Leadership Problems

David Rakoff's best-selling collection of autobiographical essays, Fraud, established him as one of today's funniest and most insightful writers. Now, in Don't Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff moves from the personal to the public, journeying into the land of unchecked plenty that is contemporary America. Rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly and wittily skewered.

Value stream mapping - an essential but underused methodology - is a proven approach to help you visualize and resolve disconnects, redundancies, and gaps in your value delivery system. More than a tool to eliminate operational waste, value stream mapping is a highly effective means to transform leadership thinking, define strategy and priorities, and create customer-centric work flow. Business performance improvement experts Karen Martin and Mike Osterling present a practical way to deeply understand how work gets done - in any environment - and how to design improved work systems.

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.

We spend the majority of our lives making decisions, both big and small. Yet, even though our success is largely determined by the choices that we make, very few of us are equipped with useful decision-making skills. Because of this, we often approach our choices tentatively, or even fearfully, and avoid giving them the time and thought required to put our best foot forward.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign.

Radical uncertainty changes the way we should think about decision-making. For over half a century economics has assumed that people behave rationally by optimizing among well-defined choices. Behavioral economics questioned how far people are rational, pointing to the cognitive biases that seem to describe actual behavior.

Every manager makes tough calls - it comes with the job. And the hardest decisions are the "gray areas" - situations where you and your team have worked hard to find an answer, you've done the best analysis you can, and you still don't know what to do. But you have to make a decision. In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers a powerful, practical, and even radical way to resolve these problems.

Despite all the effort through the years to understand what it takes to be an effective leader, the challenges of leadership remain enormously difficult and elusive. Drawing on the distilled wisdom, stories and lessons from hundreds of chief executives to show how every aspiring leader can master these challenges and lead like a CEO, The CEO Test is the authoritative, no-nonsense insider's guide to navigating leadership's toughest challenges, brought to you by authors uniquely qualified to tell the stories.

In Clarity in Crisis, Marc shares how true leaders need to lead in and through times of crisis and thrive under conditions of ambiguity, rather than message their way out or duck from hard decisions.

Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a "good" leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the "collective genius" of the people in the organization.

How the world's leading innovators push their ideas to fruition, time and time again. Edison famously said that genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. Ideas for new businesses, solutions to the world's problems, and artistic breakthroughs are common, but great execution is rare. According to Scott Belsky, the capacity to make ideas happen can be strengthened by anyone willing to build their organizational habits and harness the forces of community.

Brick by Brick takes you inside the LEGO you've never seen. By following the teams that are inventing some of the world's best-loved toys, it spotlights the company's disciplined approach to harnessing creativity and recounts one of the most remarkable business transformations in recent memory.

The ability to make sound and timely decisions is the mark of a good leader. But when leaders with otherwise strong track records suddenly begin making poor decisions - as seen in the recent corporate scandals that rocked the business world - the impact can be widespread. In The Stress Effect, leadership expert Henry L. Thompson argues that stress is often the real culprit behind this leadership failure.

Thoroughly revised and updated new edition of the best-selling guide to implementing the popular change methodology, Appreciative Inquiry, in organizations of all sizes and sectors. 20,000 of the 1st edition sold.

The purpose of The Sticking Point Solution is to help entrepreneurs and executives recognize the ways in which their businesses may be stuck, and to then give them tools for getting unstuck and enjoying exponential growth. To achieve this, Jay will help you to identify the nine "sticking points" that keep entrepreneurs and executives alike grinding just to survive, instead of growing and thriving.

Are you a Simplifier or a Multiplier? Every great entrepreneur is primarily one or the other, and identifying which you are adds deeper insight and meaning to the way you instinctively create value. Once you know who you are, you can find the perfect collaborator: your opposite. Simplier-Multiplier collaborations lead to unprecedented breakthroughs and results, and give you the freedom to focus exclusively on what you do best.

In Better, Simpler Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee provides executives with a simple tool to cut through technological complexity and market uncertainties. The Value Stick, based on proven economic mechanics, is an extraordinarily powerful tool that helps executives decide where to focus their attention and how to deepen their firm's competitive advantage.

This is a book about common sense—what it is, how to make it, and how to put it into practice across all contexts of leadership and life. It's also a book of stories from my leadership journey across continents, cultures, and contexts (e.g., combat, business, and government). In this book, you’ll learn what I learned and what many other common-sense leaders across the ages have learned before us.

Leading with Strategic Thinking reveals what effective leaders do differently. Eschewing the one-size-fits-all leadership model, this helpful guide outlines four general leadership types and demonstrates how each type achieves success - whether through personal vision, structured process, collaboration, or empowering others. The authors identify the actions and skills that distinguish strategic leadership, drawn from interviews and focus groups with over 300 leaders from around the world.

Scott knows firsthand what it’s like to go from out-of-touch boss to team-growing leader. In Management Mess to Leadership Success, you’ll find 30 leadership challenges, honed by FranklinCovey through years of research, instructional programs, and executive consultancy, and illustrated with real-life experiences shared by someone who’s lived these challenges.