Plummer & Associates | Human Resources Consulting

Some of the books that we have found useful in our work:

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink 2009
Most of us believe that motivation comes from external rewards like money – the carrot and the stick. Pink proposes that in our new workplace the secret to high performance is threefold: the need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Fierce Leadership: A Bold Alternative to the Worst “Best Practices” of Business Today: by Susan Scott 2009 Learn how to spot the worst “best” practices in our organizations using a technique she calls “squid eye”–the ability to see the “tells” or signs that we have fallen prey to disastrous behaviors by knowing what to look for. Only then, she says, can we apply the antidote. Scott offers fresh ideas to six of today’s “best practices”.

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and In Life One Conversation at a Time by Susan Scott 2002 This book provides principles, examples, tools, stories, and exercises to take you step-by-step through your first fierce conversation-with yourself-on to the most challenging and important conversations facing you.

First Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman 1999
Based on a mammoth research study conducted by the Gallup Organization involving
80,000 managers across different industries, this book explores the challenge of
many companies - attaining, keeping and measuring employee satisfaction. A key idea we particularly like is that the best managers focus on building people’s strengths and talent rather than trying to fix weaknesses.

The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M. Covey 2006
Trust has become the key leadership competency in the workplace today. This book explains the four cores of credibility and shares the 13 behaviors common to high-trust leaders throughout the world.

Author Malcolm Gladwell's books— Outliers, Blink, and Tipping Point — are all great reads that will give you new ways of thinking about people and organizations.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell 2009

Learn about people who are outliers—men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell 2005

This book is about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren't as simple as they seem.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell 2002

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate.