This practical guide to building stable, healthy, and inclusive communities offers an antidote to today's polarizing culture of isolation.

With the increasing violence in our culture, the widening ideological divides, and the growing gap in economic well-being, a deeper sense of community is desperately needed. But even as we acknowledge the need to build community, the typical ways we engage people, civically and organizationally, remain essentially unchanged. In Community, Peter Block explores how authentic community can emerge from fragmentation and offers practical steps and strategies we can use to foster this transformation.

This updated and revised edition draws on a decade of putting Block's ideas into practice. New examples show that community building can be a more powerful way to address social problems than more traditional policies and programs. And encouragingly, Block demonstrates how simple positive transformation can be, once we decide it is essential.

An expert discussion of the timeless fundamentals and latest tools that form the foundation of successful influencing

Renowned consultant and author Peter Block delivers the latest and fourth edition of his best-selling 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
• Concise and digestible techniques for successful contracting and discovery

For over 40 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.

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, a shift in our thinking and speaking. An Other Kingdom takes us out of a culture of addictive consumption into a place where life is ours to create together. This satisfying 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 neighborly covenant has a different language than market-hype. It speaks instead in a sacred tongue.

Authors Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann, and John McKnight invite you on a journey of departure from our consumer market culture, with its constellations of empire and control. Discover an alternative set of beliefs that have the capacity to evoke a culture where poverty, violence, and shrinking well-being are not inevitable--a culture in which the social order produces enough for all. They ask you to consider this other kingdom. To participate in this modern exodus towards a modern community. To awaken its beginnings are all around us. An Other Kingdom outlines this journey to construct a future outside the systems world of solutions.

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.

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.

The Empowered Manager uncovers a roadmap to creating a more accountable culture in today's fragmented and virtual world. 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 this book, 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.

Peter enhances the first edition of the book by acknowledging employees wish for dependency. Their longing for the days when a job carried a promise of a future, and companies cared more about the product and the people, than about the money.

This is written primarily for people in the middle. Good managers and employees who care more about doing good work and treating people right, than ambition and making it into the ruling class. The upper middle and below is where there is the greatest need for great management. Which builds on valuing strengths, and allowing talent the space to stretch and achieve. Almost independent of the power points of people at the top. This book shows you how a new approach to management empowers all employees at all levels, and culminates in better business outcomes for the entire organization.

• Help shape a culture of commitment
• Develop the political skills to negotiate successfully
• Take responsibility for your actions
• Learn to fail up, and face setbacks with courage

If you feel controlled by bureaucracy, unrewarded for creativity, and from a distance, 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-read guide for anyone doing business today.

This book is written to support those who care for the well-being of their community. It is for anyone who wants to be part of creating an organization, neighborhood, city, or country that works for all, and who has the faith and the energy to create such a place. I am one of those people. Whenever I am in a neighborhood or small town and see empty storefronts, watch people floating aimlessly on the sidewalks during school or working hours, pass by housing projects, or read about crime, poverty, or a poor environment in the places where our children and our brothers and sisters live, I am distressed and anguished. It has become impossible for me to ignore the fact that the world we are creating does not come close to fulfilling its promise. Along with this distress comes the knowledge that each of us, myself included, is participating in creating this world. If it is true that we are creating this world, then each of us has the power to heal its woundedness. This is not about guilt, it is about accountability. Citizens, in their capacity to come together and choose to be accountable, are our best shot at making a difference. This book is for all who are willing to take a leadership role that affirms the conviction that without a willingness to be accountable for our part in creating a strong and connected community, our desire to reduce suffering and increase happiness in the world becomes infinitely more difficult to fulfill. It is also based on the belief that in some way the vitality and connectedness of our communities will determine the strength of our democracy.

Revised and expanded: this classic guide to business leadership presents an original and profound new view on how to run an organization (Library Journal).

Despite all the evidence calling for change, most organizations still rely on patriarchy and control as their core form of governance. The result is that they stifle initiative and spirit and alienate people from their work. In Stewardship, Peter Block calls for a dramatic shift in how we distribute power, privilege, and the control of money. Stewardship, he writes, is the willingness to be accountable for the well-being of the larger organization by operating in service, rather than in control, of those around us.

