As a benefit of membership in OWA, all members receive their choice of a book from a thoughtfully compiled list of titles meant to inspire and educate. This page shows you previous titles that we think you should add to your reading list.
Brevity is confidence. Length is fear. This is the guiding principle of Smart Brevity, a communication formula built by Axios journalists to prioritize essential news and information, explain its impact and deliver it in a concise and visual format. Now, the co-founders of Axios have created an essential guide for communicating effectively and efficiently using Smart Brevity.
This book offers a practical roadmap to crafting and delivering more powerful, persuasive stories that you can use to get more of what you want out of your career and your life. Study after study confirms that stories have unparalleled power to break down walls, build trust, and influence people to act. More than facts and data alone, stories are fundamental to capturing and expressing our ideas, wishes, and beliefs . . . and getting the results we want.
The right story can help you: nail a job, interview, earn a raise, close a sale, build trust with an employee or colleague, strengthen relationships with customers, become a more comfortable networker, win over a skeptic, rally a team, align people with a strategy, promote your brand, raise a toast, deliver a eulogy, and more.
Discover how to become an effective woman in leadership — even if you're shy, avoid conflict at all costs, or lack confidence. Do you find it difficult to express yourself during work meetings without being hostile or apologetic? Perhaps you're tired of coming home feeling frustrated because you didn't speak up at the meeting, or maybe you feel as though, no matter what you try, people just walk all over you. Are others getting promoted, given better assignments, and enjoying pay raises even though you know your skills and results are just as good, if not better?
In She Thinks Like a Boss, here's just a fraction of what you will discover:
And much more.
The Digital Sales Rep is a practical step-by-step guide to prospecting and closing sales online. If you are in outside sales, inside sales, or managing a team of salespeople, you want to read this book. Selling in today's world has changed. Salespeople need to be part marketer, part social media guru, part digital expert, part copywriter, part graphic designer, and of course, part salesperson. This book will show how you can easily be amazing at all of those tactics.
Learn how to mix digital efforts with traditional outreach to connect to 100+ target clients every single day. The days of pounding the pavement on the road as your only source of business acquisition are long gone. The most successful sales reps utilize the power of digital and social channels to effectively network and gain sales opportunities with clients that would otherwise be impossible to reach. These strategies don't just open doors, they secure welcome invitations to talk about your products and services.
Trudi Charest is the co-founder of Marketing4ECPs, a digital marketing agency focused on eyecare. Known for developing, facilitating, and designing innovative training and marketing for the industry, she is an optician, author, speaker, marketer, entrepreneur, and an OWA board member.
Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there's another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos rather than an opportunity to learn. We surround ourselves with people who agree with our conclusions when we should be gravitating toward those who challenge our thought process. The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. The brighter we are, the blinder to our own limitations we can become.
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people's minds — and our own; he makes it one of his guiding principles to argue like he's right but listen like he's wrong. With bold ideas and rigorous evidence, he investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, bring nuance to charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners. You'll learn how an international debate champion wins arguments, a Black musician persuades white supremacists to abandon hate, a vaccine whisperer convinces concerned parents to immunize their children, and Adam has coaxed Yankees fans to root for the Red Sox. Think Again reveals that we don't have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It's an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don't know is wisdom.
Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, this luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past and our voice for the future.
When Captain Abrashoff took over as commander of USS Benfold, it was like a business that had all the latest technology but only some of the productivity. Knowing that responsibility for improving performance rested with him, he realized he had to improve his own leadership skills before he could improve his ship. Within months, he created a crew of confident and inspired problem-solvers eager to take the initiative and responsibility for their actions. The slogan on board became "It's your ship," and Benfold was soon recognized far and wide as a model of naval efficiency. How did Abrashoff do it? Against the backdrop of today's United States Navy, Abrashoff shares his secrets of successful management including:
From achieving amazing cost savings to winning the highest gunnery score in the Pacific Fleet, Captain Abrashoff's extraordinary campaign sent shock waves through the U.S. Navy. It can help you change the course of your ship, no matter where your business battles are fought.
In 1992, Dr. Connie Mariano became the first military woman in American history to be appointed White House doctor. She served 9 years at the White House under Presidents George H.W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and George W. Bush. She participated in world headline-making news events and traveled all over the world. She cared for visiting dignitaries and was charged with caring for all the members of the First Family. From flirting with King Juan Carlos of Spain to spending the night on the Queen of England's yacht, Dr. Mariano glimpsed a glittering and powerful celebrity that few ever see.
Dr. Mariano is the founder of the Center for Executive Medicine, a medical concierge practice providing presidential-quality medical care to CEOs and their families.
In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker argues that the gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive — which they don't have to be. We rely too much on routine and the conventions of gatherings when we should focus on distinctiveness and the people involved. At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play.
Drawing on her expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn't, and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings — conferences, meetings, a courtroom, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp — and explains how simple, specific changes can invigorate any group experience.
The result is a book that's both journey and guide, full of exciting ideas with real-world applications. The Art of Gathering will forever alter the way you look at your next meeting, industry conference, dinner party, and backyard barbecue — and how you host and attend them.
