90 Steps to Employee Engagement & Staff Motivation

In this powerful indictment of George W. Bush's White House, environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., charges that the administration has taken corporate favoritism to unprecedented heights -- threatening our health, our national security, and our democracy.

Kennedy lifts the veil on how the administration, in order to enrich its corporate paymasters, has eviscerated the laws that protect our nation's air, water, public lands, and wildlife. He describes the White House doling out lavish subsidies and tax breaks to energy barons while allowing the corporations to profit by poisoning the public and eliminating security at the more than 15,000 nuclear and chemical facilities that are prime targets for terrorist attacks. He shows how right-wing White House ideologues have taken the "conserve" out of conservatism and trampled the free-market democracy in favor of a kind of corporate-crony capitalism that is as antithetical to democracy, efficiency, and prosperity in America as it is in Nigeria.

Crimes Against Nature is a book for both Democrats and Republicans, people like the traditionally conservative farmers and fishermen whom Kennedy represents in lawsuits against polluters. "Without exception," he writes, "these people see the current administration as the greatest threat not just to their livelihoods but to their values, their sense of community, and their idea of what it means to be American."

Why do so many scorecard projects fail? Why do managers treat information as a source of power to be protected, instead of an asset to be exploited? Clearly there has to be a better way of managing perfomance. After witnessing countless initiatives fail, Oracle thought leader and former Gartner analyst Frank Buytendijk challenges conventional wisdom on the best practices of performance management and developed a new framework that predicts and improves organizational behavior--which in turn maximizes business performance both inside and outside an organization.

In Performance Leadership, Buytendijk takes a breakthrough approach that focuses on people's behaviors both within and outside of the organization. He presents the “next practices” of performance management, revealing that the trick is to focus on human behaviors to create strategic alignment across the organization. After reviewing the most popular methodologies today, Frank shows how predicting and correcting human behaviors is the key to achieving your desired results.

Performance management is intended to support decision making, manage business operations, and drive people’s behavior. In most cases, however, the behavioral side is forgotten. The framework in Performance Leadership enables you to

• Motivate your people to follow a common path
• Avoid dysfunctional behaviors
• Create strategic alignment--all people taking the right actions
• Raise the bar of expected performance

Full of case studies, practical examples, and unconventional thinking, Performance Leadership will help you create better management processes and performance indicators that will help you make the most of your scorecards and strategic plans.

Our changing performance landscape is still evolving, as it continues to be formed by strict regulations on compliance and transparency, a global economy, social pressures of greater corporate responsibility, and a wave of new business innovations. In this ever-changing new business environment, Performance Leadership is a forward-thinking road map you cannot afford to be without.

“Clark and his team discovered some surprising truths about highly engaged people that cross cultural, demographic, and industry lines. The Employee Engagement Mindset unlocks the door to our own personal and professional connectedness.”
—Marshall Goldsmith, author of the New York Times bestsellers MOJO and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

“The Employee Engagement Mindset is an outstanding companion guide for anyone who wants to sustain a high level of engagement in both personal and professional life. It lays out in clear, practical terms how highly engaged people think and what they do. I highly recommend it.”
—Vai Sikahema, NBC Philadelphia sports anchor and former NFL All-Pro, Philadelphia Eagles

“The Employee Engagement Mindset shows that engagement is not mental gymnastics, but six specific drivers of management and employee action. The book captures the emerging search for meaning and purpose in organizations and offers fantastic concepts, tools, and examples of how to go beyond rhetoric to action and resolve.”
—Dave Ulrich, professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and partner, The RBL Group

“There has been a lot written about employee engagement from the leader’s perspective. What excites me about The Employee Engagement Mindset is that it is written for employees. It offers a blueprint for high engagement that really works.”
—Patricia Longshore, vice president, Duke Corporate Education

“The six drivers introduced in this book have the powerful capacity to enrich your life, no matter where you are on the engagement spectrum. Read this book—for both inspiration and practical strategies to supercharge your organization!”
—Elliott Masie, chair, The Learning CONSORTIUM

“Clark advances a well-considered approach to creating a culture of superior employee engagement. This is a worthy read for every aspiring leader.”
—Douglas R. Conant, former president and CEO, Campbell Soup Company and New York Times bestselling author of TouchPoints

About the Book:

When it comes to employee engagement, Timothy R. Clark goes where no one has gone before. One of today’s leading experts on the subject, Clark reveals that the business world has been focusing on only half the question—namely, the organization’s role in driving employee engagement. Clark points to the other interested party—the employee.

