Blog Archives
Win or Win: Your Playbook for the Starting Five to Align, Lead, and Scale Your Business
Tamika Tyson’s Win or Win is a practical guide to building leadership teams that can evolve with a growing company. Using basketball as its governing metaphor, Tyson identifies five essential roles: Founder, CEO, Operator, Marketer, and Finance Person. She divides each role into three archetypes, producing a vocabulary that helps readers distinguish job titles from the ways people actually create value. Her central insight is expressed with admirable economy: “Your role is where you sit. Your number is how you think.” This distinction gives the book a sharper purpose than a conventional discussion of executive responsibilities.
The framework becomes more useful as Tyson connects the fifteen archetypes to three orientations: Meaning, Systems, and Speed. She then applies them to common organizational constraints, five stages of growth, and the “Triangle” a balanced team needs. This layered structure enables readers to diagnose whether a business requires greater clarity, capacity, or capability before making another hire. The later chapters are especially strong because they address changing requirements as a company moves from validation through building, scaling, optimization, and institutional endurance. Tyson treats leadership composition as dynamic, showing how a person who was indispensable at one stage can become poorly matched to the next.
Tyson writes in a direct, conversational style and develops her concepts through brisk case studies drawn from companies such as Danaher, Fastenal, Nike, Patagonia, Quibi, and Zillow. These examples function as managerial parables, making an elaborate taxonomy easy to remember. Repeated diagnostics, hypothetical responses, and “exhaustion tests” turn the book into a workbook as much as a narrative. This repetition occasionally slows the middle chapters, and the compressed business histories sometimes support broader conclusions than their documentation can fully establish. Still, the consistent format reinforces the framework and gives leadership teams a common language for discussing strengths, blind spots, and role fit without reducing those conversations to personality or loyalty.
I think the book’s most valuable contribution is its treatment of succession as an achievement. Tyson asks readers to judge leadership by the durability of what they build, including systems, brands, capital structures, and teams that can function without their creators. Her statement that “Win or Win isn’t optimism. It’s architecture” captures both the method and the ambition of the book. Win or Win is a disciplined, accessible playbook for founders and executives who want to align complementary talents, recognize when their organization’s game has changed, and create a company whose success can outlast any individual leader.
Pages: 266 | ASIN: B0HCRCR7XM
Alchemy of Adversity – How Emotional Intelligence Transforms Trauma Into Leadership Strength
Sarah Staley’s Alchemy of Adversity is a hybrid of memoir, trauma-informed leadership study, and practical guide to emotional intelligence. Drawing on the accident that killed her husband, Sean, and left her with severe injuries, Staley examines how traumatic experience can influence judgment, relationships, workplace behavior, and leadership. The book’s argument is carefully qualified: “Adversity does not automatically create strength”. Growth, she contends, emerges through the deliberate integration of experience. Its five-part structure reflects that process, progressing from personal devastation through neuroscience and emotional development to organizational practice and renewed purpose.
The memoir sections give the book its emotional authority. Staley describes the accident, hospitalization, grief, physical recovery, and responsibility of raising her young son, Eli, with directness and considerable sensory detail. Her image of the “gray world,” a period when color remained visible but had lost emotional meaning, conveys the numbing effects of trauma with unusual precision. These chapters also trace the uneven nature of recovery through therapy, gratitude, family support, work, and the gradual restoration of agency. The epilogue, which follows her relationship with Cody and the family life they build, provides a fitting conclusion to this personal narrative by showing a life broad enough to contain grief, gratitude, memory, and new love at once.
The book’s analytical center connects Staley’s experience to research on the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, memory, nervous-system regulation, post-traumatic growth, and the window of tolerance. Staley then converts those concepts into the ALCHEMY framework and the four emotional-intelligence domains of self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, and relationship management. Case studies involving a grieving leader named Chris, organizational crises, and Satya Nadella’s leadership at Microsoft widen the book’s scope beyond individual recovery. Reflection questions, regulation exercises, narrative-reframing practices, and the four organizational pillars of safety, trustworthiness, choice, and empowerment make the later chapters particularly useful for managers and teams. The material’s recurring formulations give it the cadence of a leadership seminar, reinforcing its main principles while occasionally slowing the narrative momentum.
