Audiobooks by Peter Block

The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work, 2nd Edition

Empowerment produces the conditions for high performance. Especially for middle managers and below. Empowered cultures attract and retain talent. They produce high achievement, high accountability, and high commitment. Bestselling author Peter Block is a true visionary: author of the classic Flawless Consulting, his work is about empowerment, stewardship, chosen accountability, and reconciliation of community. In The Empowered Manager, he returns his eye toward management to renew our efforts to create a shift in the traditional hierarchy. Twenty years after the original book, Block talks of why it is so difficult to both open the door to empowerment and more importantly, have people walk through it. It is more important than ever to create a culture in which all members of an organization are treated as entrepreneurs, giving them ownership over their role and responsibilities. This is in the face of the reality that most employees want safety, not the adventure of empowerment. If you feel controlled by bureaucracy, unrewarded for creativity, and powerless to control your own destiny, this book is the breath of fresh air your career has been craving. Timeless tips from a master of business strategy alongside a framework for more effective management makes The Empowered Manager a must-listen guide for anyone doing business today.

Peter Block (Author), William Andrew Quinn (Narrator)

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The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook & Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise

The perfect resource for consultants, updated for a transformed and rapidly evolving market In the newly revised second edition of the Flawless Consulting Fieldbook, bestselling author and consultant Peter Block delivers an invaluable companion to the fourth edition of his popular Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise. In the book, you'll find an expansive toolkit you can draw on for information and guidance in the midst of your next consulting engagement. In the book, you'll discover: - How the flawless consulting skills are being applied in a wide variety of situations by people with unique and different ways of bringing their gifts in the world. Just like you. - How to act on what you know to use a variety of approaches to create experiences aligned with your intent and strategy. - How to view resistance as an ally instead of a problem to be solved or overcome. An invaluable collection of resources for consultants everywhere, Flawless Consulting Fieldbook, 2nd Edition will rapidly become your most used reference for everyday consulting engagements.

Peter Block (Author), Sanya Simmons (Narrator)

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An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture

Our seduction into beliefs in competition, scarcity, and acquisition are producing too many casualties. We need to depart a kingdom that creates isolation, polarized debate, an exhausted planet, and violence that comes with the will to empire. The abbreviation of this empire is called a consumer culture. We think the free-market ideology that surrounds us is true and inevitable and represents progress. We are called to better adapt, be more agile, more lean, more schooled, more, more, more. Give it up. There is no such thing as customer satisfaction. We need a new narrative. An Other Kingdom takes us out of a culture of addictive consumption into a place where life is ours to create together. This way depends upon a neighborly covenant-an agreement that we together, will better raise our children, be healthy, be connected, be safe, and provide a livelihood. The authors invite you on a journey of departure from our consumer market culture. Discover an alternative set of beliefs that have the capacity to evoke a culture where poverty, violence, and shrinking well-being are not inevitable. An Other Kingdom outlines this journey to construct a future outside the systems world of solutions.

John Mcknight, Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann (Author), Mirron Willis (Narrator)

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Activating the Common Good: Reclaiming Control of Our Collective Well-Being

A powerful, inspiring, and achievable vision of a society based on cooperation and community instead of competition and commodification. This book counters the dominant and destructive story that we are polarized, violent, selfish, and destined to consume everything in sight. That is not who we are. The challenge, Peter Block says, is that we are suffering under an economic theology that is based on scarcity, self-interest, competition, and infinite growth. We're told we can purchase and outsource all that matters. Block calls this the business perspective narrative. It dominates not only the economy but also architecture, faith communities, journalism, arts, neighborhoods, and much more. Block offers an antidote: the common good narrative. It embodies the belief that we are basically communal and cooperative. And that we have the capacity to communally produce what we care most about: raising a child, safety, livelihood, health, and a clean and sustainable environment. This book describes how shifts to the common good perspective could transform many areas, fostering journalism that reports on what works, architecture that designs habitable spaces creating connection, faith collectives that build community, a market that is restrained and local, and leadership and activism that build social capital by creating trust among citizens. With these shifts, we would fundamentally change the world we live in for the better.

Peter Block (Author), Alex Christiansen (Narrator)

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Flawless Consulting, 4th Edition

Renowned consultant and author Peter Block delivers the latest and fourth edition of his bestselling Flawless Consulting, an intuitive and insightful step-by-step guide to the five phases of effective consulting. The book offers a deep exploration of the skills, tools, and behaviors required to successfully influence others. You'll see exactly what you need to say and do to help others achieve their goals, whether you are an internal or external consultant or anyone in a leadership position who wants to build effective partnerships in business, healthcare, education, or community work. Along with newly updated examples, case studies, stories, and suggestions for putting the flawless consulting process into everyday practice, you'll find: a new section for consultants living in a highly virtual world that explains how to achieve authentic engagement with your clients in virtual and hybrid environments; invaluable information for leaders and internal consultants operating within their organizations; and techniques for successful contracting and discovery. For over forty years Flawless Consulting has been the go-to guide to building trust and structuring meaningful partnerships with others for greater influence and impact. This latest edition ensures that the book will remain the gold standard in the industry for many years to come.

