VALUES-CONSCIOUS BOOKS | IN BALANCE CONSULTING

Recommended Books

We offer the following list of values-based books by visionary writers supporting both business and personal consciousness in support of expanding your resource base. Included is a brief summary about each book's content and a link directly to the Amazon.com webpage where you can learn more about the book, the author and make a purchase; simply click on the book cover icon of interest.

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ONE

The Art and Practice of Conscious Leadership

Lance Secretan

In ONE: The Art and Practice of Conscious Leadership,Lance Secretan brilliantly reframes leadership theory with a new vision for the 21st century—a vision of reconnecting each of us with our deepest human needs. He shows us how we have become detached from our innate sense of oneness and instead, have embraced the illusion of “separateness thinking.” Secretan reveals how this illusion has created profound misunderstandings about leadership and how we can, once again, become conscious leaders—through the practice of oneness.

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Conscious Business

How to Build Value Through Values

Fred Kofman

More and more business leaders are catching on to an often-overlooked fact: consciousness is our basic faculty for survival and success. Without it, we forget what's important to us and lose sight of the steps we might take to reach those goals. Conscious Business, explains Fred Kofman, means shining this awareness on every area of your work: in recognizing the needs of others and expressing your own, in seeing the hidden emotional obstacles that may be holding your team back, in making good decisions under pressure and even in delving into such "spiritual" questions as "Who am I?" and "What is my real purpose here?" With "Conscious Business", you hold the definitive resource for maximizing profit and potential in the workplace and beyond.

Presence

Human Purpose and the Field of the Future

Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers

Radical and hopeful - Presence synthesizes cutting-edge thinking, firsthand knowledge and ancient wisdom

Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society gives the reader an intimate look at the development of a new theory about change and learning. A book built around a series of wide-ranging conversations over a year and a half, Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, and Flowers explore their own experiences and those of one hundred and fifty scientists and social and business entrepreneurs in an effort to explain how profound collective change occurs. Their journey of discovery articulates a new way of seeing the world, and of understanding our part in creating it - as it is and as it might be.

Leadership Without Borders

Successful Strategies From World-Class Leaders

Ed Cohen

Business leaders in today’s borderless global marketplace face unprecedented challenges. The emergence of the knowledge economy has demanded that business leaders become global leaders. Successful global leaders are those with strategies for guiding and empowering a diversified workforce operating in different countries, cultures, and time zones so that they can maximize the return from trading in a worldwide market with distinct local needs.

Leadership Without Borders poses the question: What advice do successful global leaders have for future and current global leaders? Part 1 distills the practical insights provided by a large number of global business leaders.

Inspire

What Great Leaders Do

Lance Secretan

Inspire! is a book about how to inspire others and ourselves, the requisite for personal and organizational transformation. Based on a lifetime of research, Lance Secretan takes us on a compelling journey to discover what all great, inspiring leaders have known: their Destiny (Why I am here on Earth), their Cause (How I will be while I am here and what I will stand for), and their Calling (What I will do and how I will use my talents and gifts to serve). He shows us clearly, using concrete examples of successful leaders he has worked with, how we can do it, too.

Inspire! introduces a breakthrough leadership practice that leaps past conventional theory by defining a deeper, more enriching kind of leadership that is precisely relevant to our times. Secretan reveals seven essentials of authentic, truthful leadership that inspire everyone and lead to extraordinary personal and organizational effectiveness.

Soul at Work

Spiritual Leadership in Organizations

Margaret Benefiel

Soul at Work describes the way organizations do business. Soul in the workplace is not a theological abstraction, but a way of being and doing. Each of the organizations that Benefiel profiles in this lively and informative book--from Southwest Airlines to the band U2--describes the profound role that awareness of soul, or spirituality, can play in leadership and organizational life.

Divided into three parts, the book looks at the role of individuals in nurturing soul, the organizational reality by which soul is manifest, and the processes by which the tension between individual and organization are managed.

