Some books are as fun to read as they are helpful.

Laid out visually, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur is just such a treat.

Instead of long, winding verbiage filled with technical jargon that no one (not even academics) understand, Business Model Generation stays grounded, simple, and practical.

The book is divided into five sections that outline the process of business model generation:
Canvas -> Patterns -> Design -> Strategy -> Process

They offer nine helpful building blocks of a healthy business model:

1. Customer segments
2. Value Propositions
3. Channels
4. Customer Relationships
5. Revenue Streams
6. Key Resources
7. Key Activities
8. Key Partnerships
9. Cost Structure 

If it’s beginning to feel a bit overwhelming, you need to flip through a copy of the book itself.

It is fun. It is visual. Brief, articulate explanations. Structured around the process itself.

I think you will find it an empowering tool for you and your partners.

Click here to see its Amazon.com page.

Karl’s Library is a weekly column highlighting my favorites from my professional development library. “Always learning” is one of the pillars of my personal mission statement. Explore past columns here.

If you’re a Kindle fan like I am, it is available for the Kindle.

Don’t have a Kindle? Get one! You’ll love it.

Set aside what you’re currently reading about leadership.

If you want to transform your impact as a leader, you need to pick up a copy of How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey.

Have you ever considered than an annoying employee complaint might also be a valuable personal value needing expression?

Have you ever withheld an idea for improvement so your supervisor wouldn’t feel criticized?

Kegan and Lahey provide an entirely new perspective on leadership by paying attention to how we talk to each other.

They point to seven changes we can make in how we communicate that will reframe how we approach problems and result in lasting change.

Seven Languages for Transformation

1. From the language of complaint to the language of commitment
2. From the language of blame to the language of personal responsibility
3. From the language of New Year’s resolutions to the language of competing commitments
4. From the language of big assumptions that hold us to the language of assumptions we hold
5. From the language of prizes and praising to the language of ongoing regard
6. From the language of rules and policies to the language of public agreement
7. From the language of constructive criticism to the language of desconstructive criticism

The shift we need to make as leaders is internal. When we see the conversation differently ourselves we will be able to have a different sort of conversation with others.

You can continue to blame the rest of the team for their shortcomings. You may even be accurate in your assessment. But you will not see change.

When you’re ready to try something new, try taking a look at how “the way you talk affects the way the team works.”

You can get a copy of the book here.

Karl’s Library is a weekly column highlighting my favorites from my professional development library. “Always learning” is one of the pillars of my personal mission statement. Explore past columns here.

If you’re a Kindle fan like I am, it is available for the Kindle.

Don’t have a Kindle? Get one! You’ll love it.

Yes, those are post-it notes you see crowding the edge of my copy of Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte.

From the looks of it you might think I marked every single page. You wouldn’t be much mistaken. I devoured this book.

This book is about the process of finding work that adequately, fittingly, and meaningfully integrates with one’s own life development jouney.

From the publisher:

Crossing the Unknown Sea is about reuniting the imagination with our day to day lives. It shows 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.

As suggested by the title, this book is for the pilgrim… the person on a journey of self-discovery and professional expression. 

Here’s a sampling of my many marked quotes:

“The soul would rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else’s.”

“Finding good work… means coming out of hiding.”

“Do one thing every day toward my future life.”

“What stops us from speaking out and claiming the life we want for ourselves?”

“The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”

“…the ability of anything followed unthinkingly, to turn into its exact opposite.”

“The courage to remain unutterably ourselves in the midst of conforming pressures.”

You can probably tell from the quotes that this is not a book of formulas, tests, assessments, or answers.

My list of pull quotes most likely seems to you either attractive and intriguing or off-putting and irrelevant.

This book is for those of you who see yourselves on an inner journey in search of a professional form.

Click here for a link to get a copy.

Karl’s Library is a weekly column highlighting my favorites from my professional development library. “Always learning” is one of the pillars of my personal mission statement. Explore past columns here.

If you’re a Kindle fan like I am, it is available for the Kindle.

Don’t have a Kindle? Get one! You’ll love it.

