Best of
Leadership

2022

Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity


Frank Slootman - 2022
    In Amp It Up Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity, he shares his leadership approach for the first time.Amp It Up delivers an authoritative look at what it takes to transform an organization for maximum growth and scale. Slootman shows that most leaders have significant room to improve their organization's performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure, or fundamental business model--and they don't need to bring in an army of consultants to do it. What they do need is to align people around what matters and execute with urgency and intensity every day.Leading for unprecedented growth means declaring war on mediocrity, breaking the status quo, and making conflicted choices daily, all with a relentless focus on the mission. Amp It Up provides the first principles to guide that change, and the tactical advice for organizing a company around them.Perfect for executives, entrepreneurs, founders, managers, and leaders of all kinds, Amp It Up is a must-read resource for anyone who seeks to unleash the growth potential of a company and scale it to heights they never thought possible.

On Priesthood: Servants, Shepherds, Messengers, Sentinels and Stewards


Stephen Cottrell - 2022
    these three words have been used to describe the work of a priest in the Church of England since Cranmer wrote the original ordination rite in 1550. Two more, servant and shepherd, were added in 1980. Taken together, these five metaphors provide a rich and resonant set of ideas through which to explore the nature of Christian ministry. In this short, lyrical book, Bishop Stephen Cottrell explores each one; based on actual addresses given to ordinands on the night before their ordination, it is refreshing, challenging and accessible. Anyone considering ordination or already in ministry will want to read this book for the fascinating exploration of the five metaphors he considers.

The Three Chairs: How Great Leaders Drive Communication, Performance, and Engagement


Karyn Gordon - 2022
    But if you don't learn foundational leadership skills, research shows you will face problems with communication, performance, engagement, and employee retention. The stakes are high.How can you quickly learn essential leadership skills? While most organizations and professionals value leadership development, it is often time-intensive and impractical.In The Three Chairs, Dr. Karyn Gordon provides a proven framework to transform anyone's ability to lead others. Nominated for the 2021 RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Award, Dr. Karyn has spent over 20 years teaching more than 500,000 people across 17 countries. Her unique approach, based on the 5 Leadership EQ Skills(TM), will show you how to:Identify Great Leadership: Understand the most essential attitudes in yourself and othersMaster Communication: Give and receive feedback to drive team accountabilityEnhance Proper Goal-Setting: Build a confident mindset and alignment on key objectivesImprove Decision-Making: Drive performance, time-management, and delegationReduce Stress And Anxiety: Increase wellness and reduce burnoutIncrease Employee Engagement: Boost retention and build a better cultureThe Three Chairs is the breakthrough leadership book for the 21st century. Discover tools you can easily apply at work and home that get results for everyone from CEOs to students. See yourself more clearly, engage more deeply with those around you, and equip yourself to be a confident great leader.

Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways to Be a Servant Leader and Build Trust


Kenneth H. Blanchard - 2022
    Effective leadership comes down to implementing everyday, commonsense practices to help organizations thrive--and yet so many leaders are still missing these fundamental principles from their personal and professional lives. Renowned business experts Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley disclose the simple truths about leadership they have gathered over their long and distinguished careers to help bring common sense into common practice.Featuring two sections--servant leadership and building trust--this book is a collection of Blanchard's greatest hits. It is chock-full of profound and memorable (and in some cases counterintuitive) leadership wisdom, such as- Create autonomy through boundaries. - People who plan the battle rarely battle the plan. - A relationship with no trust is like a cell phone with no internet. All you can do is play games. - The most important part of leadership is what happens when you're not there.This book will help readers incorporate these integral practices into their leadership style, build trust through servant leadership, and make a difference in their own life and the lives of those they influence.

