Traveling Solo

A Life Well Lived, A Death Well Planned

“This is a beautiful book, rich in humanity, wisdom, and humor. It is going to help a lot of people.” —Anne Lamott

After years of battling a mysterious illness, Diana Williams chose to end her life. This extraordinary and intimate memoir, written in the months before her death, bravely explores the profound question: How much suffering is enough?

For three decades, Williams relentlessly pursued a cure for the symptoms that plagued her: grinding exhaustion, night sweats that drenched the sheets, brain fog that made her forget her own address, and throbbing headaches and chills that left her bedridden for days. Dozens of specialists diagnosed her with everything from multiple sclerosis to Lyme disease to toxic mold exposure and prescribed grueling, expensive, and ultimately, ineffective treatments.

Hope vanished with each failed therapy, and her symptoms grew worse. Rather than face a life of increasing pain and disability, and after deep contemplation, Williams chose assisted dying at the Swiss nonprofit, Dignitas.

Traveling Solo raises questions millions of people ask, too often in silence: What makes life worth living? How much can one person bear? Most of all, should we afford humans the choice to end their lives on their own terms?

More than a chronicle of one woman’s battle with illness, this is also a story of a family coming to terms with a heartbreaking decision, as well as an ode to abiding friendship.

Published posthumously, Traveling Solo was written to inspire meaningful conversations and compassion for those who choose to die rather than endure continued suffering. It offers a candid portrait of the fragility of life and the preciousness of beauty when one’s days are numbered.

Shaping a Winning Team

A Leader’s Guide to Hiring, Assessing, and Developing the People You Need to Succeed

Organizations spend too much of their earnings with each bad hire. They count on failed interview processes and fallible intuition of specific managers when they choose staff, create training programs, and promote from within. Despite the best of intentions, they put their people in position to fail, while simultaneously hurting morale and losing opportunities for better performance.

And yet we have the data to improve . . . by a lot. Paul Fayad and Chak Fu Lam have decades of experience in the research and practice of human resources and management, and they present it to you in Shaping a Winning Team. This essential guide introduces you to the rowers, sitters, and drillers who represent your team right now. The seeming simplicity of these labels undersells the massive impact they have—for better or for worse—on your organization. The authors’ proprietary instruments, including the Positive Assessment Tool (PATsm), use science to help you bring in the personality and behavioral traits that will ultimately help decide your success as you support your rowers, get your sitters to move, and let go of the drillers.

Fayad and Lam offer leadership methods to help you expand the strengths of your people as you hire, assess, and manage your most important assets. Use their work to create an organizational culture that has continuity and strength—one that is shaped for the modern workplace to lessen turnover and improve productivity and quality.

Shaping a Winning Team

A Leader’s Guide to Hiring, Assessing, and Developing the People You Need to Succeed

Organizations spend too much of their earnings with each bad hire. They count on failed interview processes and fallible intuition of specific managers when they choose staff, create training programs, and promote from within. Despite the best of intentions, they put their people in position to fail, while simultaneously hurting morale and losing opportunities for better performance.

And yet we have the data to improve . . . by a lot. Paul Fayad and Chak Fu Lam have decades of experience in the research and practice of human resources and management, and they present it to you in Shaping a Winning Team. This essential guide introduces you to the rowers, sitters, and drillers who represent your team right now. The seeming simplicity of these labels undersells the massive impact they have—for better or for worse—on your organization. The authors’ proprietary instruments, including the Positive Assessment Tool (PATsm), use science to help you bring in the personality and behavioral traits that will ultimately help decide your success as you support your rowers, get your sitters to move, and let go of the drillers.

Fayad and Lam offer leadership methods to help you expand the strengths of your people as you hire, assess, and manage your most important assets. Use their work to create an organizational culture that has continuity and strength—one that is shaped for the modern workplace to lessen turnover and improve productivity and quality.

The Virtue Proposition

Five Virtues That Will Transform Leadership, Team Performance, and You

Virtues generate success.

Virtuous leaders, virtue-grounded teams, and virtue-led organizations raise performance. The Virtue Proposition details how. 

Sig Berg, founder of the Severn Leadership Group, explores what’s lacking from traditional leadership, with its focus on the rules and rituals of boardrooms and c-suites, and from iconoclastic leadership, which encourages you to move fast and break things. Neither of these approaches prioritizes virtues, and neither has, nor ever will, lead to sustainable, superior results.

There is a courageous third way: virtuous leadership. Virtues will lift you and your organization on a path toward long-term achievement and meaning. The Virtue Proposition is full of actionable insights and practices focused on Virtue Intelligence (VQ) that instills purpose to leaders of character, embracing the Five Virtues of love, integrity, truth, excellence, and relationships. Individuals trained to high VQ become agents of transformation in their domains and especially within their organizations and teams.

This book is for change-makers. It is meant to reach men and women who notice the absence of virtues and know they can make a difference by seeking that third way. If you want to be a catalyst to shape healthy families, communities, and government for the common good, embrace the power of virtuous leadership now.