Blog Archives
Sharing My Survival Kit
In The Resilience Mindset, you present the ReBAR framework developed following your long road to recovery after a devastating cancer diagnosis. Why was this an important book for you to write?
After many of my speaking engagements following the release of my memoir, At Face Value: My Triumph Over A Disfiguring Cancer (2001 1st edition, 2006 2nd edition), audience members often approached me to say they had read my memoir, but what I spoke about included so much about how others could deal with change, conflict and adversity in their own lives. Many encouraged me to write another book sharing my survival kit and ReBAR framework in a workbook style so others could learn my methods and personalize to their own life journey. So I was compelled to write this to help others.
One of the most powerful scenes is your reaction after learning the potential extent of your surgery. Why was it important to share that moment so openly?
That was the turning point moment when I realized life would never be the same for me. I was at a loss on how I would be able to move forward. I wanted to share that vulnerability with my readers, hoping it would inspire them to have confidence to be able to open up about their own pains and challenges.
Of the four elements of ReBAR, which do people tend to struggle with the most?
I think the Act phase is the most difficult for people to implement, because this is where the real work begins. This is when we must focus on what we can control, find ways to confront our challenges, and set goals to make progress toward a better future. This is where the rubber meets the road, but it’s critical that we focus on progress in small increments, so we don’t get overwhelmed or frustrated along our positive journey forward.
When readers finish The Resilience Mindset, what do you hope they believe about themselves that they may not have believed before opening the book?
I want readers to believe that we each have the capacity to build resilience, to find purpose from pain. I want readers to understand that we can learn how to build resilience, we can find our inner strength, and we can bounce forward from change and adversity, not just bounce back. By developing simple habits that take just a few minutes a day, we can change our life for the better so that when future adversity presents itself, we have the tools to better cope and keep hope.
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“Finally, a book that provides practical guidance for business professionals and everyday people to find greater success and purpose despite daily challenges.” — Grant Riggs, CEO, Riggs Distributing
Adversity can deliver a blow to our emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual health, eroding our self-confidence and self-esteem. Having experienced a harrowing ordeal with a life-threatening cancer that left him with a permanent facial difference at the age of twenty-one, Healey found a way to harness daily inspirations into key turning points that enabled him to create an actionable framework of four key principles to not only manage adversity whenever confronted with it but to learn how to create a better, more fulfilling life — because of it. Healey’s four principles are invaluable to individuals and to those leading teams of people.
Coping with adversity is one thing, but thriving is another. To thrive, we must find happiness, success, and purpose by developing ways to build resilience, embrace change, and strengthen our resolve so that we become unstoppable. Each of us has the capacity to incorporate Healey’s resilience framework into our daily routines and become more empowered and self-confident.
The Resilience Mindset offers evidence-backed research and stories from others who overcame seemingly insurmountable odds, including paralysis, traumatic brain injury (TBI), severe dyslexia, burn injuries, and other adversities. Offering more than just inspiration, The Resilience Mindset provides readers with the tools to build their own survival kits to take on the smallest and biggest obstacles, leading to a more fulfilling life.
Teachers, Teams & Tugboats
Teachers, Teams & Tugboats is a reflective career memoir about leadership, mentorship, and the complicated machinery of global logistics, told through Rich Higgins’s more than forty years in the field. Using tugboats as his central metaphor, Higgins looks back at the people who steadied him, pushed him, protected him, and taught him how to lead. The book moves from noisy trucking docks and deregulation to retail bankruptcies, mergers, Asian port visits, union conflicts, public speaking, health struggles, and late-career reinvention. What holds it together isn’t just supply chain expertise, though there’s plenty of that. It’s gratitude. Again and again, Higgins returns to the idea that a career is rarely built alone, and that the best leaders are the ones powerful enough to guide without needing the spotlight.
I appreciated the book’s emotional honesty. Higgins doesn’t polish himself into some flawless executive hero, and that gives the memoir its warmth. The scene where Tom drives him to work every day after his DUI is one of the book’s most affecting moments because it’s both painful and generous. Higgins lets us feel the shame of that mistake, but he also lets us feel the astonishing grace of a friend who simply shows up. I found that more memorable than many of the larger corporate victories because it captures the book’s real subject: character under pressure. The same is true when he writes about relocating his family and watching his daughters struggle, or turning down the dream job in St. Louis so he could be near his dying father. Those passages carry a quiet ache. They remind us that every career decision has a private cost, and Higgins is at his best when he lets that human truth sit beside the business lesson.
The writing is plainspoken and sincere. Higgins writes like a man talking across a table, and that directness suits the material. The book uses a lot of quotations, acronyms, and operational detail, especially when it gets deep into detention, demurrage, ocean rates, UPS contracts, and best-practice checklists. I did occasionally want a little less instruction and a little more scene. But even the technical passages have an authentic authority. When Higgins describes eliminating rail detention by teaching the distribution center team how the clock worked, creating a Container Priority Report, and getting everyone aligned around FIFO, the lesson lands because it’s concrete. The ideas are strongest when they’re embodied in action: Charlie trying to turn C players into B players, Dave bringing in positive reinforcement training, Greg keeping a position open until Higgins found his way back, Jimmy valuing expertise over age. The book’s moral universe is clear, maybe even stubbornly so, but I liked that about it. Tugboats, captains, crew members, pirates. It’s simple language for complicated workplaces, and it sticks.
Teachers, Teams & Tugboats feels less like a conventional business book and more like a thank-you letter written after a long and meaningful voyage. Its best moments are tender, funny, and grounded in hard-earned perspective, especially when Higgins admits what he didn’t know, who helped him survive, and which values still matter after the titles and relocations fade. I closed the book feeling that its deepest argument isn’t about logistics at all, but about remembering who carried us when we couldn’t quite steer ourselves. I’d recommend it to readers in supply chain, retail, transportation, or operations, but also to managers, mentors, and late-career professionals who want a candid reminder that leadership is built through patience, integrity, gratitude, and the grace to help someone else reach safe harbor.
Pages: 78 | ISBN : 978-1970751505
Strategy Is Attitude: The Missing Half of Strategy
Strategy Is Attitude, by Ganzorig, is an ambitious and deeply personal reconsideration of what strategy really means. Rather than treating strategy as a corporate exercise built from goals, templates, and annual planning rituals, the book argues that strategy is an ancient human capacity rooted in responsibility, perception, and action under uncertainty. Ganzorig builds his case through Genghis Khan and the Mongol command system, presenting Temujin not merely as a conqueror but as the creator of a system that produced strategists from herders, former enemies, and ordinary riders. The book’s central framework, strategy as both process and attitude, rests on the conviction that situation analysis, customer perspective, giving, productivity, and responsibility are not soft virtues but the living machinery of strategic success.
What moved me most about the book was its insistence that strategy begins with seeing. Ganzorig’s examples often carry a quiet moral force, particularly the story of the freezing receptionist in the Ulaanbaatar office lobby. That moment could have been a minor workplace anecdote, but in his hands, it becomes a devastating miniature of strategic blindness. Everyone had walked past the problem. No one had felt it. I found that idea lingering with me, because it reframes strategy as something more intimate than intelligence and more difficult than planning. It asks whether a leader can perceive what others have learned not to notice. The book is at its strongest when it draws those connections between the grand and the ordinary, between Mongol armies moving across continents and a bank teller who understands customers better than an executive report ever could.
I admired the writing for its conviction, rhythm, and willingness to challenge comfortable assumptions. Ganzorig writes with a stern tenderness, one moment dismantling the emptiness of SWOT analysis or slogan-driven “digital transformation,” the next recalling childhood days spent herding animals with only a horse, weather, danger, and responsibility for the company. There are places where the argument presses hard, especially when the book’s confidence in its own framework leaves little room for ambiguity. That same forcefulness gives the book its uniqueness. Its ideas don’t feel assembled for a management seminar. They feel wrestled out of experience, sharpened by disappointment, and carried forward with genuine urgency.
I finished Strategy Is Attitude with the sense that I’d read not just a strategy book, but a book about moral attention. Its best insight is that strategy isn’t reserved for executives, generals, consultants, or the credentialed few; it belongs to anyone willing to carry responsibility for unclear outcomes and look at reality without flinching. This is a thoughtful, demanding, and often stirring work, and its concluding power lies in its belief that strategists are made, not born. I’d recommend it especially to leaders, entrepreneurs, educators, policymakers, and reflective readers who are tired of hollow strategic language and want a more human, disciplined, and consequential way to think about decisions.
Pages: 213 | ASIN : B0GX3B589S
The Emergent Leader: A Guide to Brand Building, Leadership, and Self-Mastery
Don Gregori’s The Emergent Leader is a broad, practical meditation on what it takes to build a durable company and become the sort of person capable of leading one. Moving through brand identity, culture, risk, innovation, operational discipline, career growth, and mental resilience, Gregori argues that leadership begins with self-mastery and then radiates outward into teams, customers, products, and purpose. I found the book most compelling when it tied lofty ideas to lived business texture, such as the distinction between mission and purpose through the Everest metaphor, Patagonia’s moral clarity, Harley-Davidson’s almost tribal customer loyalty, Shackleton’s grim honesty aboard the Endurance, and Fitbit’s decision to be candid with customers when production delays threatened early trust.
