The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results


George B. Bradt - 2006
    Gelb former vice chairman, Bristol-Myers Squibb"I love this book and wish I had read it before stepping into my current leadership role. It provides a practical and indispensable road map to success that will help new leaders stack the odds in their favor. Read it and don't be among the forty percent of leaders who fail in the first eighteen months!" --Sandy Rogers former marketing manager, Procter & Gamble and Apple Computer, and former senior vice president, Corporate Strategy, Enterprise Rent-A-Car Company"The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan offers a comprehensive architecture with practical tools and techniques for new leaders to follow. I believe that leaders who utilize the advice from this book will have demonstrative business and culture-building results." --Joe Bonito Vice President, Global Leadership Effectiveness, Pfizer"One of the most basic yet comprehensive books I've read regarding the dos and don'ts of a successful on-boarding process. A must-read for all aspiring business leaders, from first-time CEO's to executives at every level of the organization. Also a great tool for human resources and talent manage-ment executives." --Joe Griesedieck Vice Chairman, Korn/Ferry Executive Search

12: The Elements of Great Managing


Rodd Wagner - 2006
    The book followed great managers as they harnessed employee engagement to turn around a failing call center, save a struggling hotel, improve patient care in a hospital, maintain production through power outages, and successfully face a host of other challenges in settings around the world.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful


Marshall Goldsmith - 2006
    They're intelligent, skilled, and even charismatic. But only a handful of them will ever reach the pinnacle--and as executive coach Marshall Goldsmith shows in this book, subtle nuances make all the difference. These are small "transactional flaws" performed by one person against another (as simple as not saying thank you enough), which lead to negative perceptions that can hold any executive back. Using Goldsmith's straightforward, jargon-free advice, it's amazingly easy behavior to change. Executives who hire Goldsmith for one-on-one coaching pay $250,000 for the privilege. With this book, his help is available for 1/10,000th of the price.

The Essential Drucker


Peter F. Drucker - 2000
    Drucker has been analyzing economics and society for more than sixty years. Now for readers everywhere who are concerned with the ways that management practices and principles affect the performance of the organization, the individual, and society, there is The Essential Drucker -- an invaluable compilation of management essentials from the works of a management legend.Containing twenty-six selections, The Essential Drucker covers the basic principles and concerns of management and its problems, challenges, and opportunities, giving managers, executives, and professionals the tools to perform the tasks that the economy and society of tomorrow will demand of them.

First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently


Marcus Buckingham - 1998
    With vital performance and career lessons and ideas for how to apply them, it is a must-read for managers at every level.

Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management


Scott Berkun - 2001
    Each essay distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice, and the new edition now adds more value for leaders and managers of projects everywhere. Based on his nine years of experience as a program manager for Internet Explorer, and lead program manager for Windows and MSN, Berkun explains to technical and non-technical readers alike what it takes to get through a large software or web development project. Making Things Happen doesn't cite specific methods, but focuses on philosophy and strategy. Unlike other project management books, Berkun offers personal essays in a comfortable style and easy tone that emulate the relationship of a wise project manager who gives good, entertaining and passionate advice to those who ask. Topics in this new edition include:How to make things happenMaking good decisionsSpecifications and requirementsIdeas and what to do with themHow not to annoy peopleLeadership and trustThe truth about making datesWhat to do when things go wrongComplete with a new forward from the author and a discussion guide for forming reading groups/teams, Making Things Happen offers in-depth exercises to help you apply lessons from the book to your job. It is inspiring, funny, honest, and compelling, and definitely the one book that you and your team need to have within arm's reach throughout the life of your project. Coming from the rare perspective of someone who fought difficult battles on Microsoft's biggest projects and taught project design and management for MSTE, Microsoft's internal best practices group, this is valuable advice indeed. It will serve you well with your current work, and on future projects to come.

Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box


The Arbinger Institute - 2000
    However well intentioned they may be, leaders who deceive themselves always end up undermining their own performance.This straightforward book explains how leaders can discover their own self-deceptions and learn how to escape destructive patterns. The authors demonstrate that breaking out of these patterns leads to improved teamwork, commitment, trust, communication, motivation, and leadership.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable


Patrick Lencioni - 2002
    This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams. Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight. Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a compelling fable with a powerful yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional team leaders.

Results Without Authority: Controlling a Project When the Team Doesn't Report to You - A Project Manager's Guide


Tom Kendrick - 2006
    This book delivers proven techniques for controlling projects and managing diverse teams in a wide variety of situations, and bringing those projects to successful closure. The concepts in this book are essential for all project managers, with and without authority, because they offer a productive alternative to ""command and control"" management techniques that can easily backfire.Tom Kendrick's system will help you get successful project results from diverse, cross-functional, virtual, outsourced, and other types of project teams by showing how to establish and build:Control Through Process. Key project management processes, infrastructure, and the role of the project office.Control Through Influence. Productive leadership styles, reciprocity, and maintaining relationships.Control Through Project Metrics. Quantitative, predictive, diagnostic, and retrospective metrics for project control, motivating desired behaviors, and avoiding potential problems.Control Through Project Initiation. The role of the sponsor in project control, the importance of project vision, project launch documentation, and the project start-up workshop.Control Through Project Planning. Collaborative planning as the foundation of project control; planning as a key factor in setting baselines and establishing metrics.Control During Project Execution. Measurement and interpretation of project status, informal communication, and maintaining relationships as keys to maintaining control.Control Through Tracking and Monitoring. Controlling scope and other project parameters; formal project communication and reporting, rewards and recognition, and project reviews.Enhancing Overall Control Through Project Closure. Sign-off, evaluating retrospective project metrics, celebrating, and rewarding the team; improving long-term project control through lessons learned.Packed with invaluable guidance for controlling projects of all scopes and in any field, Results Without Authority will help novice and experienced project leaders get the best from their project teams."

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't


Robert I. Sutton - 2007
    Sutton addressed a taboo topic that affects every workplace: employees who are insensitive to their colleagues, corporate bullies, bosses who just don't get it, the kind of people who make you exclaim in exasperation, "What an asshole!"Now, in a definitive book that addresses this growing problem, Sutton shows you how you can work with unsavory people without becoming one of them yourself.

Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity


Kim Malone Scott - 2017
    While this advice may work for everyday life, it is, as Kim Scott has seen, a disaster when adopted by managers.Scott earned her stripes as a highly successful manager at Google and then decamped to Apple, where she developed a class on optimal management. She has earned growing fame in recent years with her vital new approach to effective management, the “radical candor” method.Radical candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It’s about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism—delivered to produce better results and help employees achieve.Great bosses have strong relationships with their employees, and Scott has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get (sh)it done, and understand why it matters.Radical Candor offers a guide to those bewildered or exhausted by management, written for bosses and those who manage bosses. Taken from years of the author’s experience, and distilled clearly giving actionable lessons to the reader; it shows managers how to be successful while retaining their humanity, finding meaning in their job, and creating an environment where people both love their work and their colleagues.

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal


Jim Loehr - 2003
    This groundbreaking New York Times bestseller has helped hundreds of thousands of people at work and at home balance stress and recovery and sustain high performance despite crushing workloads and 24/7 demands on their time. We live in digital time. Our pace is rushed, rapid-fire, and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We're wired up, but we're melting down. Time management is no longer a viable solution. As bestselling authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz demonstrate in this groundbreaking book, managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy more skillfully both on and off the job by laying out the key training principles and provides a powerful, step-by-step program that will help you to: * Mobilize four key sources of energy * Balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal * Expand capacity in the same systematic way that elite athletes do * Create highly specific, positive energy management rituals to make lasting changes Above all, this book provides a life-changing road map to becoming more fully engaged on and off the job, meaning physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.

The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business


Josh Kaufman - 2010
    The consensus is clear: MBA programs are a waste of time and money. Even the elite schools offer outdated assembly-line educations about profit-and-loss statements and PowerPoint presentations. After two years poring over sanitized case studies, students are shuffled off into middle management to find out how business really works.Josh Kaufman has made a business out of distilling the core principles of business and delivering them quickly and concisely to people at all stages of their careers. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. In The Personal MBA, he shares the essentials of sales, marketing, negotiation, strategy, and much more.True leaders aren't made by business schools-they make themselves, seeking out the knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to succeed. Read this book and in one week you will learn the principles it takes most people a lifetime to master.

Growing Great Employees: Turning Ordinary People into Extraordinary Performers


Erika Andersen - 2006
    They would do exactly what we asked them to do, exactly when we asked them to do it – except, of course, for the fantastic ideas they would cook up on their own…Back to reality. Your employees are, like you and me, flawed and hopeful human beings whose success is at least partly dependent on your skill as a manager, human beings who will thrive with skillful and consistent attention and wither without it.” In business today we’re told that management development is a thing of the past. Staying limber, preparing to change hats at a moment’s notice, and keeping your finger on the pulse of the “new” – that’s what we’re told is critical. At this moment when companies and managers aren’t focusing on the long haul, Erika Andersen says just the opposite. If you want to compete with the market leaders, grow your business, and succeed in your field, you need support: an all-star staff that epitomizes your company’s mission and has the skills to implement it. How do you achieve this? Grow great employees. For twenty-five years Erika Andersen has been helping some of the best-managed companies in the world develop their employees. In Growing Great Employees you’ll learn how they stay ahead of the competition by investing in their people. You’ll discover that: • Listening is your most powerful asset. Use it to motivate and build commitment. • Everything you know about interviewing is wrong. Find out how to discover what you really need in a potential employee and how to find it. • Successful companies hire for keeps. Get people feeling like part of the team from day one. • Great leaders surround themselves with the best. Recognize who has potential and develop them into tomorrow’s leaders. Whether you’re a manager or a senior executive, Growing Great Employees is your guide to creating a dynamic workplace where the efforts you make with your employees today will blossom into success for years to come.

The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels


Michael D. Watkins - 2003
    In this updated and expanded 10th anniversary edition, internationally known leadership transition expert Michael D. Watkins gives you the keys to successfully negotiating your next move—whether you’re onboarding into a new company, being promoted internally, or embarking on an international assignment.In The First 90 Days, Watkins outlines proven strategies that will dramatically shorten the time it takes to reach what he calls the "breakeven point" when your organization needs you as much as you need the job. This new edition includes a substantial new preface by the author on the new definition of a career as a series of transitions; and notes the growing need for effective and repeatable skills for moving through these changes. As well, updated statistics and new tools make this book more reader-friendly and useful than ever.As hundreds of thousands of readers already know, The First 90 Days is a road map for taking charge quickly and effectively during critical career transition periods—whether you are a first-time manager, a mid-career professional on your way up, or a newly minted CEO.