Maxwell's thirty years of experience teaching people how to make a significant difference in their organizations.Don't wait for that promotion!Start leading NOW... right where you are!What's the number one question leadership expert John C. Maxwell is asked while conducting his leadership conferences?  "How can I implement what you teach when I'm not the top leader?"Is it possible to lead well when you're not the top dog?  How about if the person you work for is a bad leader?  The answer is a resounding yes!  Welcome to The 360° Leader.  People who desire to lead from the middle of organizations face unique challenges.  And they are often held back by myths that prevent them from developing their influence.  Dr. Maxwell, one of the globe's most trusted leadership mentors, debunks the myths, shows you how to overcome the challenges, and teaches you the skills you need to become a 360° leader.If you have found yourself trying to lead from the middle of the organization, as the vast majority of professionals do, then you need Maxwell's insights.  You have a unique opportunity to exercise influence in all directions-up (to the boss), across (among your peers), and down (to those you lead).The good news is that your influence is greater than you know.  Practice the disciplines of 360° leadership and the opportunities will be endless... for your organization, for your career, and for your life.

    Under such pressure to stay alive—let alone grow—it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of “sell it—do it, sell it—do it” that leaves them exhausted, frustrated, and unable to get ahead no matter how hard they try.This is the exact situation Mike Michalowicz found himself in when he was trying to grow his first company. Although it was making steady money, there was never very much left over and he was chasing customers left and right, putting in twenty-eight-hour days, eight days a week. The punishing grind never let up. His company was alive but stunted, and he was barely breathing. That’s when he discovered an unlikely source of inspiration—pumpkin farmers.After reading an article about a local farmer who had dedicated his life to growing giant pump­kins, Michalowicz realized the same process could apply to growing a business. He tested the Pumpkin Plan on his own company and transformed it into a remarkable, multimillion-dollar industry leader. First he did it for himself. Then for others. And now you. So what is the Pumpkin Plan?Plant the right seeds: Don’t waste time doing a bunch of different things just to please your customers. Instead, identify the thing you do better than anyone else and focus all of your attention, money, and time on figuring out how to grow your company doing it. Weed out the losers: In a pumpkin patch small, rotten pumpkins stunt the growth of the robust, healthy ones. The same is true of customers. Figure out which customers add the most value and provide the best opportunities for sustained growth. Then ditch the worst of the worst. Nurture the winners: Once you figure out who your best customers are, blow their minds with care. Discover their unfulfilled needs, innovate to make their wishes come true, and overdeliver on every single promise.Full of stories of other successful entrepreneurs, The Pumpkin Plan guides you through unconven­tional strategies to help you build a truly profitable blue-ribbon company that is the best in its field.

    Businesses of the future need all hands on deck when implementing new ways to stimulate grown and cost efficiency, and this includes human resources. In HR Transformation, the team presents a four-phase model of transformation that shows you step-by-step how to make meaningful progress in contributing to the performance of your company by redesigning HR to work as a strategic partnership.From the "#1 Management Educator & Guru"-BusinessWeek"The authors have presented us with an accessible, readable, and practical illustration of a clear path for successful strategy execution in a complex environment." -Majed Al Romaithi, Executive Director, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority"HR can only transform organizations if it transforms HR. This book shows us how. HR Transformation would have been important in the past-it is critical now! We are entering a new world. HR Transformation can help our organizations thrive in the midst of uncertainty." -Marshall Goldsmith, author of the Wall Street Journal bestsellers What Got You Here Won't Get You There and Succession: Are You Ready? "Ulrich and his colleagues talk tough and provide a detailed blueprint for how those of us in the field can use our own tools to do a "720-degree" evaluation of ourselves. We cannot contribute to the success of our organizations until we upgrade ourselves." -Linda A. Hill, Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School"Based on groundbreaking research with hundreds of companies and thousands of executives, HR Transformation provides compelling theory and practical tools to create alignment between strategy, systems, and people. This important book should be read carefully by leadership teams everywhere." -Mark Huselid, Professor of HR Strategy, Rutgers University, Co-author of The HR Scorecard, The Workforce Scorecard, and The Differentiated WorkforceTurn to the front matter for more than thirty rousing endorsements of HR Transformation.INCLUDES CASE STUDIES FROM Intel, Pfizer, Takeda, Flextronics