Freedom at Work


Traci Fenton - 2022
     The good news is that there's an antidote: Freedom at Work. In this groundbreaking book, Traci Fenton brings together decades of original research, based on her team’s work with hundreds of top companies around the world, such as The WD-40 Company, Mindvalley, DaVita, Menlo Innovations, Zappos, Widen, HCL Technologies, and more, revealing the proven pathway to leadership success. This powerful leadership strategy will benefit any leader at any level in any type of organization, from entrepreneurs to mid-level managers to the C-suite.Freedom at Work is based on three key pillars: • Freedom-Centered Mindset: Break through limitations, make better decisions, and act with clarity and confidence • Freedom-Centered Leadership: Lead yourself and others from a place of freedom rather than fear • Freedom-Centered Design: Develop a world-class culture based on the 10 Principles of Organizational DemocracyFreedom at Work is a revolutionary guide that will help make any organization high-performing and highly profitable, while creating a culture people love. This book will help passionate leaders weave freedom and democracy into our global tapestry through the way they run their teams and organizations—ultimately transforming our world for the better.*** “Ideals like freedom, self-determination, and democracy are too often shelved when we show up to work, where for some reason we too willingly accept a culture of surveillance and even fear. In this powerful and engaging book, Traci Fenton lays out how we can actually bring the ideals of democracy to our workplaces—and why everyone from CEOs to workers to communities stand to benefit.”—Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of When, Drive, and To Sell Is Human“The brilliant Traci Fenton taps into a concept that is missing today—not only in workplaces, but often in our daily lives: freedom. Embracing freedom in the workplace won’t just benefit your organization at every level, it will promote an important precedent that lets all individuals shine.”—Jamie Naughton Henriod, Former Chief of Staff, Zappos“Freedom-Centered Leadership shouldn’t be a novel concept, but it’s unfortunately far from the norm. This book is a step toward changing that, one organization at a time, and it couldn’t have come at a more crucial moment in our history. This book is as timely and practical as it is conceptually profound.”—Kent Thiry, former CEO and chairman of DaVita“If you’re not leading with freedom, you’re leading with fear. That’s the most striking message in Freedom at Work. We believe in the principles of Freedom at Work. Putting them into practice has helped us maintain our employee engagement of 93% and both grow our revenue and deliver value to our stakeholders.”—Garry Ridge, CEO and chairman of WD-40 Company and coauthor of HelpingPeople Win at Work

Split the Pie: A Radical New Way to Negotiate


Barry Nalebuff - 2022
    Negotiations are incredibly stressful and can bring out the worst in people. Wouldn't it be better if there were a principled way to negotiate? Wouldn't it be even better if there were a way to treat people fairly and get treated fairly in a negotiation?Split the Pie offers a new approach that does both--a field-tested method that reframes how negotiations play out. Barry Nalebuff, a professor at Yale School of Management, helps identify what's really at stake in a negotiation: the "pie." The negotiation pie is the additional value created through an agreement to work together. Seeing the relevant pie will change how you think about fairness and power in negotiation. You'll learn how to get half the value you create, no matter your size.Filled with examples and in-depth case studies, Split the Pie is a practical and theory-based approach to negotiation. You'll see how it helped reframe a high-stakes negotiation when Coca-Cola purchased Honest Tea, a company Barry cofounded with his former student Seth Goldman. The pie framework also works for everyday negotiations. You'll learn how to deploy logic to determine truly equitable solutions and employ empathy to expand the pie and sell your solution. Split the Pie allows both sides to focus their energy on making the biggest possible pie--to have your pie and eat it too.

Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies


Ranjay Gulati - 2022
    Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like "mission," "vision," and "values." Even well-intentioned leaders don't understand purpose's full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor.Having conducted extensive field research, Ranjay Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, he shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. To get purpose right, leaders must fundamentally change not only how they execute it but also how they conceive of and relate to it. They must practice what Gulati calls deep purpose, furthering each organization's reason for being more intensely, thoughtfully, and comprehensively than ever before.In this authoritative, accessible, and inspiring guide, Gulati takes readers inside some of the world's most purposeful companies to understand the secrets to their successes. He explores how leaders can pursue purpose more deeply bynavigating the inevitable tradeoffs more deliberately and effectively to balance between short- and long-term value;building purpose more systematically into every key organizational function to mobilize stakeholders and enhance performance;updating organizations to foster more autonomy and collaboration, which in turn allow individual employees to work more purposefully;using powerful storytelling to communicate a reason for being, arousing emotions and building a community of inspired and committed stakeholders; andbuilding cultures that don't merely support purpose, but also allow employees to link the corporate purpose to their own personal reasons for being.As Gulati argues, a deeper engagement with purpose holds the key not merely to the well-being of individual companies but also to humanity's future. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It's the kind of inspired thinking that businesses--and the rest of us--urgently need.

