True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership
by Bill George and Peter Sims (Jossey-Bass, 2007)

True North shows how anyone who follows their internal compass can become an authentic leader. This leadership tour de force is based on research and first-person interviews with 125 of today’s top leaders—with some surprising results. True North presents a concrete and comprehensive program for leadership success and shows how to create your own Personal Leadership Development Plan centered on five key areas:

• Knowing your authentic self
• Defining your values and leadership principles
• Understanding your motivations
• Building your support team
• Staying grounded by integrating all aspects of your life

True North offers an opportunity for anyone to transform their leadership path and become the authentic leader they were born to be.

For more on this book, visit www.truenorthleaders.com

 
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
by Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter (Hyperion, 2007)

"The problems we’ll be looking at in this book are not life-threatening diseases (although ignored for too long they can destroy a career). They’re not deep-seated neuroses that require years of therapy or tons of medication to erase. "More often than not, they are simple behavioral tics ‘bad habits that we repeat dozens of times a day in the workplace’ which can be cured by (a) pointing them out, (b) showing the havoc they cause among the people surrounding us, and (c) demonstrating that with a slight behavioral tweak we can achieve a much more appealing effect."

For more on this book, visit www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com

How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life) by Dov L. Seidman (Wiley, 2007)

It’s no longer what you do that sets you apart from others, but how you do what you do. Whats are commodities, easily duplicated or reverse-engineered. Sustainable advantage and enduring success—for both companies and the people who work for them—now lie in the realm of how, the new frontier of conduct. Divided into four comprehensive parts, this insightful guide:

• Exposes the forces and factors that have fundamentally changed the world in which business operates, placing a new focus on the hows with which we conduct ourselves
• Provides frameworks to help you understand these hows and implement them in powerful and productive ways
• Helps you channel your actions and decisions to thrive uniquely within today’s new business realities
• Sheds light on the systems of how—the dynamics between people that shape organizational culture—and introduces a bold new vision for winning through self-governance

With in-depth insights and practical advice, HOW will help you bring excellence and significance to your business endeavors—and your life—and refocus your efforts in powerful new ways. If you want to stand out, to thrive in our fast changing, hyperconnected, and hypertransparent world, open this book and discover HOW.

For more on this book, visit www.HowsMatter.com

 
Measure of a Leader
by Aubrey C. Daniels and James E. Daniels
(McGraw-Hill, 2007)

This book turns conventional leadership wisdom on its head, showing how to focus on the behavior of followers to craft a powerful leadership style.

Structuring their message around the indicators of follower behavior that predict a leader’s influence, Aubrey and James Daniels show exactly how to impact the growth of a business, its customers, and the marketplace. Even more important, the authors’ system gives managers the tools to adapt the approach, creating positive behavior that can improve the performance of their people. Managers are transformed into leaders, creating a legacy that perpetually generates greater momentum, commitment, initiative, and reciprocity throughout an organization.

Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls
by Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis (Portfolio Hardcover, 2007)

“With good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters.”
Whether we’re talking about United States presidents, CEOs, Major League coaches, or wartime generals, leaders are remembered for their best and worst judgment calls. In the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflicting demands, the quality of a leader’s judgment determines the fate of the entire organization. That’s why judgment is the essence of leadership.

Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis have each spent decades studying and teaching leadership and advising top CEOs such as Jack Welch and Howard Schultz. Now, in their first collaboration, they offer a powerful framework for making tough calls when the stakes are high and the right path is far from obvious. They show how to recognize the critical moment before a judgment call, when swift and decisive action is essential, and also how to execute a decision after the call.

No organization can afford to neglect this crucial discipline—and no previous book has ever brought it into such clear focus.

The Leaders We Need: And What Makes Us Follow
by Michael Maccoby
(Harvard Business School Press, 2007)

A leader is: someone people follow. But why do people follow? Books abound on leaders, but much less is known about followers. In The Leaders We Need, Maccoby steps into this yawning gap in the literature.

