Peter Block has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 23 ratings. The most-rated is Flawless Consulting.
Flawless Consulting
Summary
When the landmark best-seller Flawless Consulting was first published more than three decades ago, it was quickly adopted as the "consultant's bible." With his legendary warmth and passion, Peter Block explained how to deal effectively with clients, peers, and others. The book continues to speak to people in a support function inside organizations as well as to external consultants. This thoroughly revised and updated third edition of Peter Block's groundbreaking book explores the latest thinking on consultation. It includes new insights about how we can organize our consulting around discovering the strengths, positive examples, and gifts of the client organization or community. The book remains a practical and specific guide for anyone who needs to develop a capacity for deeper relatedness and partnership - which means it is for all who wish to make a real difference in the world. This new edition covers the consulting challenges that have arisen from the way we routinely communicate electronically and live in the virtual world. Block suggests ways to overcome the distancing and isolating effects inherent in electronic connects. The book also includes practical guidance on how to ask better questions, gives suggestions for dealing with difficult clients, and contains expanded guidelines on more engaging forms of implementation. Flawless Consulting includes two new examples, taken from health care and educational reform efforts, to show how consulting skills can be useful (and often transformative) in a broader context. These illustrative examples point the way for achieving changes for leadership in business, government, religion, human services, and more.Like the first two editions, Flawless Consulting affirms the notion that authentic behavior and personal relationships are the key to technical and business success. By demonstrating their ability to be truly authentic at each step in the process, consultants can aim toward creating workplaces that are more collaborative and ultimately more successful.
©2011 Peter Block (P)2012 Gildan Media Corp
Community
Summary
Community: The Structure of Belonging, Second Edition As a response to the increasing violence in our culture, the widening ideological divides, and the growing gap in economic well-being, there is greater awareness that a deeper sense of community is desperately needed. But even as we acknowledge the need to build community, the dominant on-the-ground practices about how to engage people, civically and organizationally, remain essentially unchanged. We still believe community is built with better messaging, more persuasion, and social events for people to get to know each other better. All of which is naïve. This is why Peter Block was moved to create an updated edition of his classic book on restoring a sense of common purpose to our neighborhoods, communities, and institutions. Block helps us see how we can change the existing context of community from one of deficiencies, interests, and entitlement to one of possibility, generosity, and gifts. As he explores the nature of community and the dynamics of transformation, he outlines six kinds of conversation that will create communal accountability and commitment and even describes how we can design physical spaces and structures that will themselves foster a sense of belonging. In this new edition, Block draws on a decade of putting these ideas into practice to emphasize what has worked and extract those thoughts that were nice but had no durability. He explores how technology, instead of bringing us together, has driven us into more isolation. 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 insists this is really simple, once we decide it is essential. He offers a way of thinking that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.
©2018 Peter Block (P)2018 Peter Block
Stewardship
Summary
The classic first edition of this book argued that organizations that place service above self-interest and practice a far-reaching redistribution of power, privilege, and wealth stewardship will succeed far beyond those with a narrower, more selfish focus. As a successful managing strategy for corporate, governmental, and nonprofit organizations, “stewardship” is, fundamentally, the spirit of partnership and service. Organizations that absorb the principles of stewardship will offer equity and partnership at all levels for its employees, and managers who identify themselves as “stewards” will hold themselves accountable to all those over whom they exercise power. In this revised and updated edition, Block explores what has and has not changed in organizations and in the world in the 20 years since the first edition was published. He argues that the concept of stewardship is more relevant and necessary than ever, and shows how the idea of stewardship can and must be expanded out from organizations into our communities, societies, and nations. Peter Block is one of our most provocative and original thinkers. Here, he extends the scope of his insights to help us create not just productive and humane workplaces but vibrant communities, an engaged democracy, and a healthy planet.
©2013 Peter Block (P)2013 AudioGO
Flawless Consulting
Summary
For over 15 years, consultants, both internal and external, have relied on Peter Block's landmark best seller, Flawless Consulting, to learn how to deal effectively with clients, peers, and others. Using illustrative examples, case studies, and exercises, the author, one of the most important and well known in his field, offers his legendary warmth and insight throughout this much-awaited second edition. Anyone who must communicate in a professional context (and who doesn't) will use the lessons taught in this book for years to come!
©1981, 2000 Peter Block and Jossy-Bass/Pfeiffer (P)2001 Penton Overseas Inc.
The Empowered Manager, Second Edition
Summary
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 road map to creating a more accountable culture in today's fragmented and virtual world. Best-selling 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 roles 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-listen guide for anyone doing business today. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2017 Peter Block (P)2017 Audible, Inc.