Career Leadership

Once you’ve discovered your strengths, you need to discover something else: Your strengths can work against you. Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, and they see it in others. But they don’t see it as clearly in themselves. Mainly, they think of leadership development as working on their weaknesses. No wonder. The tools used to assess managers are not equipped to pick up on overplayed strengths - when more is not better. Nationally recognized leadership experts Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser have conducted thousands of assessments of senior executives designed to determine when their strengths serve them well - versus betray them.

In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals. One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work.

A classic work on leadership for business men and women, government leaders, and all people in positions of authority.

The coauthors of the New York Times best-selling Difficult Conversations take on the toughest topic of all: How we see ourselves. Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen have spent the past 15 years working with corporations, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In Thanks for the Feedback, they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging. They blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice.

The new question: Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? In Great by Choice, Collins and his colleague, Morten T. Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times. The new study: Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins’s prior work by its focus on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today.

Written by Sir John Whitmore, the pioneer of coaching, and Performance Consultants, the global market leaders in performance coaching, this extensively revised and extended edition will revolutionize the traditional approach to organizational culture. Brand-new practical exercises, corporate examples, and coaching dialogues strengthen the learning process, whilst a critical new chapter demonstrates how to measure the benefits of coaching as a return on investment, ensuring this landmark new edition will remain at the forefront of professional coaching and leadership development.

Productivity expert Paula Rizzo shows how you can use lists to your maximum advantage. She helps you assess the work you have in front of you and identify how to best spend your time - figuring out what to work on versus what to delegate, what’s important versus what can wait. From evaluating tasks through the lens of your top priorities to embracing your own productivity rhythm and scheduling free time to recharge, her tips will empower you to accomplish more of what’s meaningful.

If you want your staff to perform at their best, then you need to become the best damn manager ever, someone who can ignite your employees' passion for their jobs, enabling them to execute their duties at a high level whether you're there or not. The Best Damn Management Book Ever teaches managers, executives, and business owners how to do just that.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question, and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it, and it's worth doing right.

Only 10 days before Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office in 1861, the Confederate States of America seceded from the Union, taking all Federal agencies, forts, and arenas within their territory. To make matters worse, Lincoln, who was elected by a minority of the popular vote, was thought of by his own advisors as nothing more than a gawky second-rate country lawyer with no leadership experience. What Lincoln did to become our most honored and revered president is history; now his wisdom and leadership philosophy can help you run your business.

As an 18-year-old, black, broke, lonely, insecure, university drop-out, from a bankrupt family, I wrote in my diary that I wanted to be a 'Happy Sexy Millionaire' by the age of 25. By 25 I was a multi-millionaire having created a business worth over $300m dollars. Ironically, in achieving everything I set out to, I learnt that I was wrong about almost everything... The world had lied to me. It lied to me about how you attain fulfilment, love and success, why those things matter, and what those words actually mean.

Master negotiator Herb Cohen has been successfully negotiating everything from insurance claims to hostage releases to his own son's hair length and hundreds of other matters for over five decades. Ever since coining the term win-win in 1963, he has been teaching people the world over how to get what they want in any situation. In clear, accessible steps, he reveals how anyone can use the three crucial variables of power, time, and information to always reach a win-win negotiation.

Mark Hunter’s own start in sales was inauspicious, to say the least. He was fired from his first two stints before he began to learn the lessons that he covers in A Mind for Sales. He discovered that sales can be incredibly rewarding, such as when your customers call you for advice, thanking you for improving their business, and letting you know they just referred you to colleagues. The difference is simply developing mindset and momentum habits.

In his popular Stanford University lectures, Shirzad Chamine reveals how to achieve one's true potential for both professional success and personal fulfillment. His groundbreaking research exposes ten well-disguised mental Saboteurs. Nearly 95 percent of the executives in his Stanford lectures conclude that these Saboteurs cause "significant harm" to achieving their full potential. With Positive Intelligence, you can learn the secret to defeating these internal foes.

Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own. Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business.

Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help listeners choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization.

To become a millionaire, you have to think like one. The Millionaire Mind shows you how. Also available: The Millionaire Next Door.

Being a CEO at any of the world’s largest companies is among the most challenging roles in business. Billions, and even trillions, are at stake—and the fates of tens of thousands of employees often hang in the balance. Yet, even when “can’t miss” high-achievers win the top job, very few excel. For those who shoulder the burden of being the one on whom everyone counts, a manual for excellence is sorely needed. To identify the 21st century’s best CEOs, the authors of CEO Excellence started with a pool of over 2,400 public company CEOs.

Colleges and universities constitute a special type of organization; and their complex mission, dynamics, personnel structures, and values require a distinct set of understandings and skills to lead and manage them well.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve.