 | The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results
by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter
(Harvard Business Review Press, 2018)
The Mind of the Leader offers a radical, yet practical, solution to solve the leadership crisis. Organizations need to put people at the center of their strategy. They need to develop managers and executives who lead with three core mental qualities: mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion. (Blog Post)
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| Leap: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied
by Howard Yu
(PublicAffairs, 2018)
In today's competitive environment, where latecomers can copy almost any product or service, companies can no longer just be good at what they do. Is the displacement of early pioneering companies an inevitable fate in the modern economy? Outlasting copycat competition in any industry is difficult; doing so over decades is nearly impossible—unless you leap. (Blog Post)
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| Reinforcements: How to Get People to Help You
by Heidi Grant
(Harvard Business Review Press, 2018)
Asking for help makes most of us uncomfortable and we often go to great lengths to avoid doing it. We fear rejection. We fear that people we think less of us. We believe people don't really want to help. But the truth is we need the help and support of others to succeed. To be sure, leadership is fundamentally about asking people for help. (Blog Post)
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| Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive
by Bradley R. Staats
(Harvard Business Review Press, 2018)
What did you learn today? We often think of learning as something we are doing all of the time. But we aren't. Mostly we are repeating or reinforcing what we already know. And that gets in the way of learning. Like most things worthwhile learning must be deliberate. (Blog Post)
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| What Happens Now? Reinvent Yourself as a Leader Before Your Business Outruns You
by John Hillen and Mark D. Nevins
(SelectBooks, Inc., 2018)
The ability to reinvent yourself is core to your success as a leader. As you take on more responsibility, the demands on you as a leader change. If disrupting yourself isnt part of who you are, you will get left behind. If you are just doubling down on what you''ve always done, you will miss the opportunities. When conditions change, you have to change too. (Blog Post)
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| The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win
by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
(St. Martin's Press, 2018)
So much of leadership is managing tensions. Leaders must know when to adapt. After the publication of their first book, Extreme Ownership, many people latched on to the aggressive implications of the word “extreme” and missed the more nuanced balance that a leader must have. “Leaders must find the equilibrium between opposing forces that pull in opposite directions.” The Dichotomy of Leadership is meant to help leaders find that equilibrium. (Blog Post)
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| Professionalizing Leadership
by Barbara Kellerman
(Oxford University Press, 2018)
Over the last 40 years, the leadership industry has grown exponentially. Yet leadership education, training, and development still fall far short. Moreover, leaders are demeaned, degraded, and derided as they never were before. Why? Leadership in the first quarter of the present century is different from what it was even in the last quarter of the past century - which is why leadership taught casually and carelessly should no longer suffice.
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| Dear Founder: Letters of Advice for Anyone Who Leads, Manages, or Wants to Start a Business
by Maynard Webb with Carlye Adler
(St. Martin's Press, 2018)
What began as a project to provide guidance to a select group of founders in the Webb Investment Network has been expanded and offered to founders of all types and those who need to have a founder’s mindset. The result is Dear Founder. (Blog Post)
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| This Is Day One: A Practical Guide to Leadership That Matters
by Drew Dudley
(Hachette Books, 2018)
This is Day One is about choosing to lead. Everything worthwhile in life begins with a Day One. “If you want to be a leader, chose to be a leader today. Repeat that choice every day. It doesn’t matter if you failed to do it yesterday or if you’ve done it every day for a decade: every new day begins with a recommitment to that choice.” (Blog Post)
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| ICONIC: How Organizations and Leaders Attain, Sustain, and Regain the Highest Level of Distinction
by Scott McKain
(Forefront Books/Simon & Schuster, 2018)
“Iconic organizations and leaders have become such universal symbols of distinction they are not only irresistible to customers in their marketplace, they compel interest and admiration across a wide spectrum.” How do you attain iconic status? The answer is explained in detail in this book. (Blog Post)
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| Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great
by Carmine Gallo
(St. Martin's Press, 2018)
“Your ability to communicate persuasively is the single greatest skill that will set you apart in the next decade.” There is so much in this book that will help you perform better in all of your communication. If only read one book on communication this year, this is it. (Blog Post)
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| Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do
by Carl J. Schramm
(Simon & Schuster, 2018)
If you are thinking of starting a business—and apparently nine million Americans are currently thinking about it and only about 500,000 actually do each year—you will want to read Burn the Business Plan. (Blog Post)
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| Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility
by Patty McCord
(Silicon Guild, 2018)
When it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams, Patty McCord says most companies have it all wrong. Powerful is a book of advice gained from her experience at Netflix. She began working with Reed Hastings to identify the behaviors that they wanted to see become consistent practices and worked to instill the discipline of actually doing them. When established they were communicated over and over again and eventually became known as the Netflix Culture Deck. (Blog Post)
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| The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership
by Fred Kofman
(Currency, 2018)
Fred Kofman's approach to leadership has little to do with the standard practices taught in business school and traditional books. Bringing together economics and business theory, communications and conflict resolution, family counseling and mindfulness mediation, Kofman argues in The Meaning Revolution that our most deep-seated, unspoken, and universal anxiety stems from our fear that our life is being wasted--that the end of life will overtake us when our song is still unsung. Kofman claims that transcendental leaders, wherever they are in the hierarchy, are able to put aside their self-interests and help others to feel connected with others on a team or in an organization on a great mission and part of an ennobling purpose.
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| Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life
by Hal Gregersen
(HarperBusiness, 2018)
The questions we ask determine our outcomes in leadership and life. The key to success is asking a different question. Gregersen explains the conditions we can create in our lives that will give rise to better questions—life-changing questions—that will provide us with better answers. (Blog Post)
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BIOGRAPHY
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| Connecting the Dots: Lessons for Leadership in a Startup World
by John Chambers with Diane Brady
(Hachette Books, 2018)
Since stepping down as CEO of Cisco in 2015, John Chambers founded the venture capital firm JC2 Ventures specializing in startups. That experience has led him to write Connecting the Dots as a way to help others to learn from the key events in his life and career as they navigate business and life. It has always been true, but it is worth repeating: “What will differentiate the winners from the losers won’t be technology or capital but leadership and a willingness to learn.” (Blog Post)
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| Entrepreneurial Leader: A Lifetime of Adventures in Business, Education, and Government
by William H. Donaldson with Karl Weber
(Greenleaf Book Group, 2018)
Donaldson and Karl Weber extract relevant lessons for leaders in Entrepreneurial Leader. The thread that runs through his career is the entrepreneurial mindset. That mindset is “about the application of creative thinking and prudent risk-taking to build innovative, long-lasting organizations in any sector of the economy.” (Blog Post)
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| Leading Matters: Lessons from My Journey
by John L. Hennessy
(Stanford University Press, 2018)
Leading Matters is about the journey. The stories Hennessy tells here are revolve around the ten elements that shaped his journey and how he relied on these traits in pivotal moments. The elements are relevant to any leader at any level. As he observes, the higher up you go the crises just get bigger and come faster. (Blog Post)
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| Leadership In Turbulent Times
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
(Simon & Schuster, 2018)
In this well-structured study, Goodwin begins by looking at the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson in turn, when they first entered public life. Unremarkable at this stage of their life they, like most young leaders, made mistakes stemming from inexperience, cockiness, lack of caution, outright misjudgments, and selfishness. But more importantly we “see the efforts made to acknowledge, conceal, or overcome these mistakes.” This of course, is a key to their eventual success. (Blog Post)
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