Peter Block (Author), Graham Rowat (Narrator)

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Confronting Our Freedom: Leading a Culture of Chosen Accountability and Belonging

Confronting Our Freedom is about reframing the common practices rising from traditional thinking about management and leadership. Most management theory and practice are about the need for clear constraints to succeed in the world where we work, but this now conventional thinking about managing calls for adaptation when working remotely has become common. This book is an invitation to freedom. Structuring our world for freedom is the path to collective accountability. It is ultimately a friendly look into how we might reimagine our participation in the working world, analyzing the strategy, execution, and management of philosophers, leaders, and educators.

Peter Block, Peter Koestenbaum (Author), Dallas Britt (Narrator)

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Community: The Structure of Belonging

Creating a Future Distinct from the PastIn this new edition of his classic book, Peter Block offers an alternative to the increasing economic, relational, and ideological divides in our culture. To achieve a deeper sense of connection and belonging, we need to change the narrative from one of deficiencies and entitlement to one of possibility and generosity. This is how community is created, and Block shows how it's done with examples from neighborhoods, towns, and cities around the United States. To bring transformation into everyday life, Community outlines six conversations that create shared accountability and shows how to design systems that foster this sense of belonging.

Peter Block (Author), Tamberla Perry (Narrator)

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Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest

The classic first edition of this book argued that organizations that place service above self-interest and practice a far-reaching redistribution of power, privilege, and wealth stewardship will succeed far beyond those with a narrower, more selfish focus. As a successful managing strategy for corporate, governmental, and nonprofit organizations, "stewardship" is, fundamentally, the spirit of partnership and service. Organizations that absorb the principles of stewardship will offer equity and partnership at all levels for its employees, and managers who identify themselves as "stewards" will hold themselves accountable to all those over whom they exercise power. In this revised and updated edition, Block explores what has and has not changed in organizations and in the world in the twenty years since the first edition was published. He argues that the concept of stewardship is more relevant and necessary than ever, and shows how the idea of stewardship can and must be expanded out from organizations into our communities, societies, and nations. Peter Block is one of our most provocative and original thinkers. Here, he extends the scope of his insights to help us create not just productive and humane workplaces but vibrant communities, an engaged democracy, and a healthy planet. "An original and profound new view on how to run organizations... Block transcends all extant leadership literature."-Library Journal

Peter Block (Author), Sherman Allen (Narrator)

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The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods

This book is about a new possibility for us together to discover the real basis for a satisfying life. It is a life that becomes possible when we join our neighbors in creating a community that nurtures our family and makes us useful citizens. We are besieged by messages from consumer society telling us that we are insufficient, that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We outsource our health care, child care, relationships, recreation, our safety, and our satisfaction. We are trained to become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. McKnight and Block take a thoughtful look at how this situation came about, what maintains it, and the crippling effect it has had on our families, our communities, and our environment. Right in our neighborhood we have the capacity to address our human needs in ways that systems, which see us only as interchangeable units, as problems to be solved, never can. We all have gifts to offer, even the most seemingly marginal among us. It does not matter how rich or poor the neighborhood is. McKnight and Block suggest how to nurture voluntary, self-organizing structures that will reveal these gifts and allow them to be shared to the greatest mutual benefit. They recommend roles we can assume and actions we can take to reweave the social fabric that has been unraveled by consumerism and its belief that however much we have, it is not enough. Each neighborhood has poeple with gifts and talents needed to provide for our prosperity and peace of mind -- this book offers practical ways to discover them. It gives voice to the ideas of an abundant community. It reminds us of our power to create a hope-filled life. It assures us that when we join together with our neighbors, we are the architects of the future where we want to live.

John Mcknight, Peter Block (Author), Janina Edwards (Narrator)

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Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, Third Edition

When the landmark best-seller Flawless Consulting was first published more than three decades ago, it was quickly adopted as the "consultant's bible." With his legendary warmth and passion, Peter Block explained how to deal effectively with clients, peers, and others. The book continues to speak to people in a support function inside organizations as well as to external consultants. This thoroughly revised and updated third edition of Peter Block's groundbreaking book explores the latest thinking on consultation. It includes new insights about how we can organize our consulting around discovering the strengths, positive examples, and gifts of the client organization or community. The book remains a practical and specific guide for anyone who needs to develop a capacity for deeper relatedness and partnership-which means it is for all who wish to make a real difference in the world. This new edition covers the consulting challenges that have arisen from the way we routinely communicate electronically and live in the virtual world. Block suggests ways to overcome the distancing and isolating effects inherent in electronic connects. The book also includes practical guidance on how to ask better questions, gives suggestions for dealing with difficult clients, and contains expanded guidelines on more engaging forms of implementation. Flawless Consulting includes two new examples, taken from health care and educational reform efforts, to show how consulting skills can be useful (and often transformative) in a broader context. These illustrative examples point the way for achieving changes for leadership in business, government, religion, human services, and more. Like the first two editions, Flawless Consulting affirms the notion that authentic behavior and personal relationships are the key to technical and business success. By demonstrating their ability to be truly authentic at each step in the process, consultants can aim toward creating workplaces that are more collaborative and ultimately more successful.

Peter Block (Author), Erik Synnestvedt (Narrator)

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Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used

Peter Block's Flawless Consulting addresses business changes and new challenges since the second edition was written ten years ago. It tackles the challenges next-generation consultants face, including more guidance on how to ask better questions, dealing with difficult clients, working in an increasingly virtual world, how to cope with complexities in international consulting, case studies, and guidelines on implementation. Also included are illustrative examples and exercises to help you cement the guides offered.

Peter Block (Author), Grover Gardner (Narrator)

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