The Good News of Our Limits: Find Greater Peace, Joy, and Effectiveness through God’s Gift of Inadequacy


Sean McGever - 2022
    We think that following God will bring peace, but instead find ourselves anxious. We expect a life of joy, but end up feeling stressed, living under the heavy load of new expectations. It's a spiritual and emotional rollercoaster.We search for solutions using optimization techniques, attempting to fit more and more into our already full days. We try to craft efficiently maximized lives, but these methods always fail, not because they are ill-intentioned, but because they do not go far enough. They fail to understand how God made us--as people with inherent limitations--and they fail to accept that as good.In The Good News of Our Limits, professor and longtime ministry leader Sean McGever reveals the wonderful news that we cannot do, be, or know all of the things that others expect of us--and that we often expect from ourselves. Nor should we. As it turns out, these expectations are not God's expectations. The freeing truth is that God created us with limitations, and he did it for a reason. God is the only all-powerful, all-present, and all-knowing person, and we are not. We can only know and do some things, and we can only be in one place at a time. And that is enough. Accepting this truth frees us to find greater peace and joy, and somewhat surprisingly, greater effectiveness in life.The Good News of Our Limits helps readers answer questions like:What are our God-given human limits?How do I find peace when I can't control the circumstances, tragedies, and difficulties that surround my life?How do I choose what is best when my time, focus, and abilities are limited?How many people can I realistically know personally?What can I do to deepen key relationships when I feel relationally maxed-out?How do I navigate all the information that comes my way each day?Through personal stories and fascinating cultural insights, The Good News of Our Limits calls readers to embrace the blessedness of their limitations and adopt a few key practices to better balance their lives. Biblical and practical, it points to a better way forward for us all.

You Coach You: How to Overcome Challenges and Take Control of Your Career


Helen Tupper - 2022
    There is no such thing as a straight line to success and there are times when we get stuck, face obstacles, feel frustrated or want to explore new opportunities. In these moments the best place to start is by coaching yourself. No one can solve your problems better than you can, and learning to coach yourself will accelerate your self-awareness and help you take control of your career. In You Coach You, you'll learn the mindset, skillset and toolkit you need to coach yourself. You'll discover practical support on some of the most common coaching challenges including:- Exploring your progression possibilities and making them happen- Building your resilience reserves and turning adversity into action- Moving beyond busy to time well spent and finding the right work-life fit for you- Building the beliefs that help you succeed and overcoming setbacks- Creating the connections you need for your career and fixing friction in difficult relationships- Developing a sense of direction and a purpose that is motivating and meaningful for youPacked with ideas for action and insightful tools, this practical book will help you to get unstuck, and increase your confidence in and control over your career.If you enjoyed reading this, check out The Squiggly Career, Helen and Sarah's Sunday Times no. 1 bestselling guide to supercharging your confidence, playing to your strengths and setting yourself up for success.

Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency


Sarah Ichioka - 2022
    What will it take to restore balance to our world, repair past injustices, and support future generations’ survival? Reaching beyond ‘sustainability,’ ‘regenerative’ practice is increasingly named as a new goal, but what does this emerging term really mean? And which key mindset shifts might enable truly regenerative transformation? Looking deeply into the web of life that created and supports us, and drawing inspiration from diverse cultural traditions and perspectives, spirited thinkers Michael Pawlyn and Sarah Ichioka propose a bold set of regenerative principles with potential to transform how we design, make, and manage our buildings, infrastructure, and communities. Whether you’re a built environment professional or client, an activist, or a policymaker, Flourish offers an urgent invitation to inhabit a new array of possibilities, through which we can build a thriving future, together.

Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Entrepreneurs at the Innovation Game


Andrew Binns - 2022
    These Corporate Explorers have the insight, resilience, and discipline to overcome the obstacles and build new ventures from inside even the largest organizations.Corporate Explorers are part entrepreneurs, using innovation disciplines to jump start cutting-edge ideas, and part change leaders, capable of creating support for investment. They see that corporations already own the ideas, resources, and—critically—the talent to build new ventures. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Bosch, LexisNexis, and Analog Devices enable managers to put these assets to use and gain an upper hand over startups that threaten to disrupt them.Corporate Explorer is a guidebook to the practices that enable these managers to go from idea into action. It demonstrates how success is not only possible but may offer entrenched companies better odds than venture-capital backed startups.This actionable and proven framework explains how managers can become successful corporate innovators; it includes tools to:-Learn how to apply innovation practices with greater discipline-Turn great ideas into a full-time job as an innovation leader-Experiment with and scale original business models-Transform innovation programs into a thriving source of new business-Attract, retain, and motivate entrepreneurial talent-Energize employees by creating a realistic way to innovateThese lessons come from the trailblazers of corporate innovation—Andrew Binns (Change Logic), Charles O'Reilly (Stanford Graduate School of Business), and Michael Tushman (Harvard Business School)—who have decades of experience helping entrepreneurial-minded executives activate employees to become Corporate Explorers.Entrepreneurs take notice—it's time for Corporate Explorers to set the pace and chart the course for disruption.

