storytelling is not just the province of children, stories can be used to re-frame and re-size problems and provide useful metaphors for the boardroom, office and individual. Showing you how and when to use stories to maximum effect, Tales for Change will immediately help managers, trainers, educators and coaches to reinforce key messages or stimulate fresh thinking. The book includes 50 tried and tested tales that can be used in a change management context. These tales can be used to communicate ideas, aid memorable learning, encourage brainstorming sessions, develop training and reflection as well as help those involved to cope with the stress of change, increase emotional intelligence levels and increase creativity.
This book reveals the true impact of stories on our lives and how stories can create feelings of hope, take away psychological distress and even stimulate the immune system. It contains over 90 short stories, and allows readers to understand the patterns storytellers use to captivate attention and how truths are often encapsulated in stories.
A practical, step-by-step guide to leading change efforts for sustainable results Leading Change Step-by-Step offers a comprehensive and tactical guide for change leaders. Spiro's approach has been field-tested for more than a decade and proven effective in a wide variety of public sector organizations including K-12 schools, universities, international agencies and non-profits. The book is filled with proven tactics for implementing change successfully, with helpful tools to put change efforts into practice (including forms, rubrics, and helpful questions to ask). Also included are success stories that show how this approach has been used effectively in 22 states and internationally. The tools reveal how the leader analyzes situations, identifies the groups needed to get desired results, and works with them effectively to do so. Includes engaging self-analyses for leaders to inform their leadership when putting in place a change initiative Jody Spiro is an experienced leader of systems change for public, nonprofit, and private sector organizations Offers information on assessing a situation, engaging stakeholders, planning "early wins," minimizing resistance, building a supportive culture and much more This important resource shows how to translate a vision of a sustainable educational reform into a series of coordinated action steps.
Moving, relatable, and totally true childhood biographies of Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller, Malala Yousafzai, and 12 other inspiring activists. Every activist started out as a kid—and in some cases they were kids when their activism began! But even the world’s greatest champions of civil liberties had relatable interests and problems—often in the middle of extraordinary circumstances. Martin Luther King, Jr. loved fashion, and argued with his dad about whether or not dancing was a sin. Harvey Milk had a passion for listening to opera music in different languages. Dolores Huerta was once wrongly accused of plagiarizing in school. Kid Activists tells these childhood stories and more through kid-friendly texts and full-color cartoon illustrations on nearly every page. The diverse and inclusive group encompasses Susan B. Anthony, James Baldwin, Ruby Bridges, Frederick Douglass, Alexander Hamilton, Dolores Huerta, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Iqbal Masih, Harvey Milk, Janet Mock, Rosa Parks, Autumn Peltier, Emma Watson, and Malala Yousafzai.
Little Changes is a succulent swirling lollipop of lessons about the products we smother on our skin, foods we devour, and surroundings in which we immerse ourselves. A gut-wrenching roller coaster of emotions, her adventure involves a Western Grebe, farm stand spinach, a meaty love story, a rock in Wyoming, and some pioneers--which eventually captured national attention. With a cup of humor, a smidgeon of sarcasm, and a wallop of mainstream motherhood, Little Changes enlightens readers about the simmering, swelling, epic transformation of our generation; becoming self-advocates for their own environmental health. Diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer at age thirty-six and with three young children at home, Kristi started on a quest to eliminate harmful chemicals from her life and environment. Now a proponent for environmental health, Kristi's passion is to share her knowledge and journey with others. "So many people are reluctant to make changes in their lives because they think it's going to be expensive or time consuming. But making little changes over time in the products we smother on our skin, foods we devour, and surroundings we immerse ourselves, doesn't have to be difficult." Kristi's dynamic message empowers her audiences to choose wiser products with kinder, simpler ingredients, giving themselves the gift of the best life possible.