    Arianna Huffington's personal wake-up call came in the form of a broken cheekbone and a nasty gash over her eye -- the result of a fall brought on by exhaustion and lack of sleep. As the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group -- one of the fastest growing media companies in the world -- celebrated as one of the world's most influential women, and gracing the covers of magazines, she was, by any traditional measure, extraordinarily successful. Yet as she found herself going from brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion, she wondered is this really what success feels like? As more and more people are coming to realize, there is far more to living a truly successful life than just earning a bigger salary and capturing a corner office. Our relentless pursuit of the two traditional metrics of success -- money and power -- has led to an epidemic of burnout and stress-related illnesses, and an erosion in the quality of our relationships, family life, and, ironically, our careers. In being connected to the world 24/7, we're losing our connection to what truly matters. Our current definition of success is, as Thrive shows, literally killing us. We need a new way forward. In a commencement address Arianna gave at Smith College in the spring of 2013, she likened our drive for money and power to two legs of a three-legged stool. They may hold us up temporarily, but sooner or later we're going to topple over. We need a third leg -- a third metric for defining success -- to truly thrive. That third metric, she writes in Thrive, includes our well-being, our ability to draw on our intuition and inner wisdom, our sense of wonder, and our capacity for compassion and giving. As Arianna points out, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success. They don't commemorate our long hours in the office, our promotions, or our sterling PowerPoint presentations as we relentlessly raced to climb up the career ladder. They are not about our resumes -- they are about cherished memories, shared adventures, small kindnesses and acts of generosity, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh. In this deeply personal book, Arianna talks candidly about her own challenges with managing time and prioritizing the demands of a career and raising two daughters -- of juggling business deadlines and family crises, a harried dance that led to her collapse and to her "aha moment." Drawing on the latest groundbreaking research and scientific findings in the fields of psychology, sports, sleep, and physiology that show the profound and transformative effects of meditation, mindfulness, unplugging, and giving, Arianna shows us the way to a revolution in our culture, our thinking, our workplace, and our lives.

    Readers can view the templates used in consulting studies and how they are used. All the foundational strategy and business analyses tools are taught along with the soft skills and practical tools to solve any business problem. This is the only book of its kind walking the reader step-by-step through a complete consulting study.This book follows an engagement team as they assist a large company in diagnosing and fixing deep and persistent organizational issues over an 8-week assignment. Readers will learn how they successfully navigate a challenging client environment, frame the problem and limit the scope, develop hypotheses, build the analyses and provide the final recommendations.We have placed the explanation of management consulting techniques within a lively and engaging storyline, which allows the reader to truly understand the challenges faced on consulting engagements, connect with the characters, and understand both how and why they debated elements of the study.It is written so that the reader may follow, understand, and replicate a strategic engagement using the same techniques used by the leading firms, such as McKinsey, Bain, and BCG. To make the story realistic and useful, we have worked with one client engagement throughout the book. Using different examples and different clients to explain concepts would have made it difficult for readers to see the data linkages and development of the final recommendations. The client and engagement are fictitious. The data presented are also fictitious, but they are based on actual consulting engagements and the experiences of the author and the contributing McKinsey, BCG, et. al. partners at FIRMSconsulting.com & StrategyTraining.com.

    Collins' research project—more than four years in duration—uncovered five step-wise stages of decline:Stage 1: Hubris Born of SuccessStage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of MoreStage 3: Denial of Risk and PerilStage 4: Grasping for SalvationStage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or DeathBy understanding these stages of decline, leaders can substantially reduce their chances of falling all the way to the bottom.Great companies can stumble, badly, and recover.Every institution, no matter how great, is vulnerable to decline. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall and most eventually do. But, as Collins' research emphasizes, some companies do indeed recover—in some cases, coming back even stronger—even after having crashed into the depths of Stage 4.Decline, it turns out, is largely self-inflicted, and the path to recovery lies largely within our own hands. We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our history, or even our staggering defeats along the way. As long as we never get entirely knocked out of the game, hope always remains. The mighty can fall, but they can often rise again.

    From iconic entrepreneurs to elite athletes, from artists to billionaire investors, their short profiles can help you answer life's most challenging questions, achieve extraordinary results, and transform your life.From the author: In 2017, several of my close friends died in rapid succession. It was a very hard year, as it was for many people. It was also a stark reminder that time is our scarcest, non-renewable resource. With a renewed sense of urgency, I began asking myself many questions: Were my goals my own, or simply what I thought I should want? How much of life had I missed from underplanning or overplanning? How could I be kinder to myself? How could I better say “no” to the trivial many to better say “yes” to the critical few? How could I best reassess my priorities and my purpose in this world? To find answers, I reached out to the most impressive world-class performers in the world, ranging from wunderkinds in their 20s to icons in their 70s and 80s. No stone was left unturned. This book contains their answers—practical and tactical advice from mentors who have found solutions. Whether you want to 10x your results, get unstuck, or reinvent yourself, someone else has traveled a similar path and taken notes. This book, Tribe of Mentors, includes many of the people I grew up viewing as idols or demi-gods. Less than 10% have been on my podcast (The Tim Ferriss Show, more than 200 million downloads), making this a brand-new playbook of playbooks. No matter your challenge or opportunity, something in these pages can help. Among other things, you will learn: • More than 50 morning routines—both for the early riser and those who struggle to get out of bed. • How TED curator Chris Anderson realized that the best way to get things done is to let go. • The best purchases of $100 or less (you'll never have to think about the right gift again). • How to overcome failure and bounce back towards success. • Why Humans of New York creator Brandon Stanton believes that the best art will always be the riskiest. • How to meditate and be more mindful (and not just for those that find it easy). • Why tennis champion Maria Sharapova believe that “losing makes you think in ways victories can’t.” • How to truly achieve work-life balance (and why most people tell you it isn’t realistic). • How billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz transformed the way he engages with difficult situations to reduce suffering. • Ways to thrive (and survive) the overwhelming amount of information you process every day. • How to achieve clarity on your purpose and assess your priorities. • And much more. This reference book, which I wrote for myself, has already changed my life. I certainly hope the same for you. I wish you luck as you forge your own path. All the best, Tim Ferriss