Imagine If . . .: A Manifesto on the Creative Revolution in Education and Beyond


Ken Sir Robinson - 2022
    The embodiment of the prestigious TED conference, his TED Talks are watched an average of 17,000 times a day - a figure that Chris Anderson, Head of TED, says is the equivalent of selling out the Millennium Dome every night for fifteen consecutive years. A New York Times bestselling author, Sir Ken's books have been translated into twenty four languages.In his final years, Sir Ken was working on a book that would serve as his manifesto. This book was being written for both new and dedicated audiences alike as a coherent overview of the arguments that he dedicated his life to, and as a pivotal piece of literature for the education revolution he began. When Sir Ken received his cancer prognosis in August 2020 he asked his daughter and collaborator, Kate Robinson, to finish writing this manifesto and continue his work.At its core, Sir Ken's work is a love letter to human potential, it is a celebration of what we as a species are capable of doing, and of being, if we create the right conditions. It is a rallying cry to revolutionize our systems of education, and the ways in which we run our businesses and structure our social systems, so that they bring out the best in each and every person. Sir Ken often observed that what separates us from the rest of life on Earth is our power of imagination - the ability to bring to mind things that are not present to our senses. It is imagination that allows us to create the world in which we live, rather than just exist in it. It also gives us the power to recreate it.

Joyous Leadership: Stories of Learnings Along the Way


John Mark Watson - 2022
    

Cultures of Belonging: Building Inclusive Organizations that Last


Alida Miranda-Wolff - 2022
    Clear, actionable steps for you to build new values, experiences, and perspectives into your organizational culture, infusing it with the diversity, inclusion, and belonging employees need to feel accepted, be their best selves, and do their best work.Bypass the faulty processes and communication styles that make change impossible in so many other organizations; access these practical tools and ideas for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in your company.Filled with actionable advice Alida Miranda-Wolff learned through her own struggles being an outsider in a work culture that did not value inclusion, and having since worked with over 60 organizations to prioritize DEI initiatives and all the value and richness it adds to the workplace, this roadmap helps leaders:Learn why creating an environment where everyone feels belonging is the new barometer for employee engagement.Develop an understanding of the key terms around DEI and why they matter. Assess where your organization is today.Define and take the small steps that build new muscle memory into an organizational culture.Increase employee engagement, collaboration, innovation, communication, and sense of belonging.Build confidence in how to solve future DEI-related challenges.Get buy-in from colleagues (and even resisters) who can clearly see how to move forward and why.Overcome any limiting work environment and build all new processes and communication priorities that allow your employees to be a part of something greater than themselves while your organization learns to value and embrace the unique experiences and perspective that each employee brings to the company.

The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Business Performance


Ruth Gotian - 2022
    The key to their success is that they do all four of these things in tandem. Based on research and in-person interviews with astronauts, Nobel laureates, and Olympic champions The Success Factor outlines the methodological approach that individuals aspiring to improve their performance can adopt to achieve success.Using these four shared attributes as a guide, The Success Factor helps you reach peak performance by applying the lessons of high achievers in your own life: identify your passion using a Passion Audit; learn how and where to find a mentor and how to build a mentoring team; develop your own community of practice; pursue your interests through informal learning; and manage your time and energy. The Success Factor comes with online resources that feature a downloadable Passion Audit worksheet, mentoring team worksheet, scripts for approaching potential mentors and a list of uncommon places to find a mentor, such as webinars, book clubs and social media.

A Radical Enterprise: Pioneering the Future of High-Performing Organizations


Matt K Parker - 2022
    The tomato sauce in your pantry. The raincoat in your closet. The smart TV hanging in your living room. What do all of these products have in common? Chances are they were created by organizations where colleagues self-allocate into teams based on intrinsic motivation. Where individuals self-manage their commitments to each other without the coercion of managers. And where teams launch new products and ventures on the market without the control of leaders.These organizations represent a new, radically collaborative breed of corporation. Recently doubling in number and already comprising 8% of corporations around the world, scientists and researchers have discovered that radically collaborative organizations are more competitive on practically every meaningful financial measure. They enjoy higher market share, higher innovation, and higher customer satisfaction than their traditional corporate competitors--and they also enjoy higher engagement, loyalty, and motivation from their employees. In this groundbreaking book, technology thought leader and organizational architect Matt K. Parker breaks down the counterintuitive principles and practices that radically collaborative organizations thrive on. By combining the latest insights from organizational science, sociology, and psychology, he illuminates four imperatives that all radically collaborative organizations must embrace in order to succeed: team autonomy, managerial devolution, deficiency gratification, and candid vulnerability. Millions of workers around the world are collapsing under the weight of command-and-control culture. The crisis has reached its breaking point. Now is the time to embrace radical change. Discover the revolutionary shift to partnership and equality and the economic superiority that follows with A Radical Enterprise.

