Design Leadership

Using accessible visual metaphors and concrete methods and examples, Design for How People Learn, Second Edition will teach you how to leverage the fundamental concepts of instructional design both to improve your own learning and to engage your audience.

Here we explore a shift from traditional command-and-control management to a system where colleagues build a deep sense of ownership. This transition moves the leader from being a central authority to acting as a Custodian of the work environment and a Curator of agency, identity, meaning, and kinship. The Core Premise: From Control to Ownership We argue that traditional leadership often relies on coercion—the quiet pressure of "do it or pay a price"—which may produce compliance but can never create true ownership. When leaders default to control, they become bottlenecks, and the work ...

Authors Eric Geiger (author of the best-selling Simple Church and Creature of the Word) and Kevin Peck argue that churches that consistently produce leaders have strong convictions to develop leaders, healthy cultures for leadership development, and helpful constructs to systematically and intentionally build leaders. All three are essential for leaders to be formed through the ministry of a local church.

No single factor—not sales, marketing, finance, strategy, or operations—has more influence over the ultimate success of an organization than its culture. Yet for many leaders, culture remains frustratingly vague: everyone knows it matters, but few know exactly what to do about it. In Culture by Design, David J. Friedman cuts through the fog and provides a clear, practical roadmap for intentionally creating a high-performing culture.

Think about the last time you said, "I love that." Maybe it was about a product that exceeded expectations, a service experience that built instant loyalty, or a moment when your work brought out the best in you. That reaction isn't just emotional—it's electric. In the organization, it fuels...

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under...

Design sprints provide a problem-solving framework to get answers quickly and effectively. Learn to run sprints in any organization to reduce politics, increase collaboration, and put the focus on outcomes.

Talking to people about your designs might seem like a basic skill, but it can be difficult to do well. In many cases, how you communicate with stakeholders, clients, and other non-designers may be more important than the designs themselves. Because if you can't get their support, your work will never see the light of day - no matter how good it is. This practical guide focuses on principles, tactics, and actionable methods for presenting your designs.

THE LIFE-CHANGING NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER MORE THAN TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD “Essentialism holds the keys to solving one of the great puzzles of life: How can we do less but accomplish more?”—Adam Grant, bestselling author of Think Again Essentialism isn’t about getting more done in...

How to structure your business for exponential growth. Have you ever wondered why some businesses scale while others fail? For every company that triples in size, thousands lose their momentum and get stuck. Every business leader aspires to achieve and sustain growth, but most come up short. Usually this happens because the early start-up structure is not designed to support their next-stage business strategy. It is not designed to scale. Designed to Scale explains the principles of scalable organizational structure.

The gap between a working artificial intelligence demo and a production-grade enterprise system is not a gap in model quality. It is a fundamental architectural gap. Foundation models are remarkably capable, but a demo that runs in a conference room without latency constraints, compliance postures, or tenant isolation requirements will fail under the weight of real-world demands. Every enterprise deployment that is more than a simple wrapper is a complex retrieval pipeline, an inference fleet, an integration mesh, and a continuous data lifecycle problem operating simultaneously. Inside this...

The church in America has wandered. In recent years we have forgotten the conviction of thousands of Christ followers, across two thousand years, who gave themselves to completing the last sending command of Jesus: “In your going, make disciples of all the peoples of the world” (Matt. 28:19). Instead, in an effort to draw people to Christ, much of the Western church today has sought to become relevant through golden-tongued leaders, star-quality worship bands, large-scale buildings, and myriad social programs. God is on a mission to redeem lost men and women to Himself and restore them ...

Our brains do their best to help us out, but every so often they can be real assholes - having meltdowns, getting addicted to things, or shutting down completely at the worst possible moments. Your brain knows it's not good to do these things, but it can't help it sometimes - especially if it's obsessing about trauma it can't overcome. That's where this life-changing book comes in. With humor, patience, science, and lots of good-ole swearing, Dr. Faith explains what's going on in your skull, and talks you through the process of retraining your brain to respond appropriately....

Filled with innovative strategies for success from a former branding expert, Emotion By Design will show you how to create an empowering brand that resonates deeply with people by unlocking the creativity within your organization and unleashing it out into the world. "The branding lessons in...

Get your bearings as a leader, gain confidence, and learn tactical approaches from experts who have been in your shoes so you can support your team and advance your career. This book includes: how to become a design leader with insights from Netflix's Andy Law; learn how to hire people with the right balance of skills and find the best structure for your team; evaluating team members' performances, coaching to help them grow, and minimizing conflicts; and more.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific...

What if the student dysregulation you are managing is not a behavior problem, but a design flaw? Most classroom management strategies focus on controlling students, but very few teach you how to design an environment where neurodivergent learners can actually thrive. If you are tired of modifying lessons on the fly, battling student refusal, and feeling like the weight of a heavy system rests entirely on your shoulders, it is because it does. The problem is not your effort. It is the architecture of the classroom. In Designing for Belonging, education leader Geraldine Doornkamp provides an ...

From the authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life comes a revised, fully up-to-date edition of Designing Your New Work Life, a timely, urgently needed book that shows us how to transform our new uncharted work life into a meaningful dream job or company. With practical...

The church in America is facing a leadership crisis. We have deviated significantly from the simple nature of the church as God designed, and nowhere is that seen more than in the leadership concepts most local congregations implement and utilize. Jesus gave the pattern for church leadership in Matthew 20:20–28: “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you.” God is looking for leaders who will lay aside top-down structures and instead empower His people to be fully His and do the work He has designed ...

What got us here won't get us where we want to go. The global Church faces its greatest opportunity-and its greatest challenge in completing the Great Commission. Despite our sincerity and sacrifice, too much remains undone. What if breakthrough is unleashed by returning to the simple commands of Jesus? What if ordinary believers, not paid professionals, hold the key to finishing our assignment?