Texas prosecutors are powerful: in cases where they seek capital punishment, the defendant is sentenced to death over ninety percent of the time. When management professor Hans Hansen joined Texas’s newly formed death penalty defense team to rethink their approach, they faced almost insurmountable odds. Yet while Hansen was working with the office, they won seventy of seventy-one cases by changing the narrative for death penalty defense. To date, they have succeeded in preventing well over one hundred executions—demonstrating the importance of changing the narrative to change our world. In this book, Hansen offers readers a powerful model for creating significant organizational, social, and institutional change. He unpacks the lessons of the fight to change capital punishment in Texas—juxtaposing life-and-death decisions with the efforts to achieve a cultural shift at Uber. Hansen reveals how narratives shape our everyday lives and how we can construct new narratives to enact positive change. This narrative change model can be used to transform corporate cultures, improve public services, encourage innovation, craft a brand, or even develop your own leadership. Narrative Change provides an unparalleled window into an innovative model of change while telling powerful stories of a fight against injustice. It reminds us that what matters most for any organization, community, or person is the story we tell about ourselves—and the most effective way to shake things up is by changing the story.
Whatever happens in life, we can be sure things are going to change. However hard you try to avoid it, change always catches up with you. Whether it's a career pivot, a move to another country, or the breakdown of a relationship, change comes in all forms. How we deal with that inevitable change makes us who we are. Tales of change explores how you can go through change and come out the other side bolder than before. each of the authors has experienced a significant change that has impacted them forever. But the most uncomfortable of changes provide the most important lessons, and those lessons are the gifts we are sharing with you.
Building from his acclaimed anthology Tales of Two Americas, beloved writer and editor John Freeman draws together a group of our greatest writers from around the world to help us see how the environmental crisis is hitting some of the most vulnerable communities where they live. In the past five years, John Freeman, previously editor of Granta, has launched a celebrated international literary magazine, Freeman's, and compiled two acclaimed anthologies that deal with income inequality as it is experienced. In the course of this work, one major theme came up repeatedly: Climate change is making already dire inequalities much worse, devastating further the already devastated. But the problems of climate change are not restricted to those from the less developed world. Galvanized by his conversations with writers and activists around the world, Freeman engaged with some of today's most eloquent storytellers, many of whom hail from the places under the most acute stress--from the capital of Burundi to Bangkok, Thailand. The response has been extraordinary. Margaret Atwood conjures with a dys¬topian future in a remarkable poem. Lauren Groff whisks us to Florida; Edwidge Danticat to Haiti; Tahmima Anam to Bangladesh; Yasmine El Rashidi to Egypt, while Eka Kurniawan brings us to Indonesia, Chinelo Okparanta to Nigeria, and Anuradha Roy to the Himalayas in the wake of floods, dam building, and drought. This is a literary all-points bulletin of fiction, essays, poems, and reportage about the most important crisis of our times.
Eleven-year-old Tilly saved lives in Thailand by warning people that a tsunami was coming. Fifteen-year-old Malika fought against segregation in her Alabama town. Ten-year-old Jean-Dominic won a battle against pesticides—and the cancer they caused in his body. Six-year-old Ryan raised $800,000 to drill water wells in Africa. And twelve-year-old Haruka invented a new environmentally friendly way to scoop dog poop. With the right role models, any child can be a hero. Thirty true stories profile kids who used their heads, their hearts, their courage, and sometimes their stubbornness to help others and do extraordinary things. As young readers meet these boys and girls from around the world, they may wonder, “What kind of hero lives inside of me?”
What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers? Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories—stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence. Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by. Stories written mostly by men with lessons and laws for all of humanity. We have outgrown so many of them, and still they endure. This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too—when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it means to be human. Lesser has walked two main paths in her life—the spiritual path and the feminist one—paths that sometimes cross but sometimes feel at cross-purposes. Cassandra Speaks is her extraordinary merging of the two. The bestselling author of Broken Open and Marrow, Lesser is a beloved spiritual writer, as well as a leading feminist thinker. In this book she gives equal voice to the cool water of her meditative self and the fire of her feminist self. With her trademark gifts of both humor and insight, she offers a vision that transcends the either/or ideologies on both sides of the gender debate. Brilliantly structured into three distinct parts, Part One explores how history is carried forward through the stories a culture tells and values, and what we can do to balance the scales. Part Two looks at women and power and expands what it means to be courageous, daring, and strong. And Part Three offers “A Toolbox for Inner Strength.” Lesser argues that change in the culture starts with inner change, and that no one—woman or man—is immune to the corrupting influence of power. She provides inner tools to help us be both strong-willed and kind-hearted. Cassandra Speaks is a beautifully balanced synthesis of storytelling, memoir, and cultural observation. Women, men and all people will find themselves in the pages of this book, and will come away strengthened, opened, and ready to work together to create a better world for all people.