Through extensive research, the author has discovered that approximately 75 percent of employees are not fully engaged with their work—a frighteningly high number with frighteningly dire consequences for both companies and individual employees. The Employee Engagement Mindset is a step-by-step guide to reversing this pattern, one employee at a time. Clark breaks it all down into six key behaviors:

Connecting: Form solid relationships with coworkers and align your behavior to the organization’s culture and goals
Shaping: Seize opportunities for tailoring experiences based on your personal preferences
Learning: Take proactive measures to learn at or above the speed of change
Stretching: Move out of your comfort zone and take calculated risks
Achieving: Accomplish your goals
Contributing: Make personal contributions that drive lasting positive change to others and to the company

The Employee Engagement Mindset provides practical advice on how any employee can put him or herself on the fast track to true engagement using this six-part model. With high levels of engagement come organizational success and improvements in employees’ professional and personal lives. Employees who take ownership and pride in their work get results with energy, passion, and purpose. They stay in their jobs longer, innovate faster, and execute better.

Simply put, every engaged employee is worth his or her weight in gold. Whether you’re in charge of driving employee engagement or feel the need to take personal responsibility for excelling at work, The Employee Engagement Mindset tells you everything you need to know.

Don't Mind If I Do

Don't let that tanned, handsome, charming surface fool you. Beneath the bronzed façade is a mischievous mind with a wicked wit. George Hamilton doesn't miss a thing. With a front row seat for classic Hollywood's biggest secrets and scandals, George has the intelligence, heart, and unflappable spirit to tell his story, and the story of Tinseltown's heyday, with great good humor and delicious candor -- as only he can. From Where the Boys Are to Dancing with the Stars; from Mary Pickford to Elizabeth Taylor; from smalltown Arkansas to the capitals of Europe -- it's all here, and George has lived to tell and to laugh about it.

As the child of a Dartmouth-educated bandleader father and a glamorous Southern debutante mother whose marriage crumbled early on, George had a childhood filled with misadventures and challenges that his mother always seemed able to turn from tragedy to comedy. Her idea of changing the family's fortunes involved a trip cross-country with three sons and a poodle in a Lincoln Continental, making stops along the way to search for husband/father number three. And she was quick to recognize that George's potential success lay in Hollywood.

George starved nobly for his art in the late 1950s, but was soon starring in major motion pictures directed by the likes of Vincente Minnelli and Louis Malle. He has forgotten more about Hollywood than most movie experts will ever know and shares intimate and hugely entertaining stories of his friendships with Cary Grant; Brigitte Bardot; Robert Mitchum; Merle Oberon; Mae West; Sammy Davis, Jr.; and Judy Garland -- not to mention Lyndon B. Johnson and Elvis's Colonel Tom Parker as well as the King himself -- among others. The world is Hamilton's oyster, and this ultimate insider is ready to share it with us. So fasten your seat belt. We'll tell you when it's safe to move about the cabin again.

When Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. “May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!” For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door—William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in its first years, Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan in 2011. And at the same time, Poetry continues to discover the new voices who will be read a century from now.

Poetry’s archives are incomparable, and to celebrate the magazine’s centennial, editors Don Share and Christian Wiman combed them to create a new kind of anthology, energized by the self-imposed limitation to one hundred poems. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive—or even to offer the most familiar works—they have assembled a collection of poems that, in their juxtaposition, echo across a century of poetry. Adrienne Rich appears alongside Charles Bukowski; poems by Isaac Rosenberg and Randall Jarrell on the two world wars flank a devastating Vietnam War poem by the lesser-known George Starbuck; August Kleinzahler’s “The Hereafter” precedes “Prufrock,” casting Eliot’s masterpiece in a new light. Short extracts from Poetry’s letters and criticism punctuate the verse selections, hinting at themes and threads and serving as guides, interlocutors, or dissenting voices.

The resulting volume is an anthology like no other, a celebration of idiosyncrasy and invention, a vital monument to an institution that refuses to be static, and, most of all, a book that lovers of poetry will devour, debate, and keep close at hand.