Staley’s strongest contribution is her treatment of emotional intelligence as an embodied discipline shaped by both pain and practice. “Self-awareness didn’t make me perfect. It made me present,” she writes, a statement that captures the book’s practical ethic. Leadership here means remaining regulated under pressure, recognizing distress beneath performance, preserving accountability without humiliation, and creating conditions in which people retain agency. Alchemy of Adversity offers leaders, trauma survivors, coaches, and organizational-development professionals an accessible framework for understanding how personal healing can affect entire systems. Its blend of intimate testimony, research, and workplace application presents leadership as a human responsibility grounded in awareness, ethical power, and sustained relational care.
Pages: 311 | ASIN : B0GQQ32QXL
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
The Bear and Cat Chronicles by Kris Neely
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Lead with Civility: A Handbook for Uncivil Times
Diane Kalen-Sukra’s Lead with Civility is a timely and substantial civic leadership book that treats civility as a discipline of governance amid mounting strain on civic institutions from rising polarization, declining public trust, and incivility. Written for elected officials, public administrators, community leaders, and people working inside civic institutions, this leadership book begins with a provocative idea: leaders are culture shapers, and the behavior they tolerate, reward, and model eventually becomes part of the culture around them. Kalen-Sukra builds that argument around what she calls “courageous civility,” a form of leadership grounded in dignity, self-mastery, truthfulness, justice, and the common good. She also introduces the “civic intervention,” a deliberate action meant to interrupt destructive patterns and restore healthier norms. That gives the book a practical backbone from the start, with culture presented as something leaders can intentionally cultivate.
One of the most distinctive qualities of Lead with Civility is the way it brings political philosophy into the everyday world of local government leadership and public administration. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Erasmus, Marcus Aurelius, and other thinkers appear throughout the book, but they’re used to illuminate recognizable leadership problems: ego, fear, toxic meetings, weak civic education, public distrust, poor conflict management, and the misuse of power. Kalen-Sukra’s Civic Braid Leadership Model organizes the material around perceiving clearly, preparing wisely, and practicing what you’ve learned, while the larger Roadmap to Renewing Civic Culture moves through self-governance, culture risk, civil dialogue, civic education, and compassionate governance. The result feels part handbook, part leadership course, and part exploration of the civic traditions that shaped democratic life.
The book becomes especially engaging when those ideas meet lived experience. The book’s practical authority is reinforced by Kalen-Sukra’s extensive experience in civic leadership and public administration. Guest essays and leadership portraits bring readers into floods, dysfunctional councils, toxic workplaces, polarized public meetings, staff teams, citizen academies, neighborhood initiatives, and deliberative processes such as citizens’ assemblies. These stories keep the civic leadership material connected to the pressures people actually face in government.
Just as useful are the book’s concrete tools: reflection questions, culture-risk exercises, dignity frameworks, civility circles, a civic intervention worksheet, and the Civic Culture Assessment Tool, which places organizations on a spectrum from toxic “Bullyville” tendencies to flourishing “Sustainaville” ones. This is clearly a leadership handbook designed to live on a desk, get marked up, and come back out when a council, organization, or community needs to address toxicity in the public square and civic culture renewal.
What I liked most is the book’s expansive definition of leadership. Lead with Civility connects personal character to institutional health, then connects institutional health to the ability of communities to flourish. Civility, in this framework, means exercising power while preserving dignity, creating spaces for honest disagreement, teaching people how democracy works, measuring trust and belonging alongside conventional performance indicators, strengthening neighborhoods, and bringing compassion into public decisions. Even its discussion of the “digital garden” extends the same logic into social media and online civic life.
