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Open Book Editions
A Berrett-Koehler/iUniverse Partnership
Open Book Editions is a self-publishing partner of Berrett-Koehler Publishers. OBE welcomes publications that fit the Berrett-Koehler mission -- Creating a World That Works for All. At Berrett-Koehler, we believe that to truly create a better world, action is needed at all levels -- individual, organizational, and societal. At the individual level, our books help people align their lives with their values and with their aspirations for a better world. At the organizational level,our books promote progressive leadership and management practices, socially responsible approaches to business, and humane and effective organizations. At the societal level, our books advance social and economic justice, shared prosperity, sustainability, and new solutions to national and global issues.
There may be titles you would expect from Berrett-Koehler such as personal development (BK Life), business (BK Business), and current affairs (BK Currents) books, but there may also be some new categories that might surprise you. Some of our authors, partners, and readers have written poetry books, so these may be published as Open Book Editions titles. Others have written memoirs or fiction with a message of hope. Still others have written wonderful relationship or parenting books. Books in these categories may be published as Open Book Editions as well. We will profile new titles on this page with links to their corresponding iUniverse pages for purchase.
Readers- New Titles in 2014
Balanced Effectiveness at Work
Balanced Effectiveness at Work: How to Enjoy the Fruits of Your Labor Without Driving Yourself Nuts is a useful compendium of tips, tools, and techniques to make being at work work better. Within each chapter there are conceptual definitions, sample scenarios, frank assessments, “Flip’s Tips,” action plans for real traction, and positive reinforcement. With a light-hearted but in-depth look at twenty-four wide-ranging topics, presented in a unique news-you-can-use format, it will provide you with real options, helpful resources, and renewed optimism.
“Flip Brown’s Balanced Effectiveness at Work is full of big reveals. One of the most important is how to replace perfectionism and judgment with empathy and engagement. This changes everything. You’ll find inspiration on every page!”
–Marshall Goldsmith, author of the New York Times bestseller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.
“‘Flip’ your conceptions about balance, with Flip Brown’s thoughtful, fun, insightful book Balanced Effectiveness at Work. It’s pragmatic, simple yet profound, and fosters moving from speed to significance to create a more meaningful life.”
–Kevin Cashman, bestselling author of Leadership from the Inside Out
• Building relationships
• Understanding the sales process
• Employing a diversified sourcing strategy
• Meeting with clients
• Evaluating why sales aren’t increasing
With case studies included, Pierce focuses on you and the value you deliver. By helping you to become more self-aware, you will develop stronger relationships that will in turn increase sales.
By Paul Ohana and David Arnow, PhD
Based on current thinking and research from the fields of management and psychology, Leadership in the Bible provides guidance about the most effective ways of responding to forty challenging situations you encounter every day. This guidance is grounded in the wisdom of three key figures in Hebrew Scripture—Abraham, Joseph, and Moses. It explores how they coped with similar challenges, and it provides recommendations about how to respond to these situations at work or at home. Each chapter ends with an essential lesson, a lesson that was true thousands of years ago and remains so today.
Leadership in the Bible is the product of a journey taken through the Bible by a management consultant and a psychologist. The authors merge their two perspectives to create a unique way of thinking about familiar ancient stories and how they relate to the difficult questions you encounter in life today.
Look What Happened to My Pocket Change!
Most people think going to work every day and working hard are the main elements that determine wealth. Some people even think holding down two jobs will secure their financial futures. But hard work alone won’t allow the average low- to middle-income individual to live well or control debt.
In Look What Happened to My Pocket Change! author Rochelle Melanie provides a guide to help low- to middle-income individuals learn how to create wealth, overcome obstacles that prevent them from saving and investing, and manage money better.
Rochelle describes her personal experiences with spending, saving, and investing to demonstrate techniques for creating financial stability. She discusses:
• Where wealth comes from
• The importance of organization
• The benefits of a good work ethic
• Credit and paying bills
• Banks, finance companies, and loan stores
• Coupons, rebates, reward points, and dollar stores
• How real savings begins
• Savings bonds, mutual funds, the stock market, real estate, and life insurance
Look What Happened to My Pocket Change! details techniques for wise investing, smart borrowing, and getting organized that anyone can adopt in order to enhance their lifestyles.
