Career Leadership

Built To Last, the defining management study of the 90s, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

Michael Porter’s groundbreaking ideas on competition and strategy have unfolded over three decades and are spread across a dauntingly long list of publications. Every manager can name individual pieces of his work - competitive advantage, the value chain, five forces - but no one, not even Porter himself, has put the entire puzzle together to reveal it as an integrated whole. This lucid, concise audiobook does just that. This book provides an engaging summary of Porter’s ideas and an invaluable synthesis of this important body of work....

Being a startup CEO is a job like no other: it's difficult, risky, stressful, lonely, and often learned through trial and error. As a startup CEO seeing things for the first time, you're likely to make mistakes, fail, get things wrong, and feel like you don't have any control over outcomes. Author Matt Blumberg has been there, and in Startup CEO he shares his experience, mistakes, and lessons learned as he guided Return Path from a handful of employees and no revenues to over $100 million in revenues and 500 employees.

Average schools don't inspire greatness - and greatness is what our world needs if we are going to produce world-changing learners. In Culturize, author and education leader Jimmy Casas shares insights into what it takes to cultivate a community of learners who embody the innately human traits our world desperately needs, such as kindness, honesty, and compassion. His stories reveal how these "soft skills" can be honed while meeting and exceeding academic standards of 21st-century learning.

Elite: High Performance Lessons and Habits from a Former Navy SEAL is a must-listen guide for everyone from aspiring entrepreneurs to established business leaders. No matter the stage of your business - development, exploitation, or disruption - Elite will change your approach to business and unlock the warrior within.

A behind-the-scenes, revelatory history of McKinsey & Company, America's most influential and controversial business consulting firm, told by one of the nation's leading financial journalists. In The Firm, Duff McDonald uncovers how these high-powered, high-priced business savants have ushered in waves of structural, financial, and technological shifts. With unrivaled access to company documents and current and former employees, McDonald reveals the inner workings of what just might be the most influential private organization in America.

The ancient biographer and essayist Plutarch thought deeply about the leadership qualities of the eminent Greeks and Romans he profiled in his famous - and massive - Lives, including politicians and generals such as Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony. Luckily for us, Plutarch distilled what he learned about wise leadership in a handful of essays, which are filled with essential lessons for experienced and aspiring leaders in any field today.

Do you have a grip on your business, or does your business have a grip on you? All entrepreneurs and business leaders face similar frustrations: personnel conflict, profit woes, and inadequate growth. Decisions never seem to get made, or once made, fail to be properly implemented. But there is a solution. It’s not complicated or theoretical.

Drawing upon his 25 years of experience as a successful CEO and executive coach, and including conversations and thinking from more than 20 well-known business and organizational leaders, Daniel Harkavy unpacks a proven framework you can implement for immediate results in your organization's culture and performance. If you're looking to improve your leadership, this book will give you a straightforward framework to do so.

Dale Carnegie's unique and powerful approach to leadership training is based on wisdom and expertise gained from developing leaders longer than any other professional development organization. Lead! is for new or experienced leaders alike who want to be more effective at motivating and inspiring their teams. This book is designed from the proven Dale Carnegie Leadership Success Model and Dale Carnegie's Human Relationships Principles to help you understand tools and techniques to address common leadership challenges....

This comprehensive guide to training your brain to do more for you presents a pragmatic set of tools to apply critical-thinking techniques to everyday business issues. Think Smarter is filled with real-world examples that demonstrate how the tools work in action, in addition to dozens of practice exercises applicable across industries and functions. Think Smarter is a versatile resource for individuals, managers, students, and corporate-training programs.

As a champion for nonprofit leaders hell-bent on maximizing the impact of the nonprofit sector, Joan produced this second edition of Joan Garry's Guide to Nonprofit Leadership during COVID lockdown. Drawing on her own experiences as a nonprofit ED, a board leader, a volunteer, and a donor, Joan shares her stories and introduces you to a host of new characters she has met since 2017. Board and staff leaders will see themselves in these folks - recognizing the mistakes and celebrating the successes.

Impromptu shows leaders how to think on their feet and respond eloquently in every situation. Never have there been so many opportunities to inspire and influence in everyday situations - elevator chats, corridor conversations, networking gatherings, meetings, and ceremonial events. Indeed, today the most iconic leadership moments are spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment events that reveal the inner workings of the leader's mind. When these impromptu opportunities arise, leaders must be able to listen, think, and respond within seconds.

In 1999 Joseph Pine and James Gilmore offered readers the idea of the experience economy as a new way to connect with customers and secure their loyalty. As a result, their book The Experience Economy is now a classic, embraced by listeners and companies worldwide and available in more than a dozen languages. Though the world has changed in many ways since then, the way to a customer’s heart has not.

Snipers are exceptional. The trained sniper is a complex fusion of hard skills such as weapons knowledge, situational awareness, knowledge of ballistics and physics, and soft skills such as emotional stability, empathy, and a stoic acceptance of the hardships associated with a particular set of circumstances. There are countless instances where a single sniper, embarking on a secret mission, would have to improvise, operate beyond any hope of support, and yet still manage to carry out the mission and get back home unharmed.

Help! I Work with People is not a book about leadership theory, but rather a handbook on how to connect with people and influence them for good. With his signature transparent and relatable storytelling, Chad Veach uses modern research and biblical principles to encourage you to lean into your leadership potential regardless of your level of influence or experience. In short and easily digestible chapters, he addresses the three phases of becoming a quality leader: learning to lead the hardest person you will ever be in charge of-yourself and more.

A practical four-step methodology for any leader or manager facing a tough choice, and for creating integrative solutions to big, complex, and pressing problems. Stimulating and practical, Creating Great Choices blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.

NLP: The Essential Handbook for Business is a straight-talking, highly practical guide to using NLP to significantly improve your results at work. Whether you want to be a better leader, manager, negotiator, salesperson, or decision-maker, you can learn proven NLP techniques that will boost your career as well as the performance of colleagues and the organization itself.

The Master Coach is based on the simple but profound 3Cs Coaching Model. This proven approach asserts that to master the art of coaching one must have an exemplary character that invites the trust of others, be able to form rapid connections with others at a deeply personal level, and have the ability to initiate and guide intense, attitude-changing conversations. At every step, Thompson reminds listeners that coaching is not merely about what the coach says or does; it's about who he or she is.

Become a more effective leader by discovering the resources you already have. Pamela McLean, CEO and cofounder of the Hudson Institute for Coaching, has been at the forefront of the field for the past three decades, using clinical and organizational psychology to provide the highest-quality coaching and development training to professionals in organizations and solo practice worldwide. Now, Pamela is teaching listeners to cultivate their leadership potential through "use of self as instrument," a key dimension of developmental coaching that emphasizes the whole person.