What I liked most was the book’s insistence that leadership isn’t a performance of certainty. Gregori returns again and again to humility, empathy, transparency, and the courage to act before conditions are perfect. I appreciated that emotional intelligence isn’t treated as decorative softness but as an operating principle, especially in the discussion of Google’s Project Aristotle and the idea that high-performing teams depend less on raw talent than on psychological safety, curiosity, and the ability to listen. The pregnancy simulation example in the chapter on empathy struck me as especially memorable because it shows how imagination can become disciplined, almost physical. The best leaders, in Gregori’s framing, don’t merely think about customers and employees. They submit themselves to the discomfort of trying to feel what others feel.
The writing is brisk and confident, and at its best, it carries the energy of a seasoned operator speaking from scar tissue rather than theory. I liked the rhythm of the short chapters, the “Take Away” and “Take Action” structure, and the way the book moves from brand building to sleep, vacation, stress, and ambition without treating those later subjects as lesser concerns. The voice remains assured and engaged throughout, with enough candor and momentum to keep the reading experience warm rather than prescriptive.
By the end, I felt that The Emergent Leader is less a single argument than a leadership field manual with a conscience, one that asks readers to build companies with purpose while also protecting the human beings who make those companies possible. Its strongest idea is that external leadership cannot outrun internal disorder, and that point lands with quiet force in the final sections on stress, expectations, limits, and release. I’d recommend this book to first-time managers, founders, ambitious intrapreneurs, and experienced leaders who want a practical reset without surrendering the reflective, human side of their work. It’s a thoughtful guide for anyone trying to lead with sharper judgment, steadier nerves, and a deeper sense of responsibility.
Pages: 304 | ISBN : 978-1611537246
Cultural and Emotional Intelligence
In The Asia Code, you assert the notion that deals in Asia are won less by perfect pitches than by patience, trust, emotional intelligence, and the art of being known. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I wrote The Asia Code because I noticed a persistent gap in how Western professionals approach business in Asia. Many arrive armed with brilliant strategies and flawless pitches, only to find deals stalling. I wanted to shift the focus from merely conquering markets to genuinely understanding the cultural and emotional intelligence required to build lasting partnerships.
Was there a specific business experience or cultural misunderstanding that first revealed this lesson to you personally?
Early in my career, I witnessed a major deal in Japan nearly collapse because the Western team pushed for immediate contractual commitments, misreading the room entirely. It became clear to me then that in many Asian business cultures, the contract is the beginning of the relationship, not the end of the negotiation. Trust must precede the transaction.
How do you personally distinguish authentic relationship-building from strategic networking?
Strategic networking often feels transactional; it is about what someone can do for you right now. Authentic relationship-building is an investment of time and empathy without the expectation of immediate return. It involves listening, showing respect for cultural nuances, and demonstrating that you value the person as much as the potential business opportunity.
If readers take away one lesson from the book, what do you hope it is about: trust, patience, and human connection?
I hope readers realize that patience is not a delay tactic; it is a vital component of trust-building. In a world obsessed with speed and automation, genuine human connection remains the most powerful and enduring currency in global business.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | LinkedIn | Amazon
As technology accelerates and markets become more automated, the ability to build authentic human connections has become the most valuable and rarest skill in business. Nowhere is this truer than in Asia, where deals are made between people, not companies. A deep personal connection, grounded in cultural understanding, is what separates a transactional relationship from a transformative, multi-million-dollar partnership.
The Asia Code is the essential playbook for any professional looking to scale up their game in the world’s most dynamic markets. This is not a theoretical guide; it is a practical, hands-on toolkit for mastering the human element of business in Asia. It provides the cultural intelligence you need to decipher the unwritten rules that govern success across the three critical markets that will define the future of the global economy:
Japan
South Korea
China
Inside, you will learn to:
Decode the Asian Mindset: Go beyond surface-level etiquette to understand the cultural logic that drives decisions in each country.
Master the Art of Connection: Build the trust and rapport that are the foundation of all successful ventures in Asia.
Navigate the Deep Waters: Turn cultural complexity from a barrier into your greatest strategic asset.
Close with Confidence: Learn the unwritten rules of negotiation, communication, and marketing that truly win deals.
In a world that thinks AI will replace us, The Asia Code is a powerful reminder that in Asia, the human factor is, and always will be, the key to outstanding success. This is the one book every professional serious about succeeding in Asia must have in their toolbox.
Ready to master the human element in Asia? Click ‘Buy Now’ to unlock The Asia Code.
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Nonfiction
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes outstanding nonfiction books that demonstrate exceptional quality in writing, research, and presentation. This award is dedicated to authors who excel in creating informative, enlightening, and engaging works that offer valuable insights. Recipients of this award are commended for their ability to transform complex topics into accessible and compelling narratives that captivate readers and enhance our understanding.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
The Doubt Loop: Turning Founder Doubt Into a Competitive Advantage
The Doubt Loop is Adam Crawshaw’s candid, founder-minded guide to turning self-doubt from an inner saboteur into a working discipline. Built around the simple rhythm of noticing fear, naming it, and converting it into action, the book moves from pre-launch soul-searching to early-stage experiments and, finally, to the stranger anxieties of success. Crawshaw threads his own story through the advice, from childhood moments of exposed vulnerability to the brutal polish of finance and investing, then to Assembly’s $1.4 billion outcome, which, tellingly, doesn’t cure him of doubt at all. The result is part memoir, part operating manual, and part emotional x-ray of entrepreneurship.
The book is most compelling when Crawshaw lets the polished founder mask slip. The scene where he expects the sale of Assembly to taste like arrival, only for the champagne moment to curdle into “battery acid,” stayed with me because it captures something business books often sand down: achievement can be loud outside and eerily hollow inside. His recollection of drinking milk instead of coffee during an all-nighter, or nursing the embarrassment of a basketball game gone wrong, gives the book a lived-in tenderness beneath its swagger. The writing is energetic, metaphor-happy, and sometimes deliberately rowdy, but its best passages have an honest pulse. Crawshaw knows how to make a framework feel less like a laminated consultant tool and more like something scribbled in a notebook after a very bad night.
The ideas themselves are strongest when they refuse easy comfort. I appreciated the bluntness of the motive matrix, especially the insistence that Wealth, Control, Passion, and Ego cannot all sit serenely at the head of the table. That’s not just useful advice, it’s emotionally clarifying. The belief ladder, the tide framework, the “I don’t mean to sh*t on your baby” anecdote, and the later ROSE test all work because they translate vague anxiety into sharper questions. The book’s density of metaphors and founder examples can feel almost over-stuffed. Still, I’d rather have a book with too much nerve than one with too little. Crawshaw’s voice has texture, bite, and a genuine ache behind the jokes.
By the end, what moved me most was that The Doubt Loop doesn’t pretend confidence is the destination. It suggests something wiser and more durable: that doubt can become a form of care, a way of checking the math, protecting the mission, reading the room, and remembering to savor the moments that actually matter. I closed the book feeling that Crawshaw had written not a victory lap, but a field report from someone who’s still listening to the uneasy voice in his head and has learned, imperfectly but seriously, how to answer it. I’d recommend this book to founders, aspiring entrepreneurs, operators, and ambitious professionals who are tired of being told to silence doubt and would rather learn how to put it to work.
Pages: 283 | ASIN : B0GTSJVLN3
STELLAR BUSINESS AWARDS: The Definitive 12 Rules to Win Awards
Stellar Business Awards: The 12 Definitive Rules to Win Awards by Anna Stella is a practical, strategy-minded guide for small businesses, agencies, consultants, founders, and teams that want to use awards as a serious visibility tool rather than a vanity exercise. The book moves through twelve rules, beginning with the idea that “boldness beats brilliance” and ending with the quieter, harder truth that recognition comes from showing up repeatedly with evidence, clarity, and intent. Along the way, Stella builds her case through courtroom analogies, judging-panel insights, checklists, the 5-Card Method, the Elevator Strategy, the A.W.A.R.D.S. Framework, and a steady insistence that awards are won through proof, positioning, and disciplined storytelling.
What I appreciated most is that the book doesn’t treat awards as glitter. It treats them as work. Stella’s strongest idea is also her most sobering one: good work doesn’t speak for itself unless someone has shaped it into a credible case. That comes through clearly in the Green Friday anecdote, where her agency’s tree-planting CSR initiative lost not because the idea lacked merit, but because the winning entry made its impact more legible. That example gives the book a useful humility. It’s not telling readers to inflate their achievements. It’s asking them to understand them better. The chapters on judges, evidence, and authenticity have a grounded, almost corrective energy, especially when Stella warns against vague claims, AI-flattened submissions, and the lone-founder myth. There’s real emotional intelligence in the reminder that recognition is rarely individual, even when one person collects the trophy.
The writing is direct and accessible. Stella circles back to clarity, proof, fit, and momentum until they begin to feel like muscle memory. The book earns its confidence by returning to concrete tools. The Elevator Strategy is a particularly useful image because it makes ambition feel staged rather than shamed: ground-floor awards aren’t lesser, they’re part of the ascent. I also liked the later chapters on promoting every award and treating finalist status as usable credibility. That section feels especially honest, because it recognizes that winning is only valuable if a business knows what to do with the signal afterward.
Stellar Business Awards feels less like a book about trophies than a book about becoming fluent in your own value. It understands that recognition can be emotional as well as commercial, giving teams language for their effort and founders a reason to stop hiding behind modesty. This is a useful and clear-eyed guide for business owners, marketing teams, PR professionals, consultants, and emerging founders who have real work to show but haven’t yet learned how to make that work visible, credible, and memorable.
ASIN: B0GZ4WGXNM
