Taking Care of Business Books

AI is already sitting on most of our laptops. Now to figure out how to make it work for us. There’s the person who tried it once, got a mediocre answer, and quietly went back to doing things the old way. The person who has somehow made it part of everything. And the manager wondering how to help an entire team find their footing somewhere in between. Underneath all of those different approaches are some very human feelings. Curiosity, skepticism, a little anxiety, and maybe the nagging feeling that everyone else has figured something out that you haven’t. Christopher Mims understands that. In How to AI, the Wall Street Journal columnist brings some welcome practicality, humor, and optimism to a subject that can feel overwhelming. He describes AI as an overconfident intern. Eager to help, remarkably capable, and occasionally willing to tell you something completely wrong with absolute conviction. Sometimes it even tells you what it thinks you want to hear. Which is a pretty good reminder to keep your own brain in the conversation. What if we used AI to become better at the things that make us human? Imagine asking AI to teach you how to fact-check information, then following the plan it creates. You're building a skill, strengthening your judgment, and becoming a little more capable along the way. There's something hopeful about that. A tool that helps us learn, think more critically, and discover what we're capable of. Mims offers another welcome perspective. For all the alarming headlines and predictions, he believes we're going to be okay. We’re excited to bring Christopher into conversation with organizations because this feels like a subject people need some room to explore together. The questions people are hesitant to ask. The experiments they're curious to try. The possibilities they haven't considered yet. Perhaps the opportunity with AI starts with getting curious enough to use it, and confident enough to keep thinking for yourself. What could your team become better at with AI by their side? Let us help you create a conversation that gets your people curious, confident, and ready to explore.  👉 https://lnkd.in/exQMJFEX If you don't already receive our monthly Know Ahead List of new releases, sign up! #EmployeeEngagement #ProfessionalDevelopment #LearningandDevelopment #CompanyCulture #TCOBBooks

What if one of your team's most valuable learning moments this year was a really great conversation? The kind that gets people thinking differently, asking better questions, and seeing their colleagues, and their work, from a new perspective. Imagine the best parts of a podcast, a book club and a TED Talk, brought together in one room. A nonfiction author with a fresh point of view. Stories that make big ideas feel real. Questions that open up new ways of thinking. With a room full of people who are connecting, challenging assumptions, sharing experiences, and learning from one another. We bring nonfiction authors and teams together for interactive conversations about the ideas, challenges, and questions shaping work and life right now. It's a chance to bring fresh thinking into your organization, create space for genuine dialogue, and give your people a shared experience they can keep building on. There's still time to make room for something different, engaging and meaningful. Something your people will still be talking about when the experience is over. What would you love your people to be thinking, questioning, or talking about before the year ends? 👉 https://lnkd.in/exQMJFEX If you don't already receive our monthly Know Ahead List of new releases, sign up! #EmployeeEngagement #ProfessionalDevelopment #LearningandDevelopment #CompanyCulture #TCOBBooks

Culture gets built in some surprisingly ordinary moments. It happens when someone asks a question and feels safe enough to hear the real answer. When a team wrestles with an idea together. When colleagues discover something about each other they didn’t know before. When a conversation reminds people what they’re working toward and why it matters. Sometimes, bringing people together around an idea worth exploring gives them a chance to step outside the day-to-day, get curious together, and see their work and each other a little differently. What conversations are helping your people feel connected to what your organization stands for? Let us help you create one worth having. https://lnkd.in/exQMJFEX

There’s an old story about a traveler beaten and left on the side of the road. People see him, and they keep walking. Then a stranger stops. He stays, helps and takes responsibility for someone he could easily have decided was somebody else’s problem. The story ends with an instruction. Go and do likewise. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear penned his new book, Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country, around those four words. The book draws on his faith and explores compassion, kindness, service and what it means to put those values into practice. Beshear has seen what those values look like when life gets very hard. Kentucky has endured devastating tornadoes and catastrophic flooding that destroyed homes and changed entire communities. In the middle of all that loss, people showed up for one another. Neighbors opened their doors. Communities dug out and rebuilt together. People dealing with damage and loss of their own still found the time and strength to help someone down the road who needed them. Values become real in the moments when someone has to choose what to do next. Sometimes that moment comes in the aftermath of a disaster. Sometimes it comes in a meeting when someone feels unheard. Or it might come in a hard conversation when patience is running thin, or on the day a team gets bad news and everyone is watching to see how the people leading them will respond. And then there’s hope. Beshear writes about holding onto hope through division, natural disasters, personal loss and the death of a close friend in a mass shooting. There’s something powerful about treating hope as something we practice. Something we return to when the easier response might be cynicism, frustration or simply walking past. Imagine a team reading this together and then sitting down with one question. What would “go and do likewise” look like here? What would it look like in the way we lead, the way we listen, or the way we show up for one another when things get hard. Look for the moments when it would be easy to keep walking. Those may be the moments when how we show up matters most. Let us help you create a conversation that gives your team a reason to stop, think, and choose how they want to show up for one another. And maybe, when Monday morning comes, someone stops and chooses differently. 👉 https://lnkd.in/exQMJFEX If you don't already receive our monthly Know Ahead List of new releases, sign up! #EmployeeEngagement #ProfessionalDevelopment #LearningandDevelopment #CompanyCulture #TCOBBooks

