Phew! Another exciting day here in Books World! After narrowly escaping a gruesome fate between a semi and another semi this morning, I arrived to discover I had to whip up some new books web pages for some books that ASTD Press will be publishing in the very near future. I managed to get them done and provided a little taste of each book in the form of sample chapters. The three new books are

The Learning Advantage: Blending Technology, Strategy, and Learning to Create Lasting Results edited by Karen Mantyla

Karen Mantyla's book presents a series of case studies from organizations such as Accenture, Microsoft, Caterpillar University, and the U.S. Department of Labor. These case studies show how to make the connection between learning and an organization's bottom line. The point of doing this? To protect the training and learning department's budget, which is pretty important in these economic hard times.

10 Steps to Successful Coaching by Sophie Oberstein

The 10 Steps series is designed to get you started on new tasks past and give you the comfort and ease of a step-by-step process to success. Sophie Oberstein's book does just that for coaching. In her preface, Sophie talks about her initial doubts about her own skills as a coach early in her career. However, in the course of her training work, she came to recognize just how powerful one-on-one coaching could be, set out to learn more, and created her own coaching process. The book provides tips, tools, and techniques for helping others to produce new and exciting results, while in the process becoming happier in your own role.

Career Development Basics by Michael Kroth and McKay Christensen

Finally, Kroth and Christensen address career development from the perspective of building career development systems in organizations. They dispel the myth that an organization's goals and an individual's goals are always divergent, claiming instead that an organization that is able to steer individual aspirations toward company goals is going to have more success in getting and keeping "the right people on the bus" (as Jim Collins puts it in Good to Great). Career Development Basics looks at the ways focusing on career development can benefit organizations and individuals and explains how to successfully create a career development initiative.