Conscious Leadership for Customer Experience, Employee Experience and What Really Moves People
In The Human Experience, Kris Wauters challenges traditional approaches to leadership, customer experience (CX), and employee experience (EX), inviting readers to embrace chaos as a messenger rather than an enemy. Drawing from over 30 years of real-world scars and stars in CX and EX, Kris explores how disconnected people, average experiences, and stalled growth act as silent killers in organizations. He exposes the "tower trap" of rigid structures that inevitably crack and reframes the "dragon" of chaos as a guide to raw passion, empathy, and truth.
The book is structured in three parts:
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Part I: Customer Experience delves into customer centricity as a journey, not a goal, covering strategy, culture, insights, design, measurement, governance, and turning promises into values and actions.
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Part II: Employee Experience bridges CX to EX, examining strategy, culture, and the employee lifecycle.
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Part III: Human Experience elevates to the core of what moves people, exploring emotions, consciousness, human skills (hard or soft?), and the distinction between leadership and management.
Through vivid stories like Lena's drill and hole, Sarah's whiteboard war, and Anna's "fewer things to apologize for" moment, Kris provides practical frameworks, maturity assessments, workshops, and a 9-step blueprint for alignment. Key takeaways include the magic triangle of voices (VOC, VOE, VOP), the maturity curve for profit, and the cycle of ask, listen, act.
Dedicated to his daughter, this book is a call to conscious leadership: pause in the gap, master human skills, lead with selfless service, and create playfields where people rise. Surplus proceeds support NPH and family-style homes for vulnerable children.
A must-read for leaders, managers, and anyone seeking to make every interaction human—from Fortune 500 giants to five-person shops. Available worldwide in print and digital formats.
The End of Human Resources — and the Rise of Human Assets
In The New H[R→A] Manager, Kris Wauters challenges one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in modern business: that people are “resources” to be acquired, deployed, optimized, measured, and replaced.
For decades, organizations have proudly claimed that people are their greatest asset — while managing them as headcount, FTEs, utilization rates, cost centres, performance ratings, and optimization targets. This contradiction has become so normal that many leaders no longer hear it. Yet the consequences are everywhere: disengagement, burnout, quiet quitting, broken recruitment experiences, shallow culture programmes, declining trust, and organizations that struggle to retain the very human capability they need most.
This book is a manifesto for everyone who feels that something no longer makes sense at work — and wants a practical way to build something better.
The central shift is simple, but profound:
A resource is used.
An asset is invested in, protected, developed, and grown.
That one shift changes everything.
The book is structured in five parts:
Part I: The Resource Trap exposes the real cost of treating people as resources — from turnover, disengagement, burnout, and innovation loss to the dangerous comfort gap between the top floor and the people doing the work.
Part II: The Asset Mindset introduces the fundamental operating system upgrade: seeing people not as capacity to be consumed, but as living assets whose value can compound over time.
Part III: The New HRA Operating System translates the mindset into strategy and culture, starting with the Employee Promise: the clear, honest, lived commitment an organization makes to its people — and must then prove through daily decisions.
Part IV: The Full Employee Lifecycle shows what changes when the Asset mindset is applied to attraction, recruitment, onboarding, development, retention, engagement, and dignified exits.
Part V: Leading the Change gives leaders the tools to make the shift real: better metrics, better language, human skills, difficult conversations, rituals, ADKAR, and Gung Ho as the energy engine for meaningful, scalable transformation.
Through sharp observations, practical frameworks, and no-BS leadership questions, Kris shows why the old HR playbook is no longer merely outdated — it is actively damaging companies and people. But the book does not stop at criticism. It offers a concrete alternative: a new way of designing work, culture, leadership, and people systems around human value.
This is not a traditional HR book. It is not a soft people-and-culture slogan book.
It is a call to end the Resource mindset — and to build organizations that prove, every day, that people are not resources.
hey never were.
A must-read for leaders, managers, HR professionals, consultants, entrepreneurs, and anyone who knows work can be more human, more honest, and more effective than this.
Available worldwide in print and digital formats.
Turn On The People In Any Organization
This is the book that gave Gung-Ho, The Human Experience Company its name—and its heartbeat.
More than 30 years ago, Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles wrote this simple, powerful parable about turning on the people in any organization. Through the story of Peggy Sinclair, a struggling plant manager, and Andy Longclaw, a wise mentor, they distilled three timeless principles inspired by nature and proven in real-world turnarounds:
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The Spirit of the Squirrel — Worthwhile work: people thrive when they understand the purpose and feel their contribution matters.
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The Way of the Beaver — In control of achieving the goal: give clarity, autonomy, and ownership—then get out of the way.
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The Gift of the Goose — Cheering each other on: celebrate progress, give genuine recognition, and build a culture of encouragement.
These three cornerstones are at the core of everything we do at Gung-Ho. They live in our workshops, our leadership programs, and the way we help organizations create conscious cultures where people feel seen, valued, and inspired. When combined with the deeper human and conscious leadership insights from my own work (including The Human Experience), they become the practical engine for turning CX and EX into lasting results.
Gung Ho! is short, story-driven, and surprisingly actionable—a classic that still feels fresh today. It’s the perfect companion for leaders who want to move from average to extraordinary, from compliance to commitment, from control to inspiration.
A must-read for managers, executives, CX/EX professionals, and anyone who believes people are the real source of performance.
Available worldwide in print, audio, and digital formats.