It is for managers, workers, organization specialists, church groups, CEOs, and anyone involved in the transformation of organizational life. It is for everyone who suspects that there is more to business than the bottom line.

Crossing the Unknown Sea

Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

David Whyte

Our greatest opportunity for discovery and growth is in the one thing we often times want to get away from: our work. It's where people spend the majority of their time wishing they were doing something else; not being present; not being themselves. And it is precisely this kind of disengagement that is so damaging to our souls. Crossing the Unknown Sea is about reuniting our imagination with our day-to-day lives. It shows us how poetry and practicality, far from being mutually exclusive, reinforce each other to give every aspect of our lives meaning and direction. For anyone who wants to deepen their connection to their life's work - or find out what their life's work is - this book can help navigate the way.

Building a Values-Driven Organization

A Whole System Approach to Cultural Transformation

Richard Barrett

Richard Barrett, author of the best-selling book Liberating the Corporate Soul, presents his new thinking

Based on his experience working with over 1,000 organizations in 32 countries on cultural transformation for the values-driven organization. He presents a whole system approach to cultural transformation, showing organizations how they can change their culture to become values-driven organizations that support their employees, their customers, their partners, their leaders, and ultimately drive effectiveness and profit.

The Alchemist

Paul Coelho

The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist.

The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, above all, following our dreams

The Seat of the Soul

Gary Zukav

With a scientist's eye and philosopher's heart, Gary Zukav illustrates our evolution from a species that pursues external power—power based upon the perceptions of the five senses—into a species that pursues authentic power—power based upon the perceptions of values of the spirit.

In his simple, elegant, poetic style, Mr. Zukav explains how the pursuit of external power has produced our survival-of-the-fittest mentality and generated conflict between individuals, races, and nations. He shows how we create our own reality through our intentions and choices. Through a revealing study of reincarnation and karma, he describes how our previous lives affect our everyday acts of creation.

He also shows how infusing the activities of life with reverence, compassion, and trust can make them come alive with new meaning and purpose. This carefully abridged edition of The Seat of the Soul describes a remarkable journey of transformation - a journey to new dimensions of spiritual discovery.

The Art of Happiness

A Handbook for Living

Dalai Lama

One of the world's greatest spiritual leaders teams up with a psychiatrist to share, for the first time, how he achieved his hard-won serenity and how readers can attain the same inner peace.

One of the biggest problems facing humanity is the struggle to find happiness in this life. The compassionate Dalai Lama carefully exposes a feeling of warmth and wholeness that leads to happiness.

Through conversations, stories, and meditations, the Dalai Lama shows us how to defeat day-to-day anxiety, insecurity, anger, and discouragement. Together with Dr. Cutler, he explores many facets of everyday life, including relationships, loss, and the pursuit of wealth, to illustrate how to ride through life's obstacles on a deep and abiding source of inner peace.

Values-Driven Business

How to Change the World, Make Money and Have Fun

Ben Cohen, Mal Warwick

In Values-Driven Business, Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen and Social Venture Network chair Mal Warwick team up to provide you with a way to run your business for profit and personal satisfaction. This practical, down-to-earth book details every step in the process of creating and managing a business that will reflect your personal values, not force you to hide them.

Values-Driven Business outlines how virtually any business can be efficient, competitive, and successful while adhering to a “triple bottom line” of profit, people, and planet.

True to Yourself

Leading a Values Based Business

Mark Albion

This is an engaging, accessible guide to a critical component of socially responsible business: effective leadership. Mark Albion, author of the New York Times bestseller Making a Life, Making a Living®, argues that small-business leaders who are concerned with more than the bottom line are not only more fulfilled than others but also more successful with more sustainable lives. He uses real-world examples to identify five critical leadership practices, each illustrated with a chapter on how successful businesspeople have put that practice into action, along with questions for reflection and a hands-on exercise to help you put that practice into action. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re many years on your way, True to Yourself will show you how to combine profit with purpose, margin with mission, value with values.