Promotions Are So Yesterday: Redefine Career Development. Help Employees Thrive.


Julie Winkle Giulioni - 2022
    Beyond, between, and besides the climb up the positional ladder, there are many other ways that employees can―and want to―grow. However, many organizations still operate under the notion that promotions are the only option for career development, leaving employees disengaged, managers frustrated, and the business disadvantaged in its efforts to retain talent.The good news is that career development is so much more than promotions alone, and managers are in a powerful position to redefine career development and create positive results for their employees and their organizations in this area.In Promotions Are So Yesterday, Julie Winkle Giulioni offers you a new approach for developing your employees' careers and helping them thrive in a company when promotions are not readily available. Discover an easy-to-apply framework of seven alternative dimensions of development (contribution, competence, confidence, connection, challenge, contentment, and choice) that will engage your employees―dynamic opportunities for growth that are completely within your control as a manager.Promotions Are So Yesterday is filled with practical advice, nearly 100 questions to spark reflection and productive dialogue, and actionable templates and tools that managers can use with employees. Help bring your employees and your organization to even greater achievement with a strategy that will increase your employees' job satisfaction, performance, knowledge, and skills, and strengthen your organization's workforce.

Step Up: How to Build Your Influence at Work


Michelle Gibbings - 2022
    That's the theme of the book. In today's fast-paced world, organisations and the people who work there are going through rapid change. Most successful leaders are able to make the most of these dynamic environments. They understand themselves, understand others and understand how to manage and motivate behavioural change. It is through these core skills that they are able to prosper through change, and gather the influence they need to be successful. These skills are relevant for everyone - regardless of their role or hierarchical position However, Step Up has been written specifically for people who are more technically focused, but are at that stage in their career where they know they need to change if they want to advance. They can be accountants, financial planners, risk management experts, financial controllers, engineers, scientists or even doctors. They are people who associate with their technical craft first, even though they may now be in a leadership role. Author, and change management expert, Michelle Gibbings believes that there are skills, practices and techniques that individuals, teams and organisations can apply to make change work. She shares these in her new book and they include learning how to: - Own your mindset - Strengthen your integrity - Be agile and know the system - Appeal to human insight and motivate - Create a story - Nurture relationships - Communicate with influence - Negotiate wisely. Step Up is practically focused and theoretically based. Every idea that is presented has at its core some form of scientific research or evidence that backs up the position. It includes practical things that you can do to build your platform for influence. 'To my mind, change is about getting stuff done and to get stuff done in an organisation you need to be influential' says Gibbings.

Leadership Deconstructed: Follow This Blueprint to Lead


Rakhshanda Rahman - 2022
    It will provide tools for introspection, developing integrity, and building skills to lead people with authenticity.

Selfless Leadership: A Complete Guide to Awakening the Servant Leader Within


Katrijn Van Oudheusden - 2022
    

Stress-Free Productivity: A Personalised Toolkit to Become Your Most Efficient, Creative Self


Alice Boyes - 2022
    The tricks that work for your colleague may not work as well for you. Or perhaps they don't work at all. The fact is that everyone has their own productivity quirks to make them work efficiently and effectively. They just don't know how to crack them.In this innovative guide, Dr Alice Boyes will help you diagnose your unique productivity profile and give you the framework to formulate a powerhouse personalised system. Drawing on groundbreaking research, countless examples, and quizzes in every chapter, this book will help you be the most growth-oriented, most effective and efficient, and most creative and visionary version of yourself.

Don't Blame the Lettuce: Insights to Help You Grow as a Leader and Nurture Your Workplace Culture


Eric Stutzman - 2022
    And, just like a gardener who knows not to blame their lettuce for failing to thrive, great leaders know that it’s the conditions of their workplace that affect how their people perform and grow.This book explores a variety of leadership topics that will help you meet challenges, respond to opportunities, and nurture a healthy workplace culture in new and innovative ways. In addition to each insight, you’ll find questions for reflection, a practical application idea, and additional resources related to each topic to help spark your own thoughts and discussions among your teams.The common themes in this book are workplace culture and relationships. While you’ll also find insights about vision, strategy, and innovation, it’s very difficult to be productive and thrive as an organization without first focusing on people.