Books
HARDWIRING EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION
Author: Janet Pilcher; Published 2023
This book is an excellent resource for leaders to use as a tool to develop a leadership team. This book outlines nine principles for leaders to follow to “hardwire” behaviors that lead to organizational excellence. Each chapter explains the principle, provides action steps to move an organization forward, and concludes by providing an example of “what right looks like” in practice within educational organizations striving for excellence.
This 256-Page Book (6” x 9” softcover) is a great training and educational resource for teams and leaders.
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Hardwiring Excellence in Education is a timely account for all leaders as we reestablish practices transitioning from a pandemic. Distinguished executives, like Janet, understand that building capacity in your people positions the organization to sustain excellence long term. As a superintendent, I value the connection in the text between accountability and culture. Professional courage is necessary if the standard is not to be compromised. Meade County School chases a process for preparing our students for a quality life and I am reinvigorated with this resource to help our students achieve success for years to come.
Superintendent, Meade County School District, KY
LEADER ROUNDING
Author: David A. Marshall; Published 2025
How can you build a great workplace culture in your school district to keep exceptional employees engaged on your team? Leader rounding is a proven and effective method for creating environments where employees feel motivated by and genuinely connected to their work. Leader rounding helps leaders address challenges that prevent employees from performing at their best.
This 30-Page Booklet (6” x 9” softcover) is a great training and educational resource for teams and leaders.
THE EXTRAORDINARY GIFT: OUR TEACHERS
Authors: Janet Pilcher and Quint Studer; Published 2025
This book is a collection of powerful stories about teachers and educators who have made a difference in the lives of others. They illustrate how educators give of themselves to make life better for others and show the gentle, caring, and helpful nature
of teachers.
It is important to help teachers feel recognized and supported. The authors’ shared goal in life, as well as writing this book, is to create cultures where people feel valued and say, “I can’t imagine doing anything else.” Once a student is helped to achieve, doors are opened. Teachers make a huge impact on all of us, and that impact extends from students in a classroom to adults in the real world.
This 90-page Book (6” x 9” softcover) is a great gift for anyone who had a teacher or educator who made an impact in their life.
MAXIMIZE PERFORMANCE: CREATING A CULTURE FOR EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE
Quint Studer and Janet Pilcher
Even the Way We Change Has Changed. To Survive and Thrive, We Must Perform at a Higher Level—Continuously.
Our professional field has always dealt with change. But the environment we’re navigating now requires change at a new level. We’ve moved from experiencing episodic change to continuous change—and as John Kotter has famously noted, that requires a whole different set of skills and a whole different level of urgency.
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Maximize Performance is a must-read for boards, superintendents, district leaders, and school leaders. The book describes the process our school district uses to transform our culture as we face constant changes in our profession. It contains a wealth of information that helps leaders think about how to face the challenges in front of us to achieve excellence. The process described promotes an open and transparent communication approach in which leaders are called to reflect on their own leadership skills and practices to be the best they can be.
Superintendent, Santa Rosa County School District, FL
HOW TO LEAD TEACHERS TO BECOME GREAT
Janet Pilcher and Robin Largue
As a new leader, or a seasoned one, your mission is to hire only the best teachers you can to support everyone under your directorship to consistently turn in a performance that has a profound impact on students. That’s where this new book comes in. How To Lead Teachers to Become Great, by Janet Pilcher and Robin Largue, helps education leaders create great places for teachers to teach, students to learn, and places for parents to send their children. The book is structured around five Evidence-Based Classroom Learning Principles-and 14 Tactics that fall underneath them-which result in improved learning results, improved parental satisfaction and improved teacher performance.
RESULTS THAT LAST- HARDWIRING BEHAVIORS THAT WILL TAKE YOUR COMPANY TO THE TOP
Quint Studer
In Results That Last, Studer teaches leaders in every industry how to apply his tactics and strategies to their own organizations to build a corporate culture that consistently reaches and exceeds its goals. He has a gift for helping struggling companies implement and hardwire brilliantly simple fixes that solve larger problems in a self-perpetuating, almost organic way.