    While obviously attractive and lucrative, home runs don’t happen every day and frequently come in cycles. Products like Kevlar, Teflon, and the Dell business model for selling personal computers may be once-in-a-decade phenomena. A surer and more consistent path to profitable revenue growth is through “singles and doubles”—small day-to-day wins and adaptation to changes in the marketplace that build the foundation for substantially increasing revenues. The impact of singles and doubles can be huge. They are not only the basis for sustained revenue growth but, in fact, the foundation for home runs. Singles and doubles provide the discipline of execution, an absolute necessity for successfully bringing a breakthrough technology to market or implementing a new business model.Inherent in this way of thinking is the revolutionary idea that growth is everyone’s business—not solely the concern of the sales force or top management. Just as everyone participates in cost reduction, so must everyone be engaged in the growth agenda of the business. Every contact of each employee with a customer is an opportunity for revenue growth. That includes everyone from the people working in a company’s call center handling customer inquiries and complaints to the CEO. In this trailblazing book, Ram Charan provides the building blocks and tools that can put a business on the path to sustained, profitable growth. For more than twenty-five years, Ram Charan has been working day in and day out with companies around the world. The ideas he has developed for solving the profitable revenue growth dilemma facing many businesses are based on personally seeing what works in real time. These are ideas that have been tested across industries and that deliver results, and they can be put to use starting Monday morning.

    The first female CEO of one of Australia's big four banks, listed by Forbes in 2010 as the 8th most powerful woman in the world, and mother of four (including triplets), Gail is celebrated as one of our finest, most innovative thinkers on leadership and workplace culture.In these personal, practical chapters, Gail Kelly shares what she's learned over her remarkable career, drawing from her personal and professional life. As a leader, she argues passionately for the importance of putting people and customers at the heart of a business; of leading with courage and generosity of spirit; and of resilience. Some of those lessons were learnt at times of high pressure, and Gail takes us into her thinking as she led Westpac through the global financial crisis and the merger with St. George.But Gail's voice speaks to each of us, whatever our role in life. She explores the absolute importance of loving what you do; learning to learn; backing yourself; and most importantly, placing your family above all things.At the heart of Gail's refreshing, authentic, integrated approach is how both individuals and companies thrive when they openly address the meaning of what they do, and understand the need to live a whole life. Live, Lead, Learn is the inspiring story of one of the world's most prominent business people, who started as a Latin teacher and became mother of four and CEO of Westpac - and everything she has learned along the way.

    Loretta Malandro has developed a groundbreaking behavior-based methodology that is used around the globe to create top-performing leaders and high-performance organizations. It is based on a simple but profound concept: In order to change your organization, you must be willing to alter your behavior and help others make the choice to change their behavior. This means demanding 100% accountability from your people--and yourself.In today's ultra-competitive business environment, a new leadership approach is needed. Fearless Leadership takes you step by step through the process of raising behavioral standards that directly impact the bottom line. You will learn the secrets behind:Confronting the blind spots that sabotage successOvercoming the success-strangling "need to be right"Eliminating silo mentality and building committed partnershipsEnding compliance and gaining full support and alignmentTalking straight and confronting difficult situations head onBuilding a culture of 100% accountabilityToo many people in leadership positions attempt to enact change through systemic means, such as restructuring or altering processes. The secret to real and lasting change lies in changing behavior--how people work together. Change the level of ownership and performance of people and you will transform your organization.Leaders who are able to act courageously when faced with uncertainty or fear, take bold stands, and engage with people in very real ways are those who generate great and long-lasting results. Fearless Leadership shows you how.