That makes Lead with Civility a rich, distinctive, and urgently needed contribution to civic leadership, public administration, and political philosophy with a remarkably consistent message running through its many examples and tools: the culture surrounding public life is shaped through repeated choices, and leadership is the work of making those choices with courage, wisdom, and care.
Pages: 344 | ISBN : 1834384893
The Listening Advisor: Winning Loyal Clients Through Authentic Human Connection
John Gatewood’s The Listening Advisor is a practical communication book written specifically for financial advisors, but its central idea reaches well beyond wealth management. Gatewood argues that technical expertise only becomes useful when an advisor first understands the person sitting across the table. Drawing on more than four decades in financial services, he builds the book around a simple sequence: understand before advising, connect before presenting, and listen well enough that what you eventually say actually matters. His personal stories give that message credibility, especially when he describes meetings he mishandled, clients he misunderstood, and lessons he learned from his father’s ability to make complicated financial ideas understandable. The result feels less like a lecture on communication and more like an experienced advisor explaining what he wishes he’d learned much earlier in his career.
The book works particularly well because Gatewood breaks listening into specific behaviors. The principles section explores ideas such as respecting the client’s sense of time, noticing questions that haven’t been asked, choosing questions over premature answers, addressing uncomfortable subjects, simplifying explanations, and recognizing the emotions behind financial decisions. The practice section then becomes even more concrete, covering presence, interruptions, body language, open-ended questions, judgment, and silence. Gatewood repeatedly asks readers to notice the small moments that change a conversation, such as a glance at a watch, a furrowed brow, a spouse who suddenly stops talking, or the temptation to finish someone’s sentence. His examples make those moments easy to recognize in your own behavior, and the reflection exercises at the end of chapters turn the reading into something closer to coaching than passive instruction.
Gatewood also gives the book a timely frame by asking what human advisors can contribute as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable of handling analysis, research, planning, and routine communication. His answer is that an advisor’s value increasingly comes from judgment, presence, empathy, courage, and the ability to accompany another person through uncertainty. That theme runs through the whole book, but it’s most persuasive when connected to ordinary client interactions. A widow who’s afraid to make a decision, a couple with different priorities, or a client embarrassed by a financial mistake needs more than information. They need someone who’ll listen without rushing, clarify instead of assume, and respond without making them feel judged. Gatewood keeps returning to those human moments, which gives the book a strong sense of purpose even as individual principles reinforce one another throughout the chapters.
I’d recommend The Listening Advisor to financial advisors who already know the technical side of their profession and want to become noticeably better in the room with clients. New advisors will appreciate having a communication playbook early in their careers, while experienced advisors may get even more from the book because they’ll recognize habits they’ve developed without realizing it. The appendices are especially useful for anyone who wants to put the ideas into practice immediately. Gatewood distills the book into a five-step listening framework, a process for working through client objections, and a structure for opening, conducting, and closing meetings with more intention. Those tools make this a book worth returning to after the first read, particularly before an important client conversation or when a meeting hasn’t gone as well as expected. It’s ultimately a book about becoming more attentive to people, and financial advisors who believe relationships are part of the real work, not merely a route to the work, will probably appreciate it most.
Pages: 284 | ASIN : B0HCK58HYB
The Clock Builder
The Clock Builder, by Jeff Seymour, is a practical reflection on curiosity, leadership, and decision-making, built around a simple idea: better questions can change how we understand difficult situations. Seymour organizes the book as a series of short “episodes,” each centered on a concept such as boundaries, perspective, responsibility, trust, humility, momentum, adaptation, identity, and character. The chapters build on one another, but they also work as individual exercises in thinking. Seymour sums up the framework neatly when he writes, “Curiosity is the operating system. Questions are the tools. Experience is the laboratory. Capability is the outcome.” That sentence captures the book’s purpose well. It’s a guide for approaching moments when experience alone doesn’t provide an obvious next step.