THE GREAT EMPLOYEE HANDBOOK
Quint Studer
The Most Valuable On-the-Job Skills Come from Experience—But You Don’t Have to Work a Lifetime to Master Them.
Often, it’s the day-to-day issues, those not found in any training manual, that keep us from being our best at work. We’ve all looked back on challenges we’ve faced—whether they involved a boss, a coworker, or a customer—and thought, If I knew then what I know now, I would have handled that in a completely different way!
HARDWIRING EXCELLENCE
Quint Studer
How do you take your organization to the next level? With passion, purpose, and worthwhile work.
In Hardwiring Excellence, Quint Studer helps health care professionals to rekindle the flame and offers a road map to creating and sustaining a Culture of Service and Operational Excellence that drives bottom-line results.
STRAIGHT A LEADERSHIP: ALIGNMENT, ACTION, ACCOUNTABILITY
Quint Studer
The Most Valuable On-the-Job Skills Come from Experience—But You Don’t Have to Work a Lifetime to Master Them.
Often, it’s the day-to-day issues, those not found in any training manual, that keep us from being our best at work. We’ve all looked back on challenges we’ve faced—whether they involved a boss, a coworker, or a customer—and thought, If I knew then what I know now, I would have handled that in a completely different way!
EAT THAT COOKIE: MAKE WORKPLACE POSITIVITY PAY OFF...FOR INDIVIDUALS, TEAMS, AND ORGANIZATIONS
Liz Jazwiec
In her book, Eat THAT Cookie! How Workplace Positivity Pays Off… For Individuals, Teams and Organizations, Liz gets real about all that and more. In her darkly humorous, ever-so-slightly sarcastic style -after all she was an ER nurse – she builds a case for the powerful benefits of a positive workplace.
HEY CUPCAKE! WE ARE ALL LEADERS
Liz Jazwiec
Leaders aren’t always who you think they are. Eventually, most of us will be called on to lead someone, whether it’s a department, a shift, a project team or a new employee. And speaker, strategist, and author Liz Jazwiec, RN, says being a good leader requires certain traits: A dash of fearlessness, the ability to tell it like it is, the willingness to learn from and laugh at your mistakes—and Cupcake, you’re gonna make some!
Plenty of books have been written on leadership, but few have told the brutal–and funny–truth quite like Hey Cupcake! We Are ALL Leaders. Bringing back the trademark slightly sarcastic style that readers loved in Eat THAT Cookie, Liz focuses on bringing out the great leader that exists in all of us.
SERVICE EXCELLENCE IS AS EASY AS PIE: PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING
Liz Jazwiec
Liz Jazwiec, award winning author of Eat That Cookie! and Hey Cupcake!, asks (and answers) this question in her latest book. In Service Excellence Is As Easy As P.I.E. (Perception Is Everything), she deploys her trademark sense of humor as she shares some practical and relatable ways to zone in on and improve service.
This latest book in Liz’s “treat trilogy” does a delicious job of explaining the tools and tactics that form the whipped-cream smiley on the pie of service excellence. Not only does she explain how to generate powerful impressions and improve perceptions, she folds lots of entertaining stories into the mix.
TAKING CONVERSATIONS FROM DIFFICULT TO DOABLE: 3 MODELS TO MASTER TOUGH CONVERSATIONS
Lynn Cunningham
You’ll never love difficult conversations—but you can learn to navigate them more successfully than you ever thought possible.
Have you ever dreaded holding a tough but necessary conversation with an employee, coworker, or boss? Do you put off such conversations for far too long? Have you ever launched into a difficult conversation without being well prepared, only to have the interaction spiral out of control? Most leaders will probably answer yes to at least one, if not all, of these questions.