    At its root, the principle works like this: Like Dorothy and the gang in The Wizard of Oz, most businesspeople have the tools to succeed, but when things go wrong they blame circumstance or others instead of looking within for the true cause of unsatisfactory results. Once individuals learn to accept responsibility, they can use the Oz Principle to become better leaders. Now, with corporate scandals in the headlines and the culture of victimization running rampant at every level of the business world, Roger Connors, Tom Smith, and Craig Hickman return with a new edition of The Oz Principle. Fully revised, this edition will update the statistics, concepts, and relevant companies through fresh, timely anecdotes and stories.

    New York Times BestsellerWhen Captain Abrashoff took over as commander of USS Benfold, it was like a business that had all the latest technology but only some of the productivity. Knowing that responsibility for improving performance rested with him, he realized he had to improve his own leadership skills before he could improve his ship. Within months, he created a crew of confident and inspired problem-solvers eager to take the initiative and responsibility for their actions. The slogan on board became "It's your ship," and Benfold was soon recognized far and wide as a model of naval efficiency. How did Abrashoff do it? Against the backdrop of today's United States Navy, Abrashoff shares his secrets of successful management including: See the ship through the eyes of the crew: By soliciting a sailor's suggestions, Abrashoff drastically reduced tedious chores that provided little additional value.Communicate, communicate, communicate: The more Abrashoff communicated the plan, the better the crew's performance. His crew eventually started calling him "Megaphone Mike," since they heard from him so often.Create discipline by focusing on purpose: Discipline skyrocketed when Abrashoff's crew believed that what they were doing was important.Listen aggressively: After learning that many sailors wanted to use the GI Bill, Abrashoff brought a test official aboard the ship-and held the SATs forty miles off the Iraqi coast. From achieving amazing cost savings to winning the highest gunnery score in the Pacific Fleet, Captain Abrashoff's extraordinary campaign sent shock waves through the U.S. Navy. It can help you change the course of your ship, no matter where your business battles are fought.

    Legacy is a unique, inspiring handbook for leaders in all fields, and asks: What are the secrets of success – sustained success? How do you achieve world-class standards, day after day, week after week, year after year? How do you handle pressure? How do you train to win at the highest level? What do you leave behind you after you’re gone?What will be your legacy?

    She was a pioneer in advertising sales at a time when women didn’t sell; served as president and publisher of the fledgling USA Today; and, in her current position as the president of Hearst Magazines, persuaded Oprah to launch a magazine. In 2006 she was named one of Fortune’s “50 Most Powerful Women in American Business” for the seventh consecutive year. Now, in the exuberant, down-to-earth voice that is her trademark, Cathie explains how she achieved “the 360° life”—a blend of professional accomplishment and personal contentment—and how any woman can seize opportunity in the workplace.No matter where you are in your career, Basic Black offers invaluable lessons that will help you land the job, promotion, or project you’re vying for. At the core of the book are Cathie’s candid, personal stories. She walks us through her decision to risk dropping a huge ad agency that handled the USA Today campaign in favor of a small boutique agency run by a wild man. (It was a smash.) She admits that her sometimes brusque style once led to a mutiny of staffers at Ms. (She learned to be more flexible in her managerial style.) She offers a clear-eyed look at what happened during the twenty-eight months between the launch and the close of the much-buzzed-about Talk magazine. And throughout, she offers fascinating glimpses of media and business personalities, such as Rupert Murdoch, Tina Brown, Frank Bennack, Vic Ganzi, former CosmoGirl! editor Atoosa Rubenstein, Bonnie Fuller, and the legendarily difficult Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today.Above all, Basic Black is motivating. It provides a close-up look at the keen judgment, perseverance, and optimism that have propelled Cathie Black to the top of her game, along with the kind of straight-up practical advice you get in a one-on-one session with a career coach. You’ll find out how to handle job interviews, which rules to break, and why you should make your life a grudge-free zone. Equally important, you’ll be inspired to pursue your passions and achieve your very best.

    Spanning a range of topics across business and public policy, from innovation and customer obsession to climate change and outer space, this book provides a rare glimpse into how Bezos thinks about the world and where the future might take us.Written in a direct, down-to-earth style, Invent and Wander offers readers a master class in business values, strategy, and execution:● The importance of a Day 1 mindset● Why “it’s all about the long term”● What it really means to be customer obsessed● How to start new businesses and create significant organic growth in an already successful company● Why culture is an imperative● How a willingness to fail is closely connected to innovation● What the Covid-19 pandemic has taught usEach insight offers new ways of thinking through today’s challenges—and more importantly, tomorrow’s—and the never-ending urgency of striving ahead, never resting on one’s laurels. Everyone from CEOs to entrepreneurs just setting up shop to the millions who use Amazon’s products and services in their homes or businesses will come to understand the principles that have driven the success of one of the most important innovators of our time.