Joyce Leonard   

Welcome to my resource page!  This is a collection of items that I have found to be most useful in keeping me motivated, creative, and connected.  Enjoy! 

Music

Dreams in the Making CD by Scott Johnson

Dreams In The Making expresses an exuberance for life that is delightful and infectious, filled with insights, humor and memorable melodies. Great energy, well performed, and beautifully presented.
Click here for an audio sample

Some Of My Favorite Books

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle   
Eckhart Tolle's message is simple: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle creates the possibility of living a life free from anxiety, worry and self-doubt. In a direct and intimate way, as if you and Eckhart were sitting together talking, he describes the habitual and culturally-embedded behaviors that people unconsciously recreate and the ways to dissolve them. Freeing ourselves from these behaviors is much simpler than our minds would assume: he says that it takes being present to your life and simply observing what is.

Leadership and the New Science: Discovering order in a    chaotic world by Margaret Wheatley   
                                                    
This is a mind-bending book-one that takes a lot of concentration, but the rewards are a new way of looking at the world, organizations, and leadership! Leadership and the New Science was named the Best Management Book of the Year by Industry Week magazine, one of the top ten books of the past decade by CIO Magazine, and one of the top ten business books of all time by Xerox Business Services.  Margaret Wheatley shows how the "New Science"—revolutionary discoveries in quantum physics, chaos theory, and biology that are overturning centuries-old images of the universe—provides powerful insights into the design, leadership, and management of organizations. She discusses the answers to questions such as:
   o How do systems move from chaos to order?
   o How is order different from control?
   o How can we reconcile individual autonomy and organizational order?
   o How can we create more participative, open, and adaptive organizations?
   o What are the keys to organizational growth, learning, and communication?

              
First, Break All The Rules: What the world's greatest managers do differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
                                                
I have created a workshop based on this book - leaders and managers really resonate with the ideas and tools presented!  The authors, both management consultants for the Gallup Organization, use the company's study of 80,000 managers in 400 companies to reach the conclusion that a company that lacks great frontline managers will bleed talent, no matter how attractive the compensation packages and training opportunities. With this in mind, they sought the answers to the follow-up questions: "How do great managers find, focus and keep talented employees." Using case studies, diagrams, and excerpts from interviews, Buckingham and Coffman guide us through their findings that discipline, focus, trust, and, most important, willingness to treat each employee as an individual are the overall secrets for turning talent into lasting performance. The book concludes with suggestions on how to become a great manager, including ideas for interviewing for talent, how to develop a performance management routine, and how to get the best performance from talented employees.