WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER & FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH Connect your workforce, improve engagement, and drive productivity to undreamed-of levels Feelings of loneliness among employees are on the rise with 72% of global workers suffering from it. This sense of isolation is contributing to a real and growing mental health problem that affects both individuals and organizations. In Connectable, you’ll learn how tackling the issue of worker loneliness head on can transform an isolated workforce into one that’s happier, more engaged, and more productive. With more than a decade of experience spent helping companies lessen worker loneliness, Ryan Jenkins and Steven Van Cohen distill their methodology, showing you what’s causing today’s loneliness, the role inclusion plays in solving it, and how you can decrease loneliness and increase belonging, engagement, and performance with employees at every level―including yourself. You’ll learn how to: Identify lonely or burned out employees Build psychological safety within a team Create environments of belonging and inclusion Cultivate meaningful connections across team members (in person or remote) Build committed, driven, and high-performing organizations using the authors’ proprietary 4-step Less Loneliness FrameworkTM Jenkins and Van Cohen provide the perfect balance of science, statistics, stories, and strategies to help you move everyone on your team from isolated to all-in. Discover what ATMs, cocaine, Red Sox fans, and time travel have to do with moving teams from disconnected to connected. Connectable delivers the information, insights, and actionable strategies needed to awaken a renewed sense of connection throughout your organization.

ConnectED Leaders is a call to action for superintendents and school system leaders to grow lead and engage in professional leadership networks. The book is based on principles developed in our professional roles as authors, a district superintendent, educational researcher, non-profit leader, leadership development expert, and a K-16 branding consultant for education and business and our personal roles and as friends, siblings, co-workers and parents. The position we claim in highlighting professional leadership networks is grounded in our work and experience. Our belief in professional leadership networks leads us to collaborate upon the superintendency’s need to employ a strategy of growing professional networks, a first book in today's literature. We intend to help superintendents, novice or veteran, and other school system leaders recognize the importance of collaboration through professional leadership networks at a critical point in public education. With the call for more leadership collaboration and less isolation in today’s schools, we offer school system leaders essential principles of networking, that will help them develop and engage in strategic opportunities of collaboration as a means to strengthen and improve the superintendency, their school district organization, and their students’ success.

The Generation Z Guide equips professionals to improve recruitment, enhance engagement, and effectively train and develop the post-Millennial generation. Born after 1998, Generation Z ranges from those entering high school, completing undergraduate college, and starting careers. Generation Z is very different than Millennials and their rapid entrance into the workforce is increasing the complexity of managing and working across generations. In fact, 62 percent of Generation Z anticipate challenges working with Baby Boomers and Generation X. Generation Z has never known a Google-free world. Growing up during the most accelerated and game-changing periods of technological advancements in history has imprinted Generation Z with new behaviors, preferences, and expectations of work, communication, leadership, and much more. The Generation Z Guide's insights are research based and the applications are marketplace tested. Learn from leading companies on how best to attract, engage, and lead Generation Z.

The Millennial Manual equips leaders to increase productivity, improve retention, and accelerate the development of their Millennial workforce. It is the culmination of five years of research, hundreds of companies and thousands of leaders sharing their best practices for managing and working with Millennials.Since Millennials became a majority of the labor force, leaders have found themselves ill-equipped to successfully manage, develop, and engage this unprecedented generation. As a result, Millennials are the most disengaged and least loyal generation at work contributing to annual costs of $500 billion in lost productivity and $30.5 billion in Millennial turnover.In this book, you will learn:How-To Instill Work Ethic into Millennials.How-To Eliminate Entitlement in a Millennial Workforce.How-To Structure and Deliver Training that Transforms Millennials.How-To Cure (or Curb) Millennials' Career Impatience and Job Hopping.How-To Avoid the Top 2 Reasons Millennials Leave Companies.How-To Attract Millennials with the Right Company Perks.How-To Get Millennials to Answer Your Phone Call.And 40 more proven and practical how-tos!The Millennial Manual serves as a quick reference guide for solving (nearly) all of the challenges managers face when leading Millennials.

Facilitators exist wherever learning happens. Anyone who works in a community organization, a corporation, a government, or a healthcare environment can end up leading a workshop, running a course, or otherwise facilitating others’ learning. Facilitators can also be consultants or post-secondary instructors who have been hired to lead one course or more. However, many people haven’t been trained in how to facilitate learning effectively. Design to Engage is a “how to” book that will help you become an effective designer and facilitator of learning events. You will: • learn about facilitation roles and responsibilities; • discover what good learning experiences look like; • plan for and design effective learning events using practical, straightforward design strategies; • raise your awareness about how to create inclusive, comfortable environments. Along with specific recommendations on developing the skills and strategies necessary to be an effective facilitator, you’ll find priceless advice on creating participatory activities to keep learners involved, assessing participants’ learning, gathering feedback about learning experiences, and how to grow your facilitation practice. The more engaging and interactive you make your learning events, the more people will actually learn from them. Practical, accessible, and jam-packed with tools to support facilitators to create impactful learning experiences, Design to Engage is a revelation and an inspiration.

Digital transformation is not about technology--it's about change. In the rapidly changing digital economy, you can't succeed by merely tweaking management practices that led to past success. And yet, while many leaders and managers recognize the threat from digital--and the potential opportunity--they lack a common language and compelling framework to help them assess it and guide them in responding. They don't know how to think about their digital business model. In this concise, practical book, MIT digital research leaders Peter Weill and Stephanie Woerner provide a powerful yet straightforward framework that has been field-tested globally with dozens of senior management teams. Based on years of study at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), the authors find that digitization is moving companies' business models on two dimensions: from value chains to digital ecosystems, and from a fuzzy understanding of the needs of end customers to a sharper one. Looking at these dimensions in combination results in four distinct business models, each with different capabilities. The book then sets out six driving questions, in separate chapters, that help managers and executives clarify where they are currently in an increasingly digital business landscape and highlight what's needed to move toward a higher-value digital business model. Filled with straightforward self-assessments, motivating examples, and sharp financial analyses of where profits are made, this smart book will help you tackle the threats, leverage the opportunities, and create winning digital strategies.

The infrastructure-as-code revolution in IT is also affecting database administration. With this practical book, developers, system administrators, and junior to mid-level DBAs will learn how the modern practice of site reliability engineering applies to the craft of database architecture and operations. Authors Laine Campbell and Charity Majors provide a framework for professionals looking to join the ranks of today’s database reliability engineers (DBRE). You’ll begin by exploring core operational concepts that DBREs need to master. Then you’ll examine a wide range of database persistence options, including how to implement key technologies to provide resilient, scalable, and performant data storage and retrieval. With a firm foundation in database reliability engineering, you’ll be ready to dive into the architecture and operations of any modern database. This book covers: Service-level requirements and risk management Building and evolving an architecture for operational visibility Infrastructure engineering and infrastructure management How to facilitate the release management process Data storage, indexing, and replication Identifying datastore characteristics and best use cases Datastore architectural components and data-driven architectures