Career Leadership

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.

The word "purpose" is big. Very big. And heavy. It carries the weight of a lifetime of work and struggle; the weight of legacy, and the mass of days spent not doing something else. It's something we all grapple with at some point-some of us find our purpose, others spend a lifetime searching. A lucky few grow to realize they've been working their purpose all along. Often, fulfilling your purpose requires some kind of change - career, lifestyle, habits, family - and what then? Are we selfish for the upheaval, or are we fulfilling destiny? Once we know our purpose, how do we pursue it?

The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, 5th Edition: The Comprehensive, Easy to Read Handbook for Beginners and Pros is a comprehensive guide to real-world project management methods, tools, and techniques. Practical, easy-to-use, and deeply thorough, this book gives you the answers you need now. You'll find cutting-edge ideas and hard-won wisdom of one of the field's leading experts, delivered in short, lively segments that address common management issues.

Carlo Ancelotti is one of the greatest managers of all time, with five Champions League titles to his name. Yet his approach could not be further from the aggressive theatricals favoured by many of his rivals. His understated style has earned him the fierce loyalty of players like David Beckham, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Smart and accessible, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding is the definitive text on branding, pairing anecdotes about some of the best brands in the world, like Rolex, Volvo, and Heineken, with the signature savvy of marketing gurus Al and Laura Ries. Combining The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding and The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding, this book proclaims that the only way to stand out in today’s marketplace is to build your product or service into a brand - and provides the step-by-step instructions you need to do so.

Using the same characters as those found in Miller’s other bestseller, The Secret and one new character, a retired Special Forces Commander, this work aims to help team leaders and team members create high-performing teams. The core message is that Talent, Skills, and Community are all essential to team success, and that team leaders and leaders supervising or training team leaders, need to develop all three in order to create such teams.

At one time or another, everyone in a position of authority, whether in a multi-national corporation or a local volunteer group, wonders what the key to great leadership is. Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller explore that important question in this revealing business fable. They uncover the secret that great leaders already know and detail what you need to do to truly inspire and motivate others.

Using the exact steps you’ll learn in this book, Donald Miller grew his small business from four employees working out of a basement to a 15 million dollar operation, increasing revenue sixfold in just six years. As Miller grew his own business from the ground up, he realized nobody had put together a simple, step-by-step playbook for growing a business. That book didn’t exist. Until now. In this book, you’ll learn the 6 steps to grow a successful small business and create a playbook to implement them—your Flight Plan.

What does it mean to be a man in the modern world? Throughout history, being a man has meant different things. Maybe being a man was about being a good hunter, or a good soldier, a good businessman, or maybe good with women. Hard Times Create Strong Men examines what it means to be a man in the modern world relative to money, sex, religion, and politics. This audiobook examines what worked and what doesn’t work based on proven history instead of feelings.

Through a captivating business parable, Ken Blanchard and coauthors Susan Fowler and Laurence Hawkins show listeners how to apply the world-renowned Situational Leadership II method to their own development. The story centers on Steve, a young advertising executive who is about to lose his job. Through a series of talks with a One Minute Manager protégé named Cayla, Steve learns the three secrets of self leadership.

Are you hungry to help others through leadership but don't feel like you have the authority? One of the greatest myths of leadership is that you must be in charge in order to lead. Great leaders don't buy it. Great leaders - whether they have the official authority or not - learn how to be an influential presence wherever they are. In How to Lead When You're Not in Charge, author and pastor Clay Scroggins explains the nature of leadership and what's needed to be a great leader - even when you answer to someone else.

During his storied career as head coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, Phil Jackson won more championships than any coach in the history of professional sports. This is the story of a preacher's kid from North Dakota who grew up to be one of the most innovative leaders of our time. Eleven times, Jackson led his teams to the ultimate goal: the NBA championship - six times with the Chicago Bulls and five times with the Los Angeles Lakers. This book is full of revelations.

Finding ways to express yourself effectively in tense situations, from negotiations with a potential client to thorny discussions with a colleague, is the key to career success. In this workshop, communications expert Phil Jones shares how three key traits - curiosity, empathy, and courage - have the power to transform any encounter into a meaningful conversation and getting what you want. You'll explore excerpts from three surprising titles that forever changed how Phil approaches complex conversations....

Ben Horowitz offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

Best-selling author and scholar Michael Roberto presents a thorough investigation of organizational obstacles to creative thought. Highly relevant to the growth crises many enterprises face in today's economic landscape, this book examines how to break barriers to spark creativity and foster new ideas.

Leadership expert Sally Helgesen and best-selling leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith have trained thousands of high achievers - men and women - to reach even greater heights. Again and again, they see that women face specific and different road blocks from men as they advance in the workplace. In fact, the very habits that helped women early in their careers can hinder them as they move up. Simply put, what got you here won't get you there...and you might not even realize your blind spots until it's too late.

Debunking much of the received wisdom regarding the sources of leadership team dysfunctionality, Leadership Team Alignment presents a targeted strategy for building and managing a top executive team to gain competitive advantage. Frederic Godart and Jacques Neatby bring a wealth of practical experience and in-depth knowledge, with over eight hundred hours of direct observation with more than fifty leadership teams across the globe and thousands of hours working with executives.

For the last several years Adm. James Stavridis and his co-author, R. Manning Ancell, have surveyed over 200 active and retired four-star military officers about their reading habits and favorite books, asking each for a list of titles that strongly influenced their leadership skills and provided them with special insights that helped propel them to success in spite of the many demanding challenges they faced. The Leader's Bookshelf synthesizes their responses to identify the top 50 books that can help virtually anyone become a better leader.

We have a choice. We can either be reactive and struggle to adjust to transformational events on the fly, or we can be proactive and control the narrative—reinventing work to align with the evolving environment. Futurist Rishad Tobaccowala has had a highly successful career because he has anticipated and capitalized on emerging trends. In Rethinking Work, Rishad outlines the reasons why being proactive in this era of unprecedented change is the only way organizations will survive and thrive.

Josh Kaufman founded PersonalMBA.com as an alternative to the business school boondoggle. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. Now, he shares the essentials of entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, negotiation, operations, productivity, systems design, and much more, in one comprehensive volume. The Personal MBA distills the most valuable business lessons into simple, memorable mental models that can be applied to real-world challenges.