The Next Money Crash- And How to Avoid It
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, on May 10, 2012, stated that the national debt is the single biggest threat to national security. The deficit spending and accumulated debt of many nations, including the United States, is a topic of wide discussion and concern. Offering provocative and compelling solutions for remedying the country’s banking system, The Next Money Crash—and How to Avoid It presents a transcription of the conference, “Fixing the Banking System for Good,” organized by the Global Interdependence Center. This conference offered a variety of speakers presenting differing views of key issues, all with a common goal—to moderate the financial disruptions the current system allows; to provide a sound, stable currency; to compel, through market forces, more transparency in the activities of financial institutions; and to take taxpayers off the hook. In all of the plans, more capital and more transparency are key elements, along with the end to government guarantees, which provide advantages to large, opaque financial institutions. The Next Money Crash—and How to Avoid It compiles the latest thinking of many leading minds in finance and economics and provides a clear prescription for fixing the banking system as well as the global monetary system.
When Jenny Longworth offers aid and comfort to David Perry, a long-ago college sweetheart who recently lost his French wife, Sandrine, to cancer, their old passion is revived, creating a gauntlet of social and moral conflicts. Against cautionary counsel, Jenny disrupts her life in Boston and moves to Europe to be at David’s side as he attempts to put his world back together. While some of David’s friends welcome Jenny, others view her with hostility. Struggling with their own grief, David’s children, Marc and Delphine, react to Jenny’s presence with confusion and ambivalence, leaving David and Jenny in a quandary as to the future of their relationship. A compelling story of loss, loyalty, and love spanning two continents and four decades, If You Needed Me reminds us that passion is not the sole province of the young and that love is not for the faint of heart. Author Lee Lowry weaves a tale that confronts the challenges of late love and second marriage with honesty and accuracy, and the characters provide a rich, multi-layered examination of the nature of love with all its pain and beauty.
Legends and Stories for a Compassionate America
The American dream has been abused, neglected, and nearly completely discredited. It is now turning into a nightmare: witness the extreme and still-growing social disparity, and the aspirations to world empire that consume precious resources in war efforts around the world. Yet this is the nature of a dream—to hover between potential and reality, advance and retreat. The legends and stories in this book begin with our Native American heritage and continue with historical turning points and biographies of important individuals at the time of the American Revolution and up to modern times. The first part of the book concerns the birth of the nation; the second records periodic efforts to revive the original founding impulses. Through the biographies of important individuals, the role of national holidays and determining events, the book allows the American soul to reveal itself. When these phenomena appear in their fullest light, the American dream appears as a whole that is more than the sum of its parts (the stories and legends); moreover, it is a whole that is universal. The book speaks with relevance and urgency to all who want to renew hope in the future of our nation and of the world. Luigi Morelli is also the author of A Revolution of Hope: Spirituality, Culture and Social Change.
Are You Making Money for Your Hive?
Lessons in Getting Results Through Learning
By Karie Holton and Elwood Holton
Millions of employees attend some type of training or learning event during their tenure. Unfortunately, only 10 to 30 percent of what they learn will actually be applied in their work, presenting a situation referred to as a learning transfer problem. In Are You Making Money for Your Hive? authors Karie Holton and Elwood Holton illustrate how businesses can make learning really work to get real results. Focusing on learning transfer, this fable is told through the eyes of Buzz and Buster, two honey bees from different hives. Buzz uses learning to produce honey; as a result, he and his hive mates enjoy a prosperous and productive life. Buster, on the other hand, looks around and sees plenty of honey in his hive and ignores the need to learn how to make more. Eventually, his hive runs out of honey, and nobody knows what to do. Buzz teaches Buster how to collect nectar from flowers to make honey so that he can do the hard work necessary to save his hive. Sharing a set of principles and practices to get results by applying learning on the job, this guide communicates how a strong commitment to learning transfer can make a real difference in your business or organization.
Nine Commitments Every Leader Must Make
Author Salvatore Fazzolari knows firsthand what it takes to be the chairman, president, and CEO of a large multinational corporation—as well as why it’s not a position suited to everyone. In CEO Lifelines, he shares nine principles to help people become more productive, capable, engaged, and effective leaders. Building on almost forty years of experience at all levels of leadership, Fazzolari outlines nine key leadership practices that underpin strong, decisive leadership and build enduring, high-performance organizations. Through three segments focusing on personal, enterprise, and luck, he discusses three practices needed for sustained leadership; the six practices of a healthy enterprise; and the serendipity of chance—both good and bad. A practical guide and workbook that includes related tools for building careers and organizations, CEO Lifelines provides useful advice from Fazzolari’s own experiences as CEO of a major corporation. It offers an examination of principles essential for building a successful career and an enduring enterprise—a blueprint for excellence.
