John S. Muir John S. Muir
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HOW TO RECRUIT AND RETAIN WINNING TEAMS
by John S. Muir
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About the Book

HOW TO RECRUIT AND RETAIN WINNING TEAMS

How to Recruit and Retain Winning Teams answers a $105,660 question: what does losing one good employee really cost? John S. Muir breaks down the math and reveals why bonuses, stock, and perks don’t prevent departures—because people stay for appreciation, meaning, and a visible future.

Through the world of Meridian Dynamics International, Muir shows why strong hires quietly become exits, why psychological safety outperforms incentives, and why the conversation that saves your best employee happens months before they resign. This edition adds new guidance for technology leaders facing key‑person risk, AI anxiety, and distributed teams, plus candid insights from employees leadership rarely hears honestly.

People don’t leave for the money. They leave for the reasons you never priced.

A $105,660 question: what is it actually costing you to lose one good employee?
Most leaders can't answer that. This book can — down to the dollar, with the math shown.
How to Recruit and Retain Winning Teams prices the problem most leadership books only describe, then names what actually fixes it: not bonuses, stock grants, or wellness stipends, but three things no compensation package has ever replaced — appreciation, meaning, and a visible future.
Through the fictional world of Meridian Dynamics International, John S. Muir traces why capable hires quietly become departures, why psychological safety beats perks, and why the conversation that saves your best person happens nine months before they resign — not in the exit interview.
New in this edition: a dedicated section for technology leaders on key-person risk, AI anxiety, and distributed teams — and a section that hands the microphone to the employee leadership never hears from honestly.
People don't leave for the money. They leave for the reasons you never priced.

US$19.99
Paperback
John S. Muir
John S. Muir
Author

John S. Muir is a leadership and organizational strategist with more than three decades inside complex organizations, and the author of The Invisible Leadership Series.

John S. Muir writes about the parts of an organization nobody puts on the org chart. His work starts from a single claim: that leadership is not a personality trait or a set of behaviors, but a structure — one that either holds weight when the leader leaves the room, or does not. Most organizations never find out which they have until the answer costs them something.

That argument came out of four decades of watching it happen. He founded and grew a hospitality and entertainment business in the 1980s before moving into global technology leadership in the mid-1990s, and has since led operational and strategic teams across technology, manufacturing, professional services, and global service delivery — in startups and in Fortune 500 companies, with distributed teams across three continents. He has been on both sides of the transformations that work and the ones that quietly do not.

He is the founder of NINETEEN64 Consulting, where he works with executive teams and boards to diagnose organizational friction, restore alignment, and design leadership systems that survive real-world pressure. His approach is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. He does not arrive with a framework to install; he helps leaders see the system they are already running, including the parts of it they built without meaning to.

That is what the books do as well. The Invisible Leadership Series examines leadership as a system rather than a personality — the patterns that cause capable organizations to stall, the dynamics that erode trust, and the conditions that let people do their best work. It is grounded in observation rather than theory, and in pattern recognition rather than prescription, on the belief that before an organization can change it has to see itself clearly, and most never take the time to look. John lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

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