What gives the book its personality is Seymour’s use of stories from his own life and career. He moves from childhood experiences with his grandfather to major technology projects involving wireless fraud, the iPhone, connected vehicles, smart homes, corporate mergers, and large-scale infrastructure work. He also brings in family life and youth sports, which keeps the ideas grounded in situations that feel recognizable outside a corporate setting. These stories show curiosity in action. Instead of treating innovation as a sudden flash of inspiration, Seymour presents it as a process of observing, questioning assumptions, learning from small experiments, and adjusting direction. The strongest examples are the ones where a seemingly minor question changes the scale or definition of the problem, such as asking where a wireless coverage problem actually exists or considering the human cost of a few extra seconds in a product experience.
The book has a conversational, workshop-like rhythm. Most chapters introduce an idea, develop it through a personal example, and then end with questions and a “Foundation” that pulls the lesson together. That repetition gives the reader a recognizable pattern and makes the book easy to use as something more active than a traditional leadership memoir. Seymour’s emphasis on humility also gives the framework some depth. Curiosity, in his telling, depends on being willing to admit that experience can become an obstacle when it hardens into certainty. One of the book’s most memorable lines is, “The day we believe we’ve learned everything is the day we stop discovering anything.” That idea connects many of the chapters, especially those dealing with leadership, adaptation, and identity.
The Clock Builder is a book about character as it is about problem-solving. Seymour gradually moves from questions about technology and organizations toward questions about achievement, legacy, judgment, and the principles that guide a person when several choices seem reasonable. The recurring images of rivers, bridges, stones, clocks, and compasses tie those ideas together and give the book a consistent vocabulary for discovery. What stayed with me most is the book’s view of curiosity as a habit. Seymour treats it as something that can shape the way a person leads, works, learns, and responds to uncertainty. That makes The Clock Builder feel useful in a very practical sense. It invites readers to carry its questions into their own problems and see what changes when they resist the first easy answer.
Healthy Minds, Healthy Nation: How Meditation, Shamanism, and Indigenous Healing Can Tap into Your Light Within and Change the World
Healthy Minds, Healthy Nation, by Gilbert Martina, is a personal, spiritual, and socially minded exploration of the idea that healthier societies begin with healthier individuals. Martina builds the book around his own experiences with grief, chronic pain, professional pressure, family trauma, and leadership in Curaçao, then connects those experiences to larger questions about consciousness, morality, and collective well-being. The book moves through four broad stages: establishing the foundations of a healthy mind, examining how trauma can affect whole societies, describing spiritual awakening, and introducing practices such as Transcendental Meditation, shamanism, and Indigenous healing. What makes the book especially personal is that Martina rarely presents these ideas from a distance. His parents, marriage, career, physical pain, and Curaçaoan heritage are woven directly into his argument, so the book reads partly as memoir, partly as a guide to spiritual development, and partly as a reflection on leadership.
One thing that was most interesting to me was the way Martina moves between individual trauma and national history. His discussion of Curaçao gives the book a strong sense of place, particularly when he considers slavery, colonialism, discrimination, political power, and the long psychological effects of historical wounds. He argues that unresolved trauma can shape not only individual behavior but also relationships, institutions, leadership, and entire communities. That argument becomes more compelling when Martina connects it to his own life, including his mother’s fight against discrimination, his professional battles over integrity, and his struggle to separate what he calls the ego from the true self. The Papiamentu sayings passed down by his mother are especially memorable because they turn abstract ideas such as honesty, discipline, humility, resilience, and responsibility into something lived and specific.
The book becomes more explicitly spiritual as it progresses, especially in its treatment of meditation, energy healing, shamanic practice, chakras, ancestral trauma, vision quests, and ayahuasca. Martina treats neuroscience, psychosomatic medicine, spiritual experience, and Indigenous healing as parts of a connected picture of human health. That gives the book a distinctive confidence and makes his worldview easy to understand, even when some of the scientific and spiritual claims are presented with different kinds of supporting evidence. His strongest material tends to come when he describes what these practices have meant in his own life. Still, the central thread remains clear: healing requires attention to mind, body, relationships, history, and spirit, and personal transformation matters because it changes the way a person acts in the world. By the final chapter, Martina turns that idea toward moral courage, arguing that an awakened person should be willing to speak up against injustice and choose principle over fear, status, or money.