Every to-do list starts out with such optimism. There’s the new exercise habit you finally bought all the right equipment for and the big project you’re leading that has plenty of executive attention. You write it all down with every intention of following through. When things get busy, the urgent crowds out the important. A few weeks later, that beautifully organized list is crumpled at the bottom of your bag, and the thing you really wanted to do is still waiting. You didn’t stop caring. Caring was never the hard part. Chris Bailey understands that gap. In his new book, Intentional: How to Finish What You Start, he looks at the surprisingly human distance between what we say matters to us and what actually gets our time and attention. Chris is a fan of the Rule of Three, and his ideas are refreshingly practical. Pick three. Choose three intentions for your day or your week. This works beautifully for team updates, too. Three things worth moving forward. Make room to learn. Turn a performance goal into a learning goal. Suddenly, success includes what you discover, what you try, and how you get better along the way. Give yourself some grace. Because finishing something is hard enough without carrying a running commentary about all the ways you should be doing it better. There’s something hopeful about all of this. Most of us already have things we care about. Teams certainly have plenty of good ideas. The opportunity may simply be getting a little clearer about which ones deserve our attention now. When Monday morning arrives, what are the three things worth making room for? Let us help you create a conversation that gets your team moving on what matters most.  https://lnkd.in/exQMJFEX If you don't already receive our monthly Know Ahead List of new releases, sign up! #EmployeeEngagement #ProfessionalDevelopment #LearningandDevelopment #CompanyCulture #TCOBBooks

In 1945, a ten-year-old sang "Old Shep" in a youth talent contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show in Tupelo. He took fifth place. Eleven years later, he came back to that same fairground. This time the whole town showed up. Nobody in that 1945 crowd knew what they were watching, and he didn't either. Many of us are somebody's fifth place right now. Early in the work and still learning the song. That's usually how the good ones start. Happy homecoming, Elvis.

After many years of watching authors walk into rooms and start conversations, we’ve learned something about the ones people remember. The people who change a room are the ones who somehow make everyone else feel a little smarter. They make it safe to raise your hand and ask the question you’re still forming. The authors people remember most are the ones who help them recognize something in themselves. They remember the question that changed the direction of the conversation, followed by the laughter that loosened everyone up. And they remember how it felt to be there. As you plan your learning experiences through the end of the year, think beyond what you want people to learn. Give people a space where they feel smart enough to speak, curious enough to listen, and comfortable enough to see something new in themselves. Then see what they bring back to the rest of their work. 👉 https://lnkd.in/exQMJFEX If you don't already receive our monthly Know Ahead List of new releases, sign up! #EmployeeEngagement #ProfessionalDevelopment #LearningandDevelopment #CompanyCulture #TCOBBooks

We measure a lot of things, because there’s something deeply satisfying about knowing how we’re doing. Numbers help us see patterns, make decisions, and know whether we’re making progress, but what do they miss? That question sits at the heart of C. Thi Nguyen’s fascinating new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game. Nguyen is a Philosophy Professor at University of Utah who studies games and what gets lost when we turn complicated things into numbers. Two hours of screen time is two hours. The number doesn't tell us whether those hours were spent scrolling, learning chess, creating something, or connecting with someone we love. Work is full of those gaps, too. We count meetings, track participation, measure output and watch productivity. Meanwhile, some of the things that matter most are happening between the numbers. Three failed attempts lead to a breakthrough. Curiosity sends a conversation somewhere unexpected. A person gets better at something while doing the work. Those things are real. They’re just harder to put on a dashboard. The data matters, and so does the story the data can’t tell.  Thi Nguyen encourages us to stay curious about the space between what we can measure and what we actually value, because some of the richest parts of work happen there. Imagine trying something simply because you're curious and the pleasure of doing something well, even when nobody is keeping track. Maybe some of the best parts of work happen when we forget to check the dashboard. Let us help find the voice your team needs right now 👉 https://lnkd.in/exQMJFEX If you don't already receive our monthly Know Ahead List of new releases, sign up! #EmployeeEngagement #ProfessionalDevelopment #LearningandDevelopment #CompanyCulture #TCOBBooks

What does your team need to get better at right now? We believe that question deserves more than a generic reading list, and that’s why we created The People Leader’s Bookshelf. We curate authors around the challenges leaders are navigating every day, from leading through uncertainty and building stronger teams to communicating with greater influence, developing as a leader and protecting their own well-being. And now we can make the bookshelf YOURS. Tell us a little about what your people are working through, what you’d like them to explore and where you’d love to see growth. We’ll use your answers to create a custom Know Ahead List with books, authors and ideas selected specifically for your team. Create your own custom Know Ahead List: https://lnkd.in/esrBfKd2 #EmployeeEngagement #ProfessionalDevelopment #LearningandDevelopment #CompanyCulture #TCOBBooks

What caught our attention about the seven competencies is how human every one of them is. So much of leadership gets learned through people, stories, experiences and conversations that stay with us. Gallup’s framework has us thinking about what teams need to get better at right now?