Organizational Leadership

It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day demands of your current job and lose sight of the big picture, but with a typical career spanning fifty years or more, you do so at your own peril. It's up to you to chart your own course to professional success. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the 10 most important ones to help you develop yourself, make the right career moves, navigate inevitable detours and disruptions, and turn your professional dreams into reality.

What if leaders stripped away all preconceptions about how business operates, allowing the organization to go back to its core and build itself back up to become something new - something so responsive, so innovative and resilient, it becomes virtually non-displaceable in the market? The Regenerative Business sets the stage for what is now only dreamt of by most of today's forward-thinking leaders and paves the path to make it possible.

According to conventional morality, either a business manager maximizes profits and necessarily compromises on ethics, or necessarily sacrifices profits in order to be moral. Woiceshyn explains why this is a false dichotomy and offers rational egoism as an alternative moral code to business people who want to maximize profits ethically. Through logical argument and various examples, this audiobook shows how to apply principles such as rationality, productiveness, honesty, justice, and pride for long-term self-interest.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Best-selling author Jason Jennings believes that urgency and speed are keys to the growth of any business. Leaders need to adapt and ignite their workplace cultures to prevent everyone from falling behind. Jennings draws on years of research and 11,000+ in-depth interviews with executives, business owners, and CEOs across the country to uncover how successful leaders build cultures that support constant innovation and growth.

Here are really two books in one: McNeilly's synthesis of Sun Tzu's ideas into six strategic principles for the business executive, plus the entire text of Samuel B. Griffith's popular translation of The Art of War. Within, McNeilly explains how to gain market share without inciting competitive retaliation, how to attack a competitor's weak points, and how to maximize the power of market information for competitive advantage.

Nearly a quarter century ago Carter Cast seemed to have it all together: he had a first-class education, an all-American athletic career, and was a very bright and energetic rising star on the fast track at a Fortune 100 company, PepsiCo. But blissfully unaware of how negative perceptions were shaped, he was stunned when called into his boss's office, and told he was "unpromotable" because he was "obstinate", "resistant", and "insubordinate".

Institutions remain essential to human flourishing. They are the means by which communities thrive, individual vocations are fulfilled, and society is changed for the good. As a result, we all need to learn how to work effectively within institutions. That is just what Gordon Smith provides. He unpacks the core of institutional intelligence - the wisdom of working effectively within an organization. At the same time, he explains how team leaders, directors, executives, board members, key stakeholders, and employees can avoid what is often their greatest source of stress on the job,

Serving on a board is like having a second full-time job. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the 10 most important ones to help you address classic challenges such as increasing diversity, ensuring a culture that reflects company values, and providing strategic oversight while also addressing emerging issues such as shareholder activism, cybersecurity, and ever-shifting regulations.

We have a choice. We can either be reactive and struggle to adjust to transformational events on the fly, or we can be proactive and control the narrative—reinventing work to align with the evolving environment. Futurist Rishad Tobaccowala has had a highly successful career because he has anticipated and capitalized on emerging trends. In Rethinking Work, Rishad outlines the reasons why being proactive in this era of unprecedented change is the only way organizations will survive and thrive.

Every business leader today should be asking themselves these questions. Systems and processes have been skewed too long in favor of some at the expense of others, and things are changing - fast. How to Be an Ally shows how to take personal responsibility for driving change that's good for people - and for business.

High performance has always required shrewd strategy and superb execution. But Rich Karlgaard - Forbes publisher, entrepreneur, investor, and board director - takes a surprising turn and argues that there is now a third element that's required for competitive advantage - your company's values. Karlgaard examined a variety of enduring companies and found that they have one thing in common; all have leveraged their deepest values alongside strategy and execution, allowing them to fuel growth as well as weather hard times.

Many people today are so dazzled by the long-term potential for artificial intelligence that they overlook the much clearer and more immediate potential for a new form of "collective intelligence": the intelligence of groups of people and computers working together. In Superminds, Thomas Malone explains what we need to do to take advantage of this potential. Groundbreaking and utterly fascinating, Superminds will change the way you work - both with others and with computers - for the better.

Berkshire Hathaway, the $300+ billion conglomerate that Warren Buffett built, is among the world's largest and most famous corporations. Yet for all its power and celebrity, few people understand Berkshire, and many assume it cannot survive without Buffett. This book challenges that assumption. In a comprehensive portrait of the corporate culture that unites Berkshire's subsidiaries, Lawrence Cunningham unearths the traits that assure the conglomerate's perpetual prosperity.

Today, not only is everything digital getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, we also have the Internet. When these two revolutions - one in technology and the other in communications - joined, an explosive force was unleashed that changed the very nature of innovation. And with any change, we have seen many strategic blunders and extraordinary learning curves along the way.

UCLA psychologist and organizational consultant Dr. Robert Maurer provides a simple and proven effective technique for making major changes with minimal disruption. Applying the operational concept of kaizen - small, continual improvements - to common management challenges, managers can drive major improvements with a series of well-planned techniques for boosting quality, innovation, sales, and morale.

Research shows you have a 50% chance of hiring the right employee...and a 50% chance of hiring the wrong one. It’s a toss up, but it doesn’t have to be. Mis-hires siphon your energy and erode team culture. Replacing them is stressful and can cost over $40,000 per re-hire. With the right tools, all of that can be avoided, and you can consistently make great hires. After years of scientific research and first-hand interview experience with thousands of candidates, Chaka Booker has created a system that helps employers consistently make great hires.

Get your mind around this: a company without org charts or hierarchy. Some firms do operate this way, but this download, The Centerless Corporation, explains how they work and why. Give this a listen and maybe it'll show you how to change your company. You can bring it up with the, uh...boss.

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.”

Increasingly, new employees and junior members of any profession are encouraged - sometimes stridently - to "find a mentor!" Four decades of research reveals that the effects of mentorship can be profound and enduring; strong mentoring relationships have the capacity to transform individuals and entire organizations.