Accessible and practical book providing a guide for building entrepreneurial workforces through carefully designed strategic conversations between management and employees.

Two leading experts on designing strategic conversations unveil a simple, creative process that allows teams to tackle their most challenging issues. In our fast-changing world, leaders are increasingly confronted by messy, multifaceted challenges that require collaboration to resolve. But the standard methods for tackling these challenges—meetings packed with data-drenched presentations or brainstorming sessions that circle back to nowhere—just don’t deliver. Great strategic conversations generate breakthrough insights by combining the best ideas of people with different backgrounds and perspectives. In this book, two experts “crack the code” on what it takes to design creative, collaborative problem-solving sessions that soar rather than sink. Drawing on decades of experience as innovation strategists—and supported by cutting-edge social science research, dozens of real-life examples, and interviews with well over 100 thought leaders, executives, and fellow practitioners— they unveil a simple, creative process that leaders and their teams can use to unlock solutions to their most vexing issues. The book also includes a “Starter Kit” full of tools and tips for putting the book’s core principles into practice.

Most organizations fail to take full advantage of their employees' knowledge, initiative, and imagination. In this accessible and practical book, J.-C. Spender and Bruce Strong provide a guide for building entrepreneurial workforces through carefully designed conversations between management and employees. These 'strategic conversations' make employees partners in the strategy development process, engaging them to help shape the organization's future. The result is transformational: instead of strategy being a dry, periodic planning exercise for the few, it becomes a dynamic and continuous act of co-creation enriched by the many. Case studies illustrate how leading organizations have used strategic conversations to build sustained competitive advantage, create innovative business models, make better decisions under uncertainty, reduce the need for change management, and enhance employee engagement. The book will appeal to managers, entrepreneurs of all stripes, and teachers and students in schools of business and public administration.

Planning can be challenging in the contemporary congregation, where people share a common faith and values but may have very different preferences and needs. Much of the literature on congregational planning presents it as a technical process: the leader serves as the chief problem solver, and the goal is finding "the solution to the problem." Rendle and Mann equip congregational leaders with a broad and creative range of ideas, pathways, processes, and tools for planning. By choosing the resources that best suit their needs and context, congregations will shape their own strengthening, transforming, holy conversation. They will find a path that is faithful to their identity and their relationship with God. Resource materials are available to purchasers of the book. E-mail [email protected] for more information.

What are Conversation Strategies? They are techniques that help the speaker and listener keep a conversation going to its natural and desired conclusion. They are skills that supplement the linguistic and sociolinguistic skills most texts focus on: grammar, vocabulary, and usage. To develop strategic competence, students must learn the words, phrases, and conventions used as two speakers engage in the active give-and-take of conversation. These are the strategies we use to get more information, make comparisons, correct someone politely, agree and disagree, summarize, share information, and make decisions in a business meeting. Students also practice polite forms, rejoinders, clarifications, follow-up questions, getting a response, expressing probability, interrupting, and avoiding conversation killers. Each activity has three parts: a teacher's introduction, a written introductory exercise to be done by students individually, and pair/group practice that makes us!e of information gap and other interactive formats. -- From product description.

Get competitive by learning to think strategically.The inability to set good strategy can sink a company¿and a leader¿s career. A recent Wall Street Journal study revealed that the most sought-after executive skill is strategic thinking, but only three out of ten managers have this skill set.Horwath explains the three keys to strategic thinking, breaks them down into simple, attainable skills, and gives you practical tools to apply them every day, providing managers with a clear path to mastery of the three disciplines: 1. Acumen¿generate critical insights through a step-by-step evaluation of your business and its environment2. Allocation¿focus your limited resources through strategic trade-offs 3. Action¿implement a system to guarantee effective execution of strategy at all levels of your organization Based on new research with senior executives from 150 companies and the author¿s experience as a thought-leading strategist, Deep Dive is the first book to focus on the most important level of strategy¿you. Armed with this knowledge and dozens of effective tools, you can become a truly strategic leader for your organization.--Rich Horwath is the president of the Strategic Thinking Institute, a former chief strategy officer, and professor of strategy at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management. As a thought-leading strategist, he has worked with such giants as Adidas, Amgen, and Pfizer. He is the author of four books and more than fifty articles on strategic thinking and has been profiled in business publications around the world, including Investor¿s Business Daily.

Fully revised and updated—the national bestselling communication skills guide that will help you achieve personal and professional success one conversation at a time. The master teacher of positive change through powerful communication, Susan Scott wants you to succeed. To do that, she explains, you must transform everyday conversations at work and at home with effective ways to get your message across—and get what you want. In this guide, which includes a workbook and The Seven Principles of Fierce Conversations, Scott teaches you how to: • Overcome barriers to meaningful communication • Expand and enrich relationships with colleagues, friends, and family • Increase clarity and improve understanding • Handle strong emotions—on both sides of the table • Connect with colleagues, customers and family at a deep level Includes a Foreword by Ken Blanchard, the bestselling co-author of The One Minute Manager