Career Leadership

At age 26, Joanne P. McCallie, a.k.a. Coach P, began her career at Maine, where in the span of eight years, she elevated the women's basketball program to a very competitive team that outdrew the men's crowds, a rarity in college sports. Over her tenure, she created the Choice Not Chance (CNC) philosophy, training kids how to think and focus on making the correct choices in life. She imparted her passionate philosophy to all of her players and now brings it to her efforts as head coach at Duke. Choice Not Chance highlights McCallie's lessons for building a fierce competitor.

Years ago, developing and sustaining a book of business was not as big a problem for accountants, attorneys, financial planners, and other professionals as it is today. Clients were more loyal to the firms they worked with, and unlikely to shop your services, compare rates, or jump ship. Times have changed! And if you don't change along with them...well, you're not going to enjoy yourself or have as much control over your career as you deserve. Believe it or not, you can enjoy the process of expanding your client base.

Today, organizations are grappling with ambiguity, volatility, and paradox surrounding the challenges they face. This is complexity. But too many leaders approach complexity the wrong way - they push their people harder and harder and tackle problems one at a time over months, sometimes even years and nearly always in a linear fashion. It’s like setting a pot of water on “low” and waiting for it to boil. In this book, the authors share their proven formula for dramatically shortening the process and solving an organization’s toughest challenges in mere days.

5 Voices is the code for unlocking your capacity to have honest conversations and build deeper, more authentic relationships with your teams, your families, and your friends. In order to lead others effectively, we need a true understanding of ourselves, our natural tendencies, and patterns of behavior.

Visionaries have groundbreaking ideas. Integrators make those ideas realities. This explosive combination is the key to getting everything you want out of your business. It worked for Disney. It worked for McDonald's. It worked for Ford. It can work for you. From the author of the best-selling Traction, Rocket Fuel details the integral roles of the visionary and integrator and explains how an effective relationship between the two can help your business thrive.

People who do amazing things in the world - developing a new cancer drug, creating award-winning ads, helping their communities - may seem to have all sorts of advantages. But they don’t have any more hours than the rest of us. Instead, they may be allocating their hours in interesting ways that the rest of us can learn from. In this workshop, time management expert Laura Vanderkam explains about how broadening our perspective on time will help us be more intentional with the hours we have, and shares the simple, practical steps your team can take to start making time work for them.

In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that the Objectives and Key Results system has spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

Playing to Win, a noted Wall Street Journal and Washington Post best seller, outlines the strategic approach Lafley, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, used to double P&G’s sales, quadruple its profits, and increase its market value by more than $100 billion when Lafley was first CEO (he led the company from 2000 to 2009). The book shows leaders in any type of organization how to guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business successwhere to play and how to win.

4DX® is not theory. It is a proven set of practices that represents a new way of thinking essential to thriving in today’s competitive climate, making this 2nd edition a book that no business leader can afford to miss. The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) is a simple, repeatable, and proven formula for executing your most important strategic priorities in the midst of the whirlwind. By following the 4 Disciplines, leaders can produce breakthrough results, even when executing the strategy requires a significant change in behavior from their teams.

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are.

Having managed dozens of teams spanning tens to hundreds of people, Julie Zhuo knows the most important lesson of all: Great managers are made, not born. The Making of a Manager is a modern field guide packed with everyday examples and transformative insights you need to be the kind of manager you wish you had.

Today's coaches are challenged with the recurring task of weaving threads from several disciplines into a tapestry that is fit for purpose in helping their clients learn and succeed. In this sense, the coach has to become a discriminating eclectic, developing a keen sense of judgment to select which threads are best woven into the fabric and those that it would be better to simply throw away.

In Great Leaders Grow, a woman named Debbie Brewster becomes a mentor to a young man named Blake, as he embarks on his own career. Together, they explore four ways that leaders must keep growing, both on the job and off. Within their story are valuable lessons for anyone who desires both professional success and personal fulfillment.

One of the biggest myths that plagues the business world today is that our ability to network depends on having the “gift-of-gab”. You don’t have to be outgoing to be successful at networking. You don’t have to become a relentless self-promoter. In fact, you don’t have to act like an extrovert at all. Matthew Pollard, an introvert himself, draws on over a decade of research and real-world examples to provide an actionable blueprint for introverted networking.

Imagine a world in which Gen Xers, millennials, and boomers interact with young people in ways that leave them feeling inspired, enthusiastic, and ready to contribute—rather than disengaged, outraged, or overwhelmed. That world may be closer than you think. In this book based on cutting edge research, psychologist David Yeager explains how to stop fearing young people’s brains and hormones and start harnessing them.

If you're like most driven entrepreneurs and business leaders, you are either starting or running a company that is barely scratching the surface of its growth and profit potential. How do you find the hidden "cash in the walls" and make the leap from ordinary business outcomes to retire-tomorrow, profit-rich results?

Most everyone has something they are passionate about. But without the ability to actually effect change...things just stay the same. In order to truly inspire change, we need to be able to effectively explain the problem, inspire people to join us, create a vision for the new reality, and then motivate people to take the actions that lead to the change. Inspiring change requires charisma - the ability to communicate a clear, visionary, and inspirational message that captivates and motivates an audience.

For decades, Peter F. Drucker was widely regarded as "the dean of this country's business and management philosophers" ( Wall Street Journal). In this concise and brilliant work, he looks to the most influential position in management - the executive. The measure of the executive, Drucker reminds us, is the ability to "get the right things done". This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive.

Being a great leader means getting the fundamentals right. It also means consistently doing the "little things" that make a positive difference in the lives of employees, customers, and other stakeholders. The Busy Leader's Handbook: How to Lead People and Places That Thrive is a practical, easy-to-use book filled with gentle reminders of what we should be doing every day - especially when work is at its most intense.

Microsoft project veteran Scott Berkun offers a collection of essays on field-tested philosophies and strategies for defining, leading, and managing projects. Each essay distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice, and the new edition now adds more value for leaders and managers of projects everywhere.