Trade-Up!: 5 Steps for Redesigning Your Leadership and Life from the Inside Out
Silicon Valley wunderkind Rayona Sharpnack has been a schoolteacher, tennis champion, manager and player for a women's professional softball team, and a celebrity who coaches some of the most successful leaders in business. Trade Up! draws on Sharpnack's experience, as well as stories of successful leaders she has worked with, to reveal how leaders limit themselves by holding on to ideas or assumptions about ourselves—what she calls your “context” —that are no longer valid. Trade Up! outlines the 5 steps to help leaders gain awareness of these assumptions and trade up from limiting beliefs and behaviors to those that will help them change the world. The 5 steps are
• Reveal your context: what do you believe about yourself? What holds you back? How do you impact others?
• Own your context: take stock of the upside and downside of your context, and examine the intended and unintended consequences of it!
• Design a new context that gets you what you want: begin by asking yourself “how good are you willing to have life be?”
• Sustain your new context: develop new practices to get this new context to stick!
• Activate your context and engage with the world: move out of your own concerns and into partnership and community with others to help change the world around you!


The book introduces the concept of narrative intelligence—an ability to understand and act and react agilely in the quicksilver world of interacting narratives. It shows why this is key to the central task of leadership, what its dimensions are, and how you can measure it. The book's lucid explanations, vivid examples and practical tips are essential reading for CEOs, managers, change agents, marketers, salespersons, brand managers, politicians, teachers, parents—anyone who is setting out to the change the world.

CIOs spend more than $1.2 trillion on software and hardware each year. Partnering with the CIO looks at IT sales from the CIO's perspective, revealing what needs to be changed and expressing their fears, concerns, warnings, and advice. Based on in-depth interviews with CIOs at major international firms and organizations such as Citigroup, First Data Corp., Priceline.com, Pitney Bowes, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Time Inc., World Wildlife Fund, Accenture, and the CIO Executive Council, among many others, Partnering with the CIO is a practical and much-needed guide to the current state of IT sales and leadership.
Americans as a whole are really bad at negotiating. We find haggling to be beneath us and we're uncomfortable with it, yet we feel cheated when we don't get the best deal possible. World-class negotiator, author, and attorney Thomas takes his cues from cultures where negotiating is celebrated as an art. While India or the Middle East may come to mind, when it comes to masters of negotiation, Japan tops the list. Thomas explains that the American way of logic and reasoning is persuasion, not negotiation, and you can persuade until you're blue in the face and still get nowhere. The art of negotiation is allowing your counterpart (don't think of them as your "opponent") to save face, which means always giving some concessions to get what you really want. "Beating" your colleague is not a way to create long-term relationships, but a "win-win" solution is. Thomas presents 21 powerful rules of negotiating, plus gives "Quickies," specific tips on how to negotiate with your boss, spouse, child, car dealer, contractor, and more. Inspiring. David Siegfried
Although it was first published more than thirty-five years ago, Up the Organization continues to top the lists of best business books by groups as diverse as the American Management Association, Strategy + Business (Booz Allen Hamilton), and The Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management. 1-800-CEO-READ ranks Townsend’s bestseller first among eighty books that “every manager must read.”