Block has revised and updated the book throughout, including a new introduction addressing what has changed--and what hasn't--in the twenty years since the book was published. It also includes a new chapter on applying stewardship to the common good of the wider community. Speaking in practical terms about how stewardship transforms every function and department for the better, Block also offers tactical advice on gearing up to implement these reforms.

The perfect resource for consultants, updated for a transformed and rapidly evolving market

In the newly revised second edition of the Flawless Consulting Fieldbook, best-selling 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. It's a just-in-time literary aid that you can read from front-to-back, or one you can grab and skip to a specific thread or theme you need to read about right now.

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 and dog-eared reference for everyday consulting engagements.

Service, Accountability, and Partnership. Stewardship was provocative, even revolutionary, when it was first published in 1993, and it remains every bit as relevant and radical today. Most organizations still rely on patriarchy and hierarchy as their core form of governance, stifling initiative and spirit and alienating people from the work they do. Peter Block asserts that a fundamental shift in how we distribute power, privilege, and the control of money can transform every part of an organization for the better, and he examines the nitty - gritty of implementing these reforms. This revised and expanded edition includes a new introduction by Block addressing what has and hasn't changed since the first edition and a new chapter on applying stewardship to the common good of the wider community. This visionary yet pragmatic book is sure to open your mind and change the way you do your job forever. ''An original and profound new view on how to run organizations ... Block transcends all extant leadership literature.'' Library Journal ''Stewardship is one of those books that permanently changes how you think. It obliterates the wall between good business and ethical business ... Get better business results, change the world, and save your soul with a single book.'' Gifford Pinchot III, cofounder and President, Bainbridge Graduate Institute. ''The most insightful analyst of what ails organizations has written a very timely update of his book Stewardship. With America's newest civic generation, millennials, now flooding the world of work, Block offers a system of governance that captures that generation's need for 'service over self - interest.''' Morley Winograd, coauthor, with Mike Hais, of Millennial Momentum. ''The new edition of Stewardship is an absolute must - read for anyone interested in building sustainable businesses, organizations, and communities. [Block's] ideas create more engaged organizations, which are better for people, the environment, and business.'' Brian Camastral, CEO, Riversong Sanctuary; cofounder, BLITS Foundation; and former Global President, Mars Food.

Modern culture's worship of how-to pragmatism has turned us into instruments of efficiency and commerce--but we're doing more and more about things that mean less and less. We constantly ask how? and still struggle to find purpose and act on what matters. Instead of acting on what we know to be of importance, we wait for bosses to change, we seek the latest fad, we invest in one more degree. Asking how keeps us safe--instead of being led by our hearts into uncharted territory, we keep our heads down and stick to the rules. But we are gaining the world and losing our souls.

Peter Block puts the how-to craze in perspective and presents a guide to the difficult and life-granting journey of bringing what we know is of personal value into an indifferent or even hostile corporate and cultural landscape. He raises our awareness of the trade-offs we've made in the name of practicality and expediency, and offers hope for a way of life in which we're motivated not by what works, but by the things that truly matter in life--idealism, intimacy, depth and engagement.

Explore the nature of modern leadership

In Confronting Our Freedom, a team of dedicated leadership coaches delivers an exciting and engaging new take on management and leadership. Drawing on recent events in the market and in the world, including the Great Resignation, the COVID-19 pandemic, and widespread digital transformation, the authors invite you to reimagine ideas of freedom and accountability in the context of work. You'll explore how freedom of action--for managers and employees--is what gives rise to true accountability, both in the community and in the workplace.

In the book, you'll also find:

• Discussions of the power and structure of freedom, including its implications for our own choices and lives
• Ways to shift the focus of your leadership and management to accountability and freedom
• Strategies for shifting the illusion of clear roles and expectations to one compatible with fully human organizations

A groundbreaking and incisive approach to managing and leading others in virtual, hybrid, and in-person settings, Confronting Our Freedom will be an eye opener for managers, executives, and other business leaders seeking to improve their ability to inspire others to their fullest potential.