This insightful book shows that followers have their own powerful motivations to follow. Many relate to their leader as to some important person from the past—a parent, a sibling, a close friend. 

The key for modern-day leaders? Being sensitive to how a group’s collective psychology and social context shape its leadership needs.

The author outlines the profound shift from a more bureaucratic society and leadership model to an interactive, collaborative one—and provides crucial advice on how to become a “leader we need.”

Offering provocative psychological insight and thoughtful analysis of social and cultural changes, this book examines leadership through an entirely new lens.

The Future of Management
by Gary Hamel (Harvard Business School Press, 2007)

What fuels long-term business success? Not operational excellence, technology breakthroughs, or new business models, but management innovation—new ways of mobilizing talent, allocating resources, and formulating strategies. Through history, management innovation has enabled companies to cross new performance thresholds and build enduring advantages.

In The Future of Management, Gary Hamel argues that organizations need management innovation now more than ever. Why? The management paradigm of the last century—centered on control and efficiency—no longer suffices in a world where adaptability and creativity drive business success. To thrive in the future, companies must reinvent management.

For more on this book, visit discussionleader.hbsp.com/hamel

egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability)
by David Marcum and Steven Smith (Fireside, 2007)

Arrogant, self-centered, stubborn, and insecure — words that most people associate with ego. But in this original, eye-opening work, authors David Marcum and Steven Smith argue that the upside of ego is as powerful as the downside and answer questions about ego that have been a mystery to most people.

In his landmark book, Good to Great, Jim Collins showed that one of two key traits defined leaders who transformed organizations from good to great: humility. But if humility is so powerful, why don’t more of us have it? Why does ego allow us to reach good results but never great ones, unless balanced by humility? Why do we need ego to personally succeed, while having it often interferes with the success we pursue?

The Answers

Using five years of exhaustive research, Marcum and Smith provide compelling evidence and matter-of-fact answers on striking the balance between ego and humility to reach the next level of leadership. The authors include case studies to illustrate how ego subtly interferes with success but also how ego sparks the drive to achieve, the nerve to try something new, and the tenacity to conquer adversity.

For more on this book, visit www.egonomicslive.com

Five Minds for the Future
by Howard Gardner
(Harvard Business School Press, 2007)

The world of the future will demand capacities that, until now, have been mere options. Have you begun developing those capacities-in yourself and others?

In Five Minds for the Future, noted psychologist Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead:

1. the disciplinary mind-mastery of major schools of thought (including science, mathematics, and history)and of at least one professional craft
2. the synthesizing mind-ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others
3. the creating mind-capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions, and phenomena
4. the respectful mind-awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings
5. the ethical mind-fulfillment of one’s responsibilities as a worker and a citizen

Armed with these well-honed capacities, a person will be equipped to deal with what is expected in the future-as well as what cannot be anticipated. Without these "minds", individuals will be at the mercy of forces they can’t understand-overwhelmed by information, unable to succeed in the workplace, and incapable of making judicious decisions about personal and professional manners.

For more on this book, visit www.howardgardner.com

Leaders at All Levels: Deepening Your Talent Pool to Solve the Succession Crisis by Ram Charan
(Jossey-Bass, 2007)

In Leaders at All Levels, Ram Charan addresses a pressing problem—a shortfall of leaders prepared to face today’s complex business challenges. When so many companies struggle to find successors for their top jobs, and when so many leaders rise to the top only to fail shortly after getting there, you know there’s something wrong with our leadership development practices.

In this book, Ram Charan presents a radical and controversial remedy for the crisis in leadership: the Apprenticeship Model. This new approach to succession and to leadership development makes it a hands-on activity for leaders and their bosses. People with the talent for leadership get stiff challenges hand-picked for them. Their bosses play a crucial role in accelerating their development. HR gets a new job, as trustee of the Apprenticeship system. Leaders at all levels develop faster and better, and boards have better choices when it comes time to choose the next CEO.