I recommend Healthy Minds, Healthy Nation to readers who are interested in spirituality, meditation, holistic approaches to healing, personal transformation, and values-based leadership. It will also have particular appeal for readers interested in Curaçao and the Caribbean, especially those thinking about how colonial history and inherited trauma continue to shape modern communities. Martina writes with the conviction of someone trying to make sense of his own life while also offering that meaning to others, and the book’s warmth comes from that personal investment. By the conclusion, his message has become both intimate and ambitious: quiet the mind, care for the body and soul, loosen the hold of ego, heal what has been carried from the past, and let that inner work influence families, communities, and nations. Readers who enjoy books that bring memoir, spirituality, leadership, cultural history, and self-development into the same conversation are likely to appreciate it most.
Pages: 246 | ASIN : B0GP4Y8JF2
Do Your Thing: Lessons from Banking’s Biggest Digital Transformation
Do Your Thing: Lessons from Banking’s Biggest Digital Transformation, by Ralph Hamers, is a book on business leadership, digital transformation, and banking management built around the reinvention of ING after the global financial crisis. Hamers takes readers from the bank’s years of government support, forced restructuring, layoffs, and battered employee confidence into the much more ambitious project of turning ING into a digital-first, customer-centered organization. What gives the story its energy is the scale of the undertaking as Hamers aspired to get tens of thousands of people across multiple countries to agree on what ING existed to do, how it would compete, how its leaders should behave, and what customers should actually experience.
The book’s central argument is that transformation comes from connecting all of those pieces and then staying remarkably consistent about them. That makes the ING story useful well beyond banking. Anyone interested in organizational change, business strategy, corporate culture, or transformation leadership will recognize the problem Hamers keeps returning to: having a vision is much easier than getting an enormous organization to live it every day.
The strongest parts of the book are where that big idea gets concrete. Hamers walks through the creation of the Think Forward strategy, ING’s purpose of “empowering people to stay a step ahead in life and in business,” the Orange Code that defined expected behaviors, and the shift from a product-centered bank to a customer-centered one. He is adept at showing how seemingly separate choices reinforced each other. Customer centricity led to simpler products and better digital experiences. The “Do Your Thing” brand gives an outward expression to ideas the organization had already spent years putting into practice. The progression Hamers presents makes this digital banking transformation story unusually satisfying because readers can watch strategy travel all the way from a CEO’s thinking to technology, organizational structure, office design, employee behavior, and finally the public-facing brand.
Hamers also makes the book feel personal enough to keep the management material from turning into a stack of frameworks. His recurring emphasis on consistency is persuasive because the later chapters show what consistency looks like when the decisions become harder. The discussion of sustainability and ING’s Terra Approach, for example, extends the book’s purpose-driven leadership argument into lending decisions, climate commitments, stakeholder expectations, and the messy reality of societal change. Hamers is willing to discuss adjustments, resistance, imperfect execution, and the tension between empowerment and control, which gives the change management and executive leadership lessons some welcome texture. His voice is confident and occasionally repetitive, especially when returning to purpose, customers, and consistency, but that repetition also mirrors his leadership philosophy: if an idea matters enough to organize a company around, people are going to need to hear it more than once.
The final section brings the ING experience into the age of artificial intelligence, and that turns out to be a natural destination for the book rather than an add-on. Hamers’ most useful contribution is the idea that leaders don’t need perfect foresight so much as a clear direction and an organization capable of moving, learning, and adjusting without losing its purpose. By the end, ING’s transformation feels less like a banking case study than a working example of how strategy becomes real through thousands of linked choices. For executives, transformation leaders, and readers interested in digital strategy, customer experience, agile organizations, corporate purpose, and the future of leadership, there’s a lot here worth carrying into the next big change.
Pages: 318 | ISBN : 978-1544552033