Indigenous Principles for Corporate Change
Many of our greatest business thought leaders proclaim that the most powerful way to transform a business is to transform its culture. In Shift: Indigenous Principles for Corporate Change, author Glenn Geffcken offers a culturally based process and path to help move companies from stagnation to change, from mediocrity to innovation, and from disconnection to harmony. Geffcken details a set of principles that underlie indigenous societies throughout the world—principles that have kept them in a state of grace and harmony with nature for longer than recorded history can account. Shift draws on the wisdom of indigenous cultures, their teachings, and their implications for significant transformation of core behaviors, beliefs, values, and ethics—which, taken as a whole, represent a paradigm shift of magnitude rarely seen in the business world. Through personal stories and experiences from Glenn Geffcken’s twenty-four years in the corporate world, in parallel with an eighteen-year immersion in North American indigenous culture and religion, Shift traces a path of self-discovery and organizational transformation. Geared toward businesspeople and entrepreneurs focused on culture as a force of positive change, it offers a methodology to help you break free and consider a different course.
A Connecticut Cavalry Officer in the Civil War and Reconstruction
“Whirlwind & Storm" introduces us to the colorful and impetuous Lieutenant Colonel Charles Farnsworth, a Connecticut cavalryman in the Union Army. Farnsworth was fiery, ambitious, and bold, sometimes a little too bold for his own good---in combat, in business ventures, and in the river crossing that ended his life tragically early. Drawing from a rich and previously ignored trove of letters and diaries, Farnsworth’s great-grandson and namesake, a military veteran himself, has done a marvelous job of bringing alive this officer in all his flawed glory.”
-Adam Hochschild, author of "To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918" and other books.
“With excellent research and clear writing, "Whirlwind & Storm" paints an impartial, intriguing, and entertaining account of the author’s privileged ancestor, who served heroically with the First Connecticut Cavalry battalion in the Civil War. Before, during, and after the war “Charlie” Farnsworth exuded those common human traits that so defined him: driven, disciplined, courageous, opportunistic, and passionate. "Whirlwind & Storm" adds an illuminating, original, and personal work to the collage of our great American heritage.”
-Robert B. Angelovich, author of the forthcoming "Riding for Uncle Samuel: The History of the First Connecticut Cavalry in the Civil War."
An intimate look at a young Norwich, Connecticut cavalry officer---in war, love, and his attempts to strike it rich---and his fierce ambition to make his mark in the Civil War and early Reconstruction. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Farnsworth’s letters and diaries form the cornerstone for this short biography about an adventurer who helped organize the First Connecticut Cavalry. The book covers “Charlie’s” near-fatal shooting while searching for Confederate bushwhackers in Virginia, his protests against incompetent Union leadership, his capture and confinement in Richmond’s notorious Libby Prison, his romantic entanglements, his political connections with President Lincoln that sent him south in early 1865, and his tragic struggle to make his mark in Georgia during the early years of Reconstruction.
Roadmap to Retirement Security
How to Build and Conserve Retirement Wealth
Doing the Right Things for the Right Reasons
By Paul D. Houston & Stephen L. Sokolow
Paul D. Houston, executive director emeritus of the American Association of School Administrators, and Stephen L. Sokolow, a founding partner and executive director of the Center for Empowered Leadership, offer eighteen core leadership values and principles to help you do the right things, in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons. The core values you’ll learn include how to
- focus on the positive;
- empower and uplift others;
- operate from a base of compassion; and
- recognize the seeds of wisdom.
Wise leaders view all people as having natural gifts, and it’s important to help them grow. What’s more, supporting and valuing people encourages them to do more for you and for the organization.
Enhance organizational productivity, creativity, and capacity by learning and applying eighteen core values of The Wise Leader.
“Never will you find such a constellation of distilled wisdom on leadership for all circumstances.”
—Michael Fullan, professor emeritus, OISE/University of Toronto
Some say leaders are individuals who get people to do what they want them to do, while others say leaders are those who are perceived by others as powerful and influential. Still others say that leaders are simply born to lead. Regardless of the definition, however, it is undeniable that leadership plays an important role in society. In Leadership for Adolescents, author Dr. Carolyn M. Anderson offers a seven-step guide to help teenagers understand the role of a leader and to teach them the skills needed for a leadership position. Detailing key characteristics, she discusses the I-in-leader theme—developing a basic understanding of self and of the leadership skills, competencies, and characteristics one already possesses. She also explores
• essential verbal and nonverbal communication skills;
• decision-making in small groups;
• conflict, what it means, and how it can be managed;
• the need for integrity and the importance of an ethical approach to living and leading; and
• the importance of continuous learning.
The process of assuming a leadership role entails learning, experiencing, and continuous growth in skill building. Including discussion exercises to reinforce learning, the book provides a foundation that can help teens navigate their academic career and eventual career path.