New but not untested, this approach works because it is based on Charan’s keen insights into how great business leaders actually develop.

For more on this book, visit www.ram-charan.com

Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time
by Kevin Eikenberry
(Jossey-Bass, 2007)

"My goal is to help you become a Remarkable Leader by unleashing the leadership potential that is already within you." — Kevin Eikenberry

We are all given a unique set of talents when we are born and it is our job to tap into our personal skills and abilities to maximize our potential throughout our lives. Some of our natural talents help us on our journey to become a leader, but other skills need to be nurtured and developed.

Remarkable Leadership is a practical handbook written for anyone who wants to hone the skills they need to become an outstanding leader. In this groundbreaking book, Kevin Eikenberry outlines a framework and a mechanism for both learning new things and applying current knowledge in a thoughtful and practical way. Eikenberry provides a guide through the most important leadership competencies, offers a proven method for learning leadership skills, and shows approaches for applying these skills in today’s multitasking and overloaded world of work. The book explores real-world concerns such as focus, limited time, incremental improvement, and how we learn.

Remarkable Leadership is an original book that is based on a proven process designed to help people become more proficient in their role as a leader.

For more on this book, visit www.remarkable-leadership.com

The Halo Effect … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers by Phil Rosenzweig (Free Press, 2007)

Much of our business thinking is shaped by delusions — errors of logic and flawed judgments that distort our understanding of the real reasons for a company’s performance. In a brilliant and unconventional book, Phil Rosenzweig unmasks the delusions that are commonly found in the corporate world.

The most pervasive delusion is the Halo Effect. When a company’s sales and profits are up, people often conclude that it has a brilliant strategy, a visionary leader, capable employees, and a superb corporate culture. When performance falters, they conclude that the strategy was wrong, the leader became arrogant, the people were complacent, and the culture was stagnant. In fact, little may have changed — company performance creates a Halo that shapes the way we perceive strategy, leadership, people, culture, and more.

Rosenzweig identifies nine popular business delusions. Among them:

• The Delusion of Absolute Performance: Company performance is relative to competition, not absolute, which is why following a formula can never guarantee results. Success comes from doing things better than rivals, which means that managers have to take risks.
• The Delusion of Rigorous Research: Many bestselling authors praise themselves for the vast amount of data they have gathered, but forget that if the data aren’t valid, it doesn’t matter how much was gathered or how sophisticated the research methods appear to be. They trick the reader by substituting sizzle for substance.
• The Delusion of Single Explanations: Many studies show that a particular factor, such as corporate culture or social responsibility or customer focus, leads to improved performance. But since many of these factors are highly correlated, the effect of each one is usually less than suggested.

The Halo Effect is a guide for the thinking manager, a way to detect errors in business research and to reach a clearer understanding of what drives business success and failure.

For more on this book, visit www.the-halo-effect.com

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath (Random House, 2007)

Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas–business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others–struggle to make their ideas “stick.”

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.”

Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas–and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.

For more on this book, visit www.madetostick.com

The Leadership Challenge, 4th Edition by James M. Kouzes, Barry Z. Posner (Jossey-Bass, 2007)

The Leadership Challenge has become one of the best-selling leadership books of all time. Now, with the publication of the fourth edition of their landmark book, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner celebrate twenty-five years of leadership excellence.

The Leadership Challenge—the most trusted source on becoming a better leader—has been thoroughly updated and revised for a new generation of leaders living and working in a global environment. Building on the knowledge base of the previous books, the fourth edition is grounded in research and presents extensive interviews with a diverse group of leaders at all levels in a wide variety of organizations from around the world. The authors emphasize that the fundamentals of leadership are not a fad. While the context of leadership has changed dramatically, the content of leadership has endured the test of time.

For more on this book, visit www.leadershipchallenge.com