blindspot “Conversational . . . easy to read, and best of all, it has the potential, at least, to change the way you think about yourself.”—Leonard Mlodinow, The New York Review of Books “Banaji and Greenwald deserve a major award for writing such a lively and engaging book that conveys an important message: Mental processes that we are not aware of can affect what we think and what we do. Blindspot is one of the most illuminating books ever written on this topic.”—Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D., distinguished professor, University of California, Irvine; past president, Association for Psychological Science; author of Eyewitness Testimony

The Voynich Manuscript has been considered to be the world's most mysterious book. Filled with strange illustrations and an unknown language, it challenged the world's top code-crackers for nearly a century. But in just four-and-a-half months, Dr. Gordon Rugg, a renowned researcher, found evidence (which had been there all along) that the book could be a giant, glittering hoax. In Blind Spot: Why We Fail to See the Solution Right in Front of Us, Dr. Rugg shares his story and shows how his toolkit of problem-solving techniques—such as his Verifier Method—can save the day, particularly in those times when the experts on your team have all the data in front of them but are still unaccountably at an impasse. In the tradition of Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely, Dr. Rugg, a rising star in computer science, challenges us to re-examine the way we think, and provides new tools to solve problems and crack codes in our own lives.

The coauthors of the New York Times–bestselling Difficult Conversations take on the toughest topic of all: how we see ourselves Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen have spent the past fifteen years working with corporations, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In Thanks for the Feedback, they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging, offering a simple framework and powerful tools to help us take on life’s blizzard of offhand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited input with curiosity and grace. They blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice. Thanks for the Feedback is destined to become a classic in the fields of leadership, organizational behavior, and education.

The shadow of a tree in upstate New York. A hotel room in Switzerland. A young stranger in the Congo. In Blind Spot, readers will follow Teju Cole's inimitable artistic vision into the visual realm, as he continues to refine the voice and intellectual obsessions that earned him such acclaim for Open City. In more than 150 pairs of images and surprising, lyrical text, Cole explores his complex relationship to the visual world through his two great passions: writing and photography. Blind Spot is a testament to the art of seeing by one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature.