Velvet Revolution at Work and The CEO: Chief Engagement Officer: 2-Volume Set

John Smythe's two book collection offers a complete perspective of ideas, insights and advice from this award-winning author, one of the pioneers of pragmatic employee engagement. You may be a senior executive wondering how to engage hundreds or thousands of employees in your vision, strategy or the transformation of the business; or a specialist in HR, communication and change, tasked with the challenge of 'aligning and mobilising' your people. In either case, you no longer want compliant people, you want individuals who will engage their creativity at work. For their part, engaged employees want a say in their work and in how the business changes. The Chief Engagement Officer explores a management philosophy which recognises the value of opening up decision making to the right groups to improve the quality of decisions and change, accelerate execution and broaden ownership. In The Velvet Revolution at Work, John Smythe follows up his earlier book to explain that the essential ingredient of the right conditions is a culture of distributed leadership which enables people at work to liberate their creativity to deliver surprisingly good results for their institution and themselves. Using models, examples and anecdotes from his client research he goes on to demonstrate exactly how to design an engagement process; one that is integrated with your business strategy and that is sustainable.

John Smythe, a founding partner of the Engage for Change consultancy, specialises in organisational communication and engagement. He was an organisational fellow with McKinsey, undertaking research into employee engagement, and has held senior public affairs posts for three American corporations: Occidental Oil, Bechtel Corporation and Marathon Oil. After leaving SmytheDorwardLambert in 2003, a consultancy acknowledged to be the thought leader in organisational communication, McKinsey and Company invited him to take a visiting organisational fellow role, undertaking research among sixty corporations and institutions in Europe and North America into current approaches in engaging leaders and employees in driving strategy and change. The research is available from Engage for Change. Earlier John was behind a start up in the same field called Wolff Olins/Smythe (1985-1989).