Management Leadership Success

Leadership isn't something you're born with or gifted as a reward for an abundance of charisma; true leadership stems from core skills that can be learned. Get more of the leadership ideas you want, from the authors you trust, with HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership (Vol. 2). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you maximize your own and your organization's performance.

For more than 40 years, The Boston Consulting Group has been shaping strategic thinking in business. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy offers a broad and up-to-date selection of the firm's best ideas on strategy with fresh ideas, insights, and practical lessons for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs in every industry. Here's a sampling of the provocative thinking you'll find inside.

Move is your guide to mobilizing your whole organization to take your business forward. Whatever your needed transformation may be - a new initiative, a new market, a new product, your fresh strategy is up against a powerful foe - an organization's tendency to stay very busy and completely engaged what it's already doing. Author Patty Azzarello draws on over 25 years of international business management experience to identify the chronic challenges that keep organizations from decisively executing strategy, and to give you a practical game plan for breaking through.

A practical four-step methodology for any leader or manager facing a tough choice, and for creating integrative solutions to big, complex, and pressing problems. Stimulating and practical, Creating Great Choices blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.

As a top-level sport psychologist and performance consultant, Dr. Stan Beeham knows what it takes to succeed - on the playing field, in the board room, and in all aspects of life. This award-winning book takes you inside the minds of major-league athletes, Olympic medal winners, and world-class business leaders to reveal the key motivators and mental processes that drive people to victory.

With The Essential Deming, Fordham University professor and Deming expert Joyce Orsini draws on a wealth of previously unavailable material to present the legendary thinker's most important management principles in one indispensable volume. The book is filled with articles, papers, lectures, and notes touching on a wide range of topics, but which focus on Deming's overriding message: Quality and operations are all about systems, not individual performance; the system has to be designed so that the worker can perform well.

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.

With the right motivation, you can begin to strengthen your character and become a moral and ethical leader capable of creating lasting change. In Leading with Character: 10 Minutes a Day to a Brilliant Legacy, Dr. Jim Loehr, cofounder of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, reveals 50 character competencies that you can practice daily to transform your life and work.

The major difference between achieving people and average people is their perception of and response to failure. John C. Maxwell takes a closer look at failure - and reveals that the secret of moving beyond failure is to use it as a lesson and a stepping-stone. He covers the top reasons people fail and shows how to master fear instead of being mastered by it. Listeners will discover that positive benefits can accompany negative experiences - if you have the right attitude.

Toxic Workplace! is the first book to tackle the underlying systems issues that enable a toxic person to create a path of destruction in an organization, pervading others' thoughts and energies, even undermining their very sense of well-being. Based on all-new research with over 400 leaders, many from the Fortune 500 list, this book illustrates how to manage existing toxic behaviors, create norms that prevent the growth or regrowth of toxic environments, and ultimately design organizational communities of respectful engagement.

The strength of any organization is determined by the quality of its managers. Want to be invaluable to your company? Just boost your management skills. When you discover what the most successful managers know, you'll unlock the secrets to turning even ordinary employees into extraordinary performers. Filled with proven techniques, this guide tells you how to bring out the best in your people - and hit new heights in your own career.

Women need to know it's okay to be kind and assertive. Between Grit and Grace will show you that success comes when you are comfortable living in the space between grit and grace - grit meaning being resilient and taking charge of your life (socially-acceptable masculine attributes), and grace meaning showing others mercy (socially-acceptable feminine trait).

As a savvy and motivated professional, you’re constantly on the lookout for high-impact leadership strategies to take your business to the next level and beyond—without bogging you down in abstract theories or exhaustive case studies. You need foolproof ways to lead your people to achieve outstanding results, even in challenging times. As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi said, it’s time to get “brilliant on the basics.”

How do you create your own definition of success - and reach your unique potential? Building a fulfilling life and career can be a daunting challenge. It takes courage and hard work. Too often, we charge down a path leading to “success” as defined by those around us - and ultimately, are left feeling dissatisfied. Each of us is unique and brings distinctive skills and qualities to any situation. So why is it that most of us fail to spend sufficient time learning to understand ourselves and creating our own definition of success?

Like Miller's previous books, this one follows the life, learning, and influence of Debbie Bruster. Here she finds herself mentoring Blake Brown, the son of her former mentor. Rather than answer Blake's questions about leadership directly, Debbie introduces him to other leaders, each of whom shares a unique perspective on what really makes a leader successful. As Blake puts the pieces together, he discovers his problem is not one of skills but of character - that leadership is more about the heart of the leader than the head or hands.

Developing successful relationships is critical to our success in both our personal and professional lives. The Power of Understanding People shows you how to establish and develop extremely effective relationships by providing you with techniques to better identify and understand the intrinsic needs of others. As a result, you will achieve better team dynamics, increased sales and client satisfaction, higher levels of employee engagement and performance, and even more satisfying marriages and friendships.

It's been over a decade since Verne Harnish's best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits was first released. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't is the first major revision of this business classic. In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team share practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business.

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.

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.

Here is Trump in action—how he runs his organization and how he runs his life—as he meets the people he needs to meet, chats with family and friends, clashes with enemies, and challenges conventional thinking. But even a maverick plays by rules, and Trump has formulated time-tested guidelines for success. He isolates the common elements in his greatest accomplishments; he shatters myths; he names names, spells out the zeros, and fully reveals the deal-maker's art. And throughout, Trump talks—really talks—about how he does it.