Growing Local Value

How to Build Business Partnerships that Strengthen Your Community

Laury Hammel, Gun Denhart

This down-to-earth guide explains how to build or expand a values-driven business that is deeply embedded in the life of the local community. While most people think of community engagement only in terms of philanthropy or volunteerism, entrepreneurs Laury Hammel and Gun Denhart show how every aspect of a business (from product creation to employee recruitment to vendor selection to raising capital) holds the dual promise of bigger profits and a stronger local community. Combining key best practices and a host of real-life examples, Growing Local Value explores the full spectrum of ways in which a business can contribute to its community—and the benefits it receives when it does.

Values Sell

Transforming Purpose Into Profit Through Creative Sales and Distribution Strategies

Nadine A. Thompson, Angela E. Soper

In this practical and inspiring guide, Nadine A. Thompson and Angela E. Soper draw on real-world examples to show how a values-driven business can establish a foundation from which innovative sales and distribution strategies naturally flow. They lay out concrete steps for communicating a powerful, motivating vision for your business and for designing sales and distribution strategies that fit the needs, interests, and habits of your target customer. They show how to turn your stakeholders into enthusiastic partners by ensuring that all your relationships—with your salespeople as well as other employees, your customers, your suppliers—are beneficial and fulfilling on more than just an economic level. And they stress the importance of continually educating these partners about the unique benefits that your product or service provides and of establishing strategic alliances that can expand your business’s reach.

Marketing that Matters

10 Practices to Profit Your Business and Change the World

Chip Conley, Eric Friedenwald

“Marketing” is not a dirty word or a last resort—it is key to advancing the mission of any socially responsible business. In this book, award-winning marketers Chip Conley and Eric Friedenwald-Fishman offer ten principles any business can use to engage new customers and strengthen relationships with current customers. For overworked entrepreneurs who want to match their mission with their values but lack the time or the training to develop a strategy from scratch, this field manual provides practical steps for incorporating marketing as a core element of the business, and for ensuring that marketing always reflects and reinforces what the business stands for. Full of inspiring stories, key concepts, and tested advice, this book shows how to sell what you do without selling your soul.

The New Paradigm in Business

Emerging Strategies for Leadership and Organizational Change

Michel Ray

Throughout the world, men and women in business are dramatically reshaping the way they think about the character of work, leadership, and success. They are engaged in an alteration of corporate daily practice and long-range planning that transforms old systems and values.

In the new paradigm, people and their creativity are at the center of the work-world. Intuition is increasingly valued in corporate planning; organizational hierarchies are turning upside down; and corporate and individual values are coming into alignment. Leaders are examining the multicultural workplace for new opportunities, and business is taking a larger social and environmental responsibility for its actions.

In this visionary collection, authorities from many fields rethink key business matters and offer some startling new ways to see business.

This book is filled with profiles from exemplary companies and their leaders; whose visions and strategies offer hopeful ways to manage the increasing complexity and potential of business in these turbulent times.

Natural Capitalism

Creating the Next Industrial Revolution

Paul Hawken

In Natural Capitalism, three top strategists show how leading-edge companies are practicing "a new type of industrialism" that is more efficient and profitable while saving the environment and creating jobs. Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins write that in the next century, cars will get 200 miles per gallon without compromising safety and power, manufacturers will relentlessly recycle their products, and the world's standard of living will jump without further damaging natural resources.

They call their approach natural capitalism because it's based on the principle that business can be good for the environment. If natural capitalism continues to blossom, so much money and resources will be saved that societies will be able to focus on issues such as housing, contend Hawken, author of a book and PBS series called Growing a Business, and the Lovinses, who cofounded and directed the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank. The book is a fascinating and provocative read for public-policy makers, as well as environmentalists and capitalists alike. --Dan Ring --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.