Our Books
Get research-based insights on leadership, self-awareness, and meaningful behaviour change.
Vertical Growth: How Self-Awareness Transforms Leaders and Organisations
Many leaders already know what good leadership looks like. The challenge is not knowing what to do—it’s doing it consistently, especially when pressure is high.
Vertical Growth addresses the gap between intention and behaviour. It explores why capable, values-driven leaders can still become defensive, avoid difficult conversations, over-control, or default to habits that quietly undermine trust, accountability, and learning—even when they know better.
The book makes a clear distinction between horizontal development and vertical growth.
Horizontal development builds skills, knowledge, and techniques. Vertical growth develops the leader’s inner capacity to notice what is happening in themselves, including thoughts, emotions, assumptions, and automatic reactions, and to choose responses aligned with their values rather than their fears.
This inner capacity is what determines whether skills are applied well, poorly, or not at all.
Vertical Growth is not about adding more tools. It is about strengthening the awareness and self-regulation required to use any tool well, and to lead with integrity when it matters most.
In this book, you’ll explore:
- Why leadership breakdowns are rarely caused by a lack of skill, but by a lack of self-awareness under pressure.
- The difference between horizontal development and vertical growth—and why both matter.
- How unconscious fears and assumptions quietly drive defensiveness, avoidance, and control.
- The Mindful Leader Matrix: a practical framework for linking values to behaviour.
- How to reduce image management and build trust, accountability, and psychological safety.
- What it takes to sustain behaviour change in leaders, teams, and organisations.
The Mindful Leader: Seven Practices for Transforming Your Leadership, Your Organisation, and Your Life
The Mindful Leader explores how mindfulness develops the inner stability required to lead well in real-world conditions. It shows how attention, self-awareness, and emotional regulation shape leadership behaviour in the moments that matter most—during conflict, uncertainty, feedback, and change.
Rather than treating mindfulness as a stress-reduction technique, the book positions it as a disciplined leadership practice that strengthens judgment, integrity, and human connection.
Grounded in neuroscience, leadership research, and decades of experience working with senior leaders, the book introduces seven core practices that help leaders stay present, take responsibility, live their values, inspire others, remain curious, empower people, and lead with genuine care.
The Mindful Leader offers a practical path for leaders who want to lead with both strength and humanity, and to build workplaces where trust, accountability, engagement, and wellbeing can coexist with high performance.
In this book, you’ll explore:
- Why presence and attention are the foundation of effective leadership.
- How mindfulness builds real self-awareness and emotional regulation.
- What it means to take full accountability without blame or defensiveness.
- How to lead from values with consistency and integrity.
- How to inspire purpose and engagement without manipulation.
- Why curiosity and beginner’s mind are essential for learning and innovation.
- How compassion and clarity combine to empower others and drive performance.
Extraordinary Leadership in Australia & New Zealand: The Five Practices That Create Great Workplaces
By James Kouzes and Barry Posner with Michael Bunting
A research-driven guide to leadership behaviours that create more engaged workplaces and boost performance, Extraordinary Leadership in Australia and New Zealand is one of the best books for managers.
Full of insights from people who are making a difference, this book also contains evidence from their direct reports, colleagues and managers about the impact The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® has on them and their performance.
Case studies are balanced across gender, function, and industry providing a broad perspective for identifying why leadership matters and offering keen insights into how you lead others to greatness.
- Study examples of extraordinary leadership in Australia and New Zealand.
- Discover the behaviours that make great leaders and why they’re so important.
- Dive into the research that shows how leadership affects engagement and organisational performance.
- Learn why people need great leadership and why it motivates them to perform at their best.
- Leadership must be nurtured. While all leaders are born, great leaders are made!
Extraordinary Leadership in Australia and New Zealand is one of the best books on leadership that presents a data-driven framework for being an effective leader.