Leadership isn't easy. It takes grit, courage, and vision, among other things, that can be hard to come by on your toughest days. When leaders and aspiring leaders seek out advice, they're often told to try harder. Dig deeper. Look in the mirror, recognize your natural-born strengths, and fix any real or perceived career-limiting deficiencies.
Frei and Morriss offer a different worldview. They argue that this popular leadership advice glosses over the most important thing you do as a leader: build others up. Leadership isn't about you. It's about how effective you are at empowering other people — and making sure this impact endures even in your absence. They show, through inspiring stories from ancient Rome to present-day Silicon Valley, that the origins of great leadership are found, paradoxically, not in worrying about your own status and advancement, but in the unrelenting focus on other people's potential.
Unleashed provides radical advice for the practice of leadership today. Showing how the boldest, most effective leaders use a special combination of trust, belonging, and love to create an environment in which other people can excel, Frei and Morriss offer practical, battle-tested tools (based on their own work with companies such as Uber, Riot Games, WeWork, and others) along with interviews and stories from their own personal experience, to make these ideas come alive. This book is your indispensable guide for unleashing greatness in other people . . . and, ultimately, in yourself.
While we may think that we need to follow some kind of prescription to get results, the most amazing leaders are those who dare to be their true selves, powerfully. People want to give them their best. But in a business world that's so competitive and uncertain, how do you connect with others more authentically to tap into their illusive want?
Brave Leadership is the essential guide for leaders in today's ever-shifting world. Wherever you are in your leadership journey — new or seasoned, young or old — if you aspire to be the best leader you can be, then this book is for you. It will help you:
On a quest to make these powerful conversations more accessible, professional-actress-turned-leadership-educator Kimberly Davis shares the transformative tools she uses in her workshops to help thousands of leaders worldwide. Drawing from years of working with leaders of all experience levels and industries and the latest research in psychology, sociology, business, and the arts, this provocative and inspiring book bridges traditional business how-to with a personal development approach to demystify what it takes to be the brave leader you were born to be.
This is the authentic story of Corinne McCormack, a business executive who always dreamed of having her own business and then turned her severance into an opportunity of a lifetime. She created and designed an eyewear brand that is sold in better stores nationwide. Early in her career, Corinne McCormack realized she wanted her own business. However, life interceded and she became a wife, mother, and business executive first. Then she got a pink slip and turned this potential disaster into an opportunity. She launched her business from her apartment and clawed her way to success. She started with a jewelry collection, but five years later, she realized that fashionable reading glasses did not exist. Corinne McCormack became the first designer to create fashionable, sexy reading glasses for women that forever changed the reading glass industry. Her company had incredible success for the first 10 years. But after 2001, her company lost money. Intuitively she knew that her business could return to profitability, so she and her husband made one last investment that would turn the business around or bankrupt them. In this book, McCormack shares her story with humor and insight. She speaks to the reader so that they can understand the essence of owning a business. As an entrepreneur, she had identified the eight characteristics that a person needs to possess or develop to be a successful entrepreneur. McCormack also shares her "Seeds of Success" that are illuminate lessons for anyone running a business or building a career. This book is essential for anyone thinking of starting a business or wanting to grow their company.
The Godmother of Silicon Valley, legendary teacher, and mother of a Super Family shares her tried-and-tested methods for raising happy, healthy, successful children using Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness: TRICK.
Esther Wojcicki — "Woj" to her many friends and admirers—is famous for three things: teaching a high school class that has changed the lives of thousands of kids, inspiring Silicon Valley legends like Steve Jobs, and raising three daughters who have each become famously successful. What do these three accomplishments have in common? They're the result of TRICK, Woj's secret to raising successful people: Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness. Simple lessons, but the results are radical.
Wojcicki's methods are the opposite of helicopter parenting. As we face an epidemic of parental anxiety, Woj is here to say: relax. Talk to infants as if they are adults. Allow teenagers to pick projects that relate to the real world and their own passions and let them figure out how to complete them. Above all, let your child lead. How to Raise Successful People offers essential lessons for raising, educating, and managing people to their highest potential. Change your parenting, change the world.
Ready to take the next step in your career . . . but not sure what's holding you back?
Leadership expert Sally Helgesen and bestselling leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith have trained thousands of high achievers — men and women — to reach even greater heights. Again, and again, they see that women face specific and different roadblocks from men as they advance in the workplace. In fact, the very habits that helped women early in their careers can hinder them as they move up. Simply put, what got you here won't get you there . . . and you might not even realize your blind spots until it's too late.
Are you great with the details? To rise, you need to do less and delegate more.
Are you a team player? To advance, you need to take credit as easily as you share it.
Are you a star networker? Leaders know a network is no good unless you know how to use it.
Sally and Marshall identify the 12 habits that hold women back as they seek to advance, showing them why what worked for them in the past might actually be sabotaging their future success. Building on Marshall's classic best seller What Got You Here Won't Get You There, their new book How Women Rise is essential reading for any woman who is ready to advance to the next level.