The myth of the independent, diversely-competent, always-together person must be hunted down wherever it still reigns and destroyed once and for all.

It’s destroying more people and all workplace cultures where its lies are still blindly obeyed.

Human beings don’t do life alone.

Human being can’t do life alone.

Fortunately, Tom Rath has taken a look at friendship and work in Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford To Live Without.

Would you believe, “that people who have a ‘best friend’ at work are seven times as likely to be engaged in their job?!”

Take note of the eight vital roles Rath asserts we need surrounding us:

1. Builder
2. Champion
3. Collaborator
4. Companion
5. Connector
6. Energizer
7. Mind Opener
8. Navigator 

You don’t have to be a “warm and fuzzy” type to appreciate the value of most of these roles.

This book is an invitation to connect with others in ways you may not yet have considered.

This book may even be a helpful wake-up call to those of us who tend to isolate and go it alone.

Order your copy today.

Karl’s Library is a weekly column highlighting my favorites from my professional development library. “Always learning” is one of the pillars of my personal mission statement. Explore past columns here.

If you’re a Kindle fan like I am, it is available for the Kindle.

Don’t have a Kindle? Get one! You’ll love it.

The perfect metaphor for describing the task of leadership today.

With constant and rapid change being a decision-making reality, leaders no longer have the luxury of planning for futures that are either predictable or stable for any period of time.

Robert Quinn was one of the first to address this issue in Building The Bridge As You Walk On It.

Both visionary and practical Quinn helps us see how we can actively participate in building the future even as it emerges in many ways beyond our control.

Eight practices characterize the leader who functions in what Quinn indentifies as the “Fundamental State of Leadership”:

1. Reflective Action
2. Authentic Engagement
3. Appreciative Inquiry
4. Grounded Vision
5. Adaptive Confidence
6. Detached Interdependence
7. Responsible Freedom
8. Tough Love 

Each noun and its complementary adjective in the list are carefully chosen and combined.

I use this book in my “No Excuses WORKout” coaching cohorts, and cannot say enough good things about it.

Order your copy today.

Karl’s Library is a weekly column highlighting my favorites from my professional development library. “Always learning” is one of the pillars of my personal mission statement. Explore past columns here.

If you’re a Kindle fan like I am, it is available for the Kindle.

Don’t have a Kindle? Get one! You’ll love it.

Both fun and helpful, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace is a treat you should not deprive yourself.

Organization as hairball. Does it get any clearer than that?!

Many of us experience our corporate systems getting in the way more than helping us along. As is commonly noted, it takes seven authorizations to get a new idea approved, but only one rejection to kill it.

From the publisher:

“Creativity is crucial to business success. But too often, even the most innovative organization quickly becomes a “giant hairball”–a tangled, impenetrable mass of rules, traditions, and systems, all based on what worked in the past–that exercises an inexorable pull into mediocrity.”

Gordon MacKenzie is hilarious. He shares from his own personal experience how he learned to survive and even thrive in a corporate context.

Instead of getting entangled in the corporate hairball, learn to orbit it!

This book is one of my favorites. Especially if you don’t care for the textbook approach that characterizes most leadership books. You’ll feel right at home laughing and learning with Gordon Mackenzie.

Order your copy today.

Karl’s Library is a weekly column highlighting my favorites from my professional development library. “Always learning” is one of the pillars of my personal mission statement. Explore past columns here.

Sadly, this book is not available for the Kindle. 

Don’t have a Kindle? Get one! You’ll love it.

A timeless classic you cannot afford to ignore, the 5th Edition is about to be released.

I remember when I first read The Leadership Challenge by James Kouzes and Barry Posner an unmentionable number of years ago.

As a young leader finding my way, it was a key resource that provided an accessible vision of leadership undergirded with substantial content.

The book is organized around five basic responsibilities of the leader:

1. Model the way
2. Inspired a shared vision
3. Challenge the process
4. Enable others to act
5. Encourage the heart

As I launch this column sharing the best of my professional development library, I could think of no better book with which to begin.

Order your copy today.

If you’re a Kindle fan like I am, it is available for the Kindle.
Don’t have a Kindle? Get one! You’ll love it.