People Practics

What is a business or nonprofit? A collection of people with a goal in mind. That's why People Practics focuses primarily on the people side of organizations, providing 17 categories of "practical tactics" for managing the workers in your business or nonprofit as well as for understanding and managing your organization overall. These are proven techniques that can make your business thrive.

People Practics covers everything from employee motivation to teamwork to conflict resolution to best practices in leadership to improving organizational culture to strategic planning and process improvement to organizational research and data collection to marketing, and more.

These practical tips come from 13 members of a graduate cohort who were often required to work as a team as we earned doctorates in organizational psychology. Our aim is to pass on useful knowledge about how to make organizations work better. But this information doesn’t only come from what we learned in grad school. It’s also based on what we know from our years of experience as business and nonprofit leaders, entrepreneurs, and consultants.

Yet, because you’ll see them mentioned in various chapters, you may want to know why we bother with theoretical models. It’s because they’ve been tested, and the research can be replicated so that we know what works and what doesn’t in the real world.

In other words, this work is scholarly only in the sense that it has been well researched, and its assertions are backed up by psychological theory, business theory, and empirical research. We all have doctorates, after all, and research is our life’s blood.

But the content here is primarily based on business experience, business sense, and common sense, and it’s meant to be readable to the average businessperson, business owner, and business or nonprofit leader.

It’s intended to be user-friendly—the kind of business book that you pick up looking for great advice for how to make your business or nonprofit more effective, easier to run, and, ultimately, successful. It’s a plus that these ideas are fully backed by really great research.