Great Reading from MA Leadership Alumni Authors

If you want to learn about planning for the aging workforce, strategies for church impact, or life success tips gleaned from professional sport, TWU’s MA Leadership alumni have written something for you in 2010/2011.  Here are a few of the latest books published.  (Please let us know if you are an MA Leadership alumni who has also published recently!)

Karen Hall, Vice President, Aon Consulting Canada, has penned a book that offers guidance for organizations on how to prepare for and manage talent succession planning. Risk Management Strategies for an Aging Workforce examines why the aging workforce poses serious financial and operational risks to organizations and what can be done to address impending challenges. The book depicts the shape of a Canadian workforce no longer able to meet or match the requirements of today’s organizational hierarchies. Hall warns that as the Baby Boom generation moves into the retirement years, organizations will find it harder to recruit and retain the talent they need. Widely received with positive reviews, Risk Management Strategies for an Aging Workforce earned top spot on the list of best-selling Labour and Employment books at Amazon.ca during the first several weeks after its issue in September 2009.

Dave Blundell, executive director of Hungry for Life International, last month released Hungry for Life: A Vision of the Church that Would Transform the World.  Blundell tells stories of worldwide poverty and conflicts that kill about 27,000 children under the age of five every day around the world, and suggests that the church has the answer to this tragedy.“We believe that the Church in the West is spiritually and morally bankrupt, and we also believe that it is incomprehensible that about half of the world population suffers from easily preventable causes,” writes Blundell.  “We exist to address the problem of spiritual and physical poverty.  Yet, we also strongly believe in the reality that God has already provided all of the spiritual and physical resources necessary to affect change that will revive the Church and transform the world."

Also on the topic of the church’s role and effectiveness, Dale Pilgrim, a Salvation Army in Canada officer and pastor of nearly 25 years, published God’s Personal Strategy: Being Church – Living On Purpose in August 2009. The book admonishes Christians to sacrificially serve their neighbors  -- not as part of a “project” to convert them or an agenda to manipulate them, but instead out of a pure motive to help.  If this selfless service leads people to inquire about what motives the kindness, then an opportunity has naturally arisen.  This book is about “real people being real with people.”

A fourth MA Leadership alumni, Ryan Walter, this past year published a revised and updated Off the Bench and Into the Game: Eight Success Strategies from Professional Sport.  Walter, assistant coach with the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks, is also a motivational speaker and leadership coach who has published a number of books on hockey, leadership and life.  In Off the Bench, Walter offers performance techniques gleaned from elite sport, like cultivating mental toughness and choosing successful habits of thought.