A Desert Railroad, a Wonder Metal, and the Making of an Aerospace Blacksmith
Harry Rosenberg grew up near the hottest place on Earth—Death Valley—in a very unusual dwelling: a red caboose. His father repaired bridges for the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad, which hauled ore from remote mines. During the Depression, the Rosenbergs traveled from washout to washout across a fiery land prone, paradoxically, to devastating floods of the Amargosa and Mojave Rivers. No other place on Earth was better suited to forge a curious boy into a metallurgist who would spend his life unlocking the vast potential of a difficult, new metal—titanium.
In Fire and Forge, author Kathleen L. Housley tells Rosenberg’s life story—working as a miner, having a chance meeting with a geologist studying Death Valley, earning a PhD from Stanford, gaining patents for aerospace alloys, and founding a company that manufactures the purest titanium in the world.
This biography captures the essence of a man whose work as a metallurgist left an impact on the world, but it also communicates Rosenberg’s love for his roots. No matter how far he traveled, no matter the number of his successes, he never really left the Mojave Desert and the Amargosa River—it still flows through his veins.
The Inclusion Revolution is Now
An Innovative Framework for Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace
Take an innovative approach to a climate of change within your workplace or organization with this guidebook on diversity and inclusion. Author Maura G. Robinson, an authority on diversity and inclusion, has been helping companies create systemic process of change for more than twenty years. In The Inclusion Revolution is Now, she explores as you can create an environment of inclusion where all employees are accountable for their behaviors, and able to work together to accomplish the organizational goals.
Recognize that civil diversity impedes systemic processes of change to occur. So diversity is viewed as an initiative or a program with no sustainability at the organizational level. Ensure employees willingly practice inclusion regardless of personal beliefs.
While there is still racism, prejudice, sexism, and other exclusionist attitudes among people in the workplace, organizational leaders have the power and responsibility to mandate a climate of inclusion. Supporting diversity and inclusion is also a prerequisite for capitalizing on the ideas that diverse people can bring to your organization.
Most diversity practices used by organizations do not actually promote inclusion, and exclusion continues to exist. There’s a better way to achieve inclusion, and it starts with The Inclusion Revolution is Now.
A Memoir of Spirit Communication
'Here Today, Here Tomorrow' is a personal history of spiritual experiences, with examples of messages from those in spirit. It’s sprinkled with humor, poetry and philosophy, as those discarnate spirits are described (“fleshed out”) as the beings they were, with their flaws and their glory, while on earth and in the world of spirit. The author doesn’t call them “dead,” because they’re alive and still progressing, and they can be with you at the drop of a thought - or whenever they choose.
You may be convinced, or at least intrigued, with the ample supply of experiences related, that life does go on. Or maybe you already know that, and you just want to have a couple of laughs.
Where Leadership, Culture, and Profitability Collide
By Jeff Dudley
Has an unplanned event ever prevented you from capitalizing on an opportunity? If you’re like most people, this probably happens to you at least once a week. At times, it may seem impossible to accomplish what you planned on doing. What’s more, this doesn’t just hurt you—it can have serious consequences for your employer, colleagues, or business partners. Author Jeff Dudley, a longtime business executive and the founder and president of LeadeReliability, reveals what you can do to consistently meet your commitments and make time for those things you never get to do. He can help you
- develop leadership skills;
- prioritize tasks and processes;
- monitor, evaluate, and sustain progress
- inspire others to follow your example.
Creating a culture of reliability at your organization can help you achieve goals that once seemed unreachable. In fact, reliability is the answer to many of the problems that may be plaguing your organization today. Make the choice to help yourself and your organization, and reap the rewards—customer loyalty, employee satisfaction, and increased profitability. It starts with changing how you approach your life as an individual and starting a journey that leads toward LeadeReliability.
The wilderness can be unforgiving and dangerous, yet fill our souls with awe and wonder. It can overwhelm us with beauty and stun us with fear, lift our spirits to the highest highs and send us crashing to the floor of creation. The wilderness is a classroom where we learn to survive, thrive and sometimes die.
At some point in our lives, we have all been lost in a wilderness of some kind—whether literal or metaphorical—without any direction on how to find our way back home. Some have faced survival decisions in community disasters or personal trauma. Some have been lost in work, wandered in careers and professions. Some have been lost in relationships, crippling addictions, health challenges, or grief.
Scott Hammond, a volunteer search and rescuer, knows that people who have been lost—in the wilderness, in the workplace, or in life—can teach us how to go beyond survival and thrive, regardless of the nature of our personal wildernesses. Through his experience rescuing others and real-life stories, Hammond provides valuable lessons designed to help those who are lost. These narratives communicate that small things matter, that no one is ever lost alone, and that movement creates opportunity.
Being lost is not a geographic problem, but a mental and spiritual problem. Lost people may be deprived of the basics of food, water, and shelter, but they are first deprived of meaning. Restoring that meaning is the first step toward hope, and hope is the beacon that leads you home.
