High Management

If you listen to nothing else on performing at your highest level, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you focus on what matters, manage your energy and attention, and achieve remarkable results. This book will inspire you to improve on your weaknesses, not just your strengths; rise above the pack; take care of your physical health for sustained mental performance; understand what motivates you; use short-term goals to achieve long-term aspirations; and inspire others.

The success of Starbucks is one of the most remarkable business stories in decades. Since 1987, the coffee merchant has grown from a single retail store on Seattle's waterfront to a company with more than 1,000 stores nationwide and a new one opening somewhere every business day. According to Fortune magazine, Starbucks "has changed everything...from our tastes to our language to the face of Main Street."

Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator's Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation. Sharp, cogent, and provocative—and consistently noted as one of the most valuable business ideas of all time—The Innovator's Dilemma is the book no manager, leader, or entrepreneur should be without.

Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute provides practical and simple concepts that CEOs, COOs, and managers at all levels in organizations both public and private can apply to their particular situations. This program is written by Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager and a regular contributor to Executive Excellence.

If recent history has taught us anything, it's that sometimes the best guide to leadership is the negative example. But that insight is hardly new. Nearly 2,000 years ago, Suetonius wrote Lives of the Caesars, perhaps the greatest negative leadership book of all time. In How to Be a Bad Emperor, Josiah Osgood provides crisp new translations of Suetonius's briskly paced, darkly comic biographies of the Roman emperors Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero. Entertaining and shocking, these ancient anti-role models show how power inflames leaders' worst tendencies.

Unstoppable Teams show managers at every level, at both large and small organizations, including private, public, and nonprofit, how to inspire, motivate, and lead the people around them.

In a televised social experiment before millions of viewers, police sergeant Derrick Levasseur demonstrated that techniques used by undercover detectives could help people achieve their goals in everyday social situations. The result: he walked away with more than half a million dollars. In The Undercover Edge, Derrick shares his personal mind-set surrounding human behavior and motivation. Even more than that, he provides easy yet groundbreaking tools acquired while overcoming personal adversity.

The new female manager’s encyclopedia - how to lead like a pro and spin teamwork into value, even with little experience! If you’ve been newly appointed to a managerial position with a few years of experience under your belt…you may struggle to get used to your peers calling you “boss”. However, it would help if you weren’t afraid to embrace leadership roles - you earned every right to excel, and your boss must have noticed something exceptional in you, so don’t downplay yourself.

How can we apply technology to drive business value? For years we've been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn't matter - that it can't provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through four years of groundbreaking research to include data collected from the State of DevOps reports conducted with Puppet, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance - and what drives it - using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research, making the information accessible for listeners to apply in their own organizations.

In High Ten: An Inspiring Story About Building Great Team Culture, Martin Rooney draws from his extensive experience developing top-level teams around the world to help leaders of all kinds foster and sustain winning cultures. This engaging parable shows you that every business, sports team, and family has a culture.

Imagine you're circling a crowded parking lot. Just as you spot a space, another driver races ahead and takes it. In a world of road rage, domestic violence, and professionally angry TV and radio commentators, your likely response is anger, even fury. Now imagine that instead of another driver, a cow has lumbered into that parking space and settled down. Your anger dissolves into bemusement. What has changed? Not just the occupant of the space but your perspective on the situation.

Your business success depends on your ability to align and develop the people who work for you. High-performance teams are built intentionally by leaders who understand the three essential components of growth: alignment, development, and transition. TeamWork breaks each of these components down into actionable processes, with steps you can take immediately to start making a difference today. Learn how to create teams that work the way you want them to. Then, discover ways to scale those teams, keeping them aligned with your objectives as your business grows.

Throughout his legendary career, John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard mutual fund group and creator of the first index mutual fund, has helped investors build wealth the right way and led a tireless campaign to restore common sense to the investment world. Along the way, he's seen how destructive an obsession with financial success can be. Now, with Enough, he puts this dilemma in perspective.

Pulling Together is a fantastic guide for leaders from all walks of life. In it you will learn about the 10 Rules for High Performance Teamwork. They’re simple, yet so important! It’s not only about leading a team, but also being a part of one. The 10 rules are presented in a way that every person in your organization can understand. Use this audiobook to clarify expectations and foster accountability, build more focus, unity, trust and credibility with your team, align people and systems, mobilize commitment and generate enthusiasm.

The Leadership Contract provides the manual that leaders around the world need. With only seven percent of employees feeling confident in senior leadership, the problem is evident: disappointing, and often disgraceful leaders. Employees deserve better than that; organizations need better than that - and this book provides a robust framework for stepping up and making the decision to lead. If you're not exceptional, step up or step aside - this book helps you toughen up and put your commitment to great leadership in writing for yourself as much as everyone else.

It's comforting to imagine that superstars in their fields were just born better equipped than the rest of us. When a co-worker loses 20 pounds, or a friend runs a marathon while completing a huge project at work, we assume they have more grit, more willpower, more innate talent, and above all, more motivation to see their goals through. But that's not at actually true, as popular Inc.com columnist Jeff Haden proves. "Motivation" as we know it is a myth. Motivation isn't the special sauce that we require at the beginning of any major change.

First published in 1949 and praised in the New York Times Book Review as "full of beauty and vigor and bite", A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land.

In his bravest and most challenging book yet, Seth Godin shows how we can thrive in an economy that rewards art, not compliance. He explains why true innovators focus on trust, remarkability, leadership, and stories that spread. And he makes a passionate argument for why you should be treating your work as art. Art is not a gene or a specific talent. It's an attitude, available to anyone who has a vision that others don't, and the guts to do something about it.

Jayson Gaddis is a personal trainer for relationships and one of the world’s leading authorities on interpersonal conflict. For almost two decades, Gaddis has helped individuals, couples, and teams get to the bottom of their deepest conflicts. He helps people see the wisdom in conflict and how to get to zero - how “clean and clear” we feel with others when we have successfully worked through a disagreement. In Getting to Zero, Gaddis shows the listener how to stop running away from uncomfortable conversations and instead learn how to work through them.

My Years with General Motors became an instant best seller when it was first published in 1963. It has since been used as a manual for managers, offering personal glimpses into the practice of the "discipline of management" by the man who perfected it. This is the story no other businessman could tell - a distillation of half a century of intimate leadership experience with a giant industry and an inside look at dramatic events and creative business management.