Systems Leadership

Today’s 21st-century leaders face tremendous pressure in an increasingly complex and fast-changing world, where traditional leadership models have become obsolete. To transform and transcend these challenges a new type of leadership is essential. The solution? Systems Inspired Leadership (SIL): a powerful alternative for innovative leaders. Instead of an outmoded and ineffective top-down, leader-knows-all style that results in stress, pressure, and anxiety, SIL offers a fresh proven approach for achieving optimal results for your organization.

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international best seller, Limits to Growth - the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet - Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem-solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world....

Learn about the Coach's Stance, the Four Phases of Coaching, and much more.

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 secret to business success is intuition. It's not just a matter of following you hunches. It's about following the right hunches. Being able to sense people's inner thoughts and needs helps you say and do the things needed to quickly reach your goals and achieve success. Many people know this, but many also believe that a good sense of intuition is something that you're just born with - not something that you can develop and train.

In Capitalism, Alone, leading economist Branko Milanovic explains the reasons for this decisive historical shift since the days of feudalism and, later, communism. Surveying the varieties of capitalism, he asks: What are the prospects for a fairer world now that capitalism is the only game in town? His conclusions are sobering, but not fatalistic. Capitalism gets much wrong, but also much right - and it is not going anywhere. Our task is to improve it.

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.

Jim Camp, the world’s number one negotiating coach, shows how to release the emotional pressure that’s part of any negotiation by using his proven system of safe, decision-based negotiation that enables you to meet all your objectives without needless, wasted compromises or giveaways. Saying no is not about being hard-nosed or intransigent. Rather, it stops everyone in their tracks, clears the air, and allows you to get at what the real issues are.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

Michael E. Gerber, the world's leading small business guru and best-selling author of the phenomenally successful The E-Myth Revisited, presents the next big step in entrepreneurial management and leadership with E-Myth Mastery. This audiobook presents a practical, real-world program that can be implemented in real-time in your business.

In The Chief Executive Operating System, veteran CEO Joel Trammell and executive coach Sherif Sakr present a concise, systematic guide to being a truly great chief executive. Filling a wide gap around CEO-specific guidance in the management literature, the authors draw on decades of leadership and client work to deliver a practical CEO operating system that works.

In this classic text, Taiichi Ohno—inventor of the Toyota Production System and Lean manufacturing—shares the genius that sets him apart as one of the most disciplined and creative thinkers of our time. Combining his candid insights with a rigorous analysis of Toyota's attempts at Lean production, Ohno's book explains how Lean principles can improve any production endeavor.

Getting to the good solutions of complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, the success or failure of companies. Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle orients around the particular challenges of engineering management - from sizing teams to technical debt to succession planning - and provides a path to the good solutions.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution provides a simple, proven formula for achieving the goals that every individual or organization needs to reach. From Marriott to the U.S. Navy, Covey and his team have worked with more than 200,000 people in hundreds of organizations to improve performance, identifying and honing four secrets of perfect execution: Focus on the Wildly Important; Act on the Lead Measures; Keep a Compelling Scoreboard; and Create a Cadence of Accountability.

Leaders not only need incredible physical energy and stamina, they need a support system, philosophy, plan, business acumen, a social network, and a brand and reputation that will ensure they achieve their vision. Backed by an assessment tool, giving each leader a personal "report card," this book provides aspiring leaders with a framework to address all aspects of leadership that translates to peak performance.

What does the collapse of sub-prime lending have in common with a broken jackscrew in an airliner’s tailplane? These were systems that drifted into failure. While pursuing success in a dynamic, complex environment with limited resources and multiple goal conflicts, a succession of small, everyday decisions eventually produced breakdowns on a massive scale. The growth of complexity in society has outpaced our understanding of how complex systems work and fail. This book explores complexity theory and systems thinking to understand better how complex systems drift into failure.

In Come Up for Air, you’ll discover the CPR® Business Efficiency Framework, a proven system for leaders, managers, and teams to maximize their performance and reduce overwhelm by using the right tools in the right way, at the right time. The end result? More output, less stress, happier employees, and the potential to gain an extra full day per week in productivity to use however you’d like.

In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient - lessons directly applicable to your organization.

Do you sometimes feel like your business is an adult daycare center? Are you constantly repeating yourself, fixing errors, and trying to hold things together? What if it were possible to create a business that runs itself? You’ve dreamed about it - now it’s time to make this a reality! SYSTEMology solves this problem with a proven, step-by-step business systemisation framework - designed so that even the busiest business owner can deploy it.

Most think productivity is just about getting more done at a faster speed. But it's not. Productivity is about getting the right things done. New York Times best-selling author Michael Hyatt has created a total productivity system that's much more than endless box checking. Proven by more than 25,000 professionals, this system helps overwhelmed leaders achieve what matters most so they can succeed at both work and life.