Fatal Illusions: Shredding a Dozen Unrealities That Can Keep Your Organization from Success

Why do our best efforts at change always seem to stall? What stops us from moving forward? As individuals and as organizations, we lay the blame on a lack of time, information, money, or motivation. However, our own illusions are usually the true culprit. As this insightful book will quickly convince you, getting real is the only way to really get ahead. We labor under fatal illusions when we base our behavior on what we wish to be true about our business, or about the marketplace, rather than on what is actually true. We treat our symptoms while core problems fester unchecked. The syndrome is all too common, but there is a remedy. Fatal Illusions shows how to dig out the truth and free yourself for positive action. This book analyzes 12 major illusions with significant power to harm you and your organization. The illusions involve too-comfortable beliefs about mission statements, teamwork, incentives, and other big issues that soak up time and resources--and they may startle you by hitting so close to home. For example:
"Of course our people understand what's important"
"Everybody knows what quality is"
"We don't need passion if we have a good plan"
"Just give people a chance and they'll work together" Throughout the book, self-tests help you pinpoint which fatal illusions are lurking in your organization. Then you'll learn proven, specific techniques for correcting the misperceptions, one by one. You'll discover how to uproot the fallacies that prevent successful implementation of benchmarking, employee empowerment, and other management initiatives. Deeper and more far-reaching than virtually any other management book, Fatal Illusions is your guide to becoming "unstuck" in business and in life. By helping you squarely face "the things you know that just ain't so," it will propel you from your current plateau to brand-new heights of success.

Fatal Illusions: Shredding a Dozen Unrealities That Can Keep Your Organization From Success

Business & Money

Lucas, James R.

Management & Leadership

Quintessential Books

Power. This groundbreaking book takes you far beyond "empowerment" into the much more effective world of powersharing. It takes a fresh look at how power can be used as a means of adding and creating value. It challenges you to ask yourself and others in your organization some crucial questions: Are we using power as a tool or as a goal? Are we using power to liberate or to dominate? Do we understand the competitive advantage of having a balance of power? This mind-opening book will show you how to share power, who to share it with, how much to give away, and how much to keep.

Balance of Power: Fueling Employee Power without Relinquishing Your Own

With great accessability and wisdom, James Lucas offers creative ideas for touching your kids' hearts and connecting with their souls. As a father of four grown children, Lucas understands the range of approaches needed for different age groups, different seasons in life, and different personalities. Discover words, actions, people, and even problems that can create connections between you and your kids. With these paragraph-long suggestions you can create life-long memories with the people you love most.

1001 Ways to Connect with Your Kids

Parenting & Relationships

James R. Lucas (Foreword by Cheri Keaggy)

Parenting

Do you want an organization with an unmistakable identity, a vision so compelling that people invest themselves in the cause and compete for a chance to join you? This booklet shows you how to fashion a powerful charter for success. 
 A great organization pursues a great vision -- a vision, forged by passionate, committed people in the organization. A passionately shared vision draws on all of their ideas, personalities, and passions to build a unique organization, one whose success can be admired but not replicated. 
 World-class leaders don't stop there: they design cultures that draw out and align the individual passions of all their people with the passions of the organization. When a passionate organization™ meets an organization whose people are merely engaged, the passionate organization™ will triumph every time. 
 This step-by-step guide will show you how to design 7 factors in your organization around a powerful core, clear 5 obstacles to building a passionate organization, and build 10 key elements into your organization to ignite and sustain its passion.

The Passion Principle: Designing a Passionate Organization

Phil Hotsenpiller

J. R. Lucas

Leaders soon learn that it's impossible to inject motivation into people who lack passion. So how do you find and keep the truly passionate, committed, pure-performance™ people who will take your organization or team to new levels of success? 
 If you're tired of stunts and fads and interviewing gimmicks, this indispensable guide will show you how to get down to what really matters. 
 The handbook provides 5 major sources of clues to help you identify passionate people, an elegantly simple way to determine whether this passionate person is right for this organization, 10 keys to keeping the people you've worked so hard to find, and 7 Keys to Effective Teams™.

The Attraction Principle: Finding, Keeping, and Teaming Passionate People

James R. Lucas

Why do smart people so often collaborate to produce stupid decisions and plans? Why do we so often seem to end up with "lowest-common-denominator" ideas and solutions? Do we have structural and process barriers to innovation? Even though we have good intentions, are we inadvertantly destroying value? Discover how to build 10 key elements into your organization to make it a Thinking Organization™ - an organization that creates more value collectively than smart people could create alone. Learn how to harness this intelligence with 10 essentials for generating an innovative culture. And find out how to get everyone passionately focused on making things better and creating new value - instead of just "doing a job."

The Thinking Principle: Using Passion to Innovate and Create Value

Competing ideas are everywhere. Even the smart people on your team hold passionate differences of opinion. This handbook provides a breakthrough approach to merging those competing ideas to generate value and produce commitment. Leaders wonder, can I be creative and disciplined? Zealous and open-minded? Focused and able to listen for input? Seeing both sides gives leaders a chance to carve out unique contributions and produce results their competitors can't imitate. Find out how to lead passionate mergers of competing ideas with this innovative, practical guide.

The Paradox Principle: How Passionate Leaders Merge Competing Ideas

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