The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
by Patrick M. Lencioni
from Jossey-Bass
Once again using an astutely written fictional tale to unambiguously but painlessly deliver some hard truths about critical business procedures, Patrick Lencioni targets group behavior in the final entry of his trilogy of corporate fables. And like those preceding it, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is an entertaining, quick read filled with useful information that will prove easy to digest and implement. This time, Lencioni weaves his lessons around the story of a troubled Silicon Valley firm and its unexpected choice for a new CEO: an old-school manager who had retired from a traditional manufacturing company two years earlier at age 55. Showing exactly how existing personnel failed to function as a unit, and precisely how the new boss worked to reestablish that essential conduct, the book's first part colorfully illustrates the ways that teamwork can elude even the most dedicated individuals--and be restored by an insightful leader. A second part offers details on Lencioni's "five dysfunctions" (absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results), along with a questionnaire for readers to use in evaluating their own teams and specifics to help them understand and overcome these common shortcomings. Like the author's previous books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, this is highly recommended. --Howard Rothman
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. 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.
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
by Dan Roam
from Portfolio Hardcover
A bold new way to tackle tough business problems—even if you draw like a second grader
When Herb Kelleher was brainstorming about how to beat the traditional hub-and- spoke airlines, he grabbed a bar napkin and a pen. Three dots to represent Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Three arrows to show direct flights. Problem solved, and the picture made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers.
Used properly, a simple drawing on a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or PowerPoint. It can help crystallize ideas, think outside the box, and communicate in a way that people simply “get”. In this book Dan Roam argues that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who swear they can’t draw.
Drawing on twenty years of visual problem solving combined with the recent discoveries of vision science, this book shows anyone how to clarify a problem or sell an idea by visually breaking it down using a simple set of visual thinking tools – tools that take advantage of everyone’s innate ability to look, see, imagine, and show.
THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN proves that thinking with pictures can help anyone discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve their ability to share their insights. This book will help readers literally see the world in a new way.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
from Back Bay Books
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea. Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making.In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like.--Barbara Mackoff
The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
by Michael Watkins
from Harvard Business School Press
Whether challenged with taking on a startup, turning a business around, or inheriting a high-performing unit, a new leader's success or failure is determined within the first 90 days on the job.
In this hands-on guide, Michael Watkins, a noted expert on leadership transitions, offers proven strategies for moving successfully into a new role at any point in one's career. The First 90 Days provides a framework for transition acceleration that will help leaders diagnose their situations, craft winning transition strategies, and take charge quickly.
Practical examples illustrate how to learn about new organizations, build teams, create coalitions, secure early wins, and lay the foundation for longer-term success. In addition, Watkins provides strategies for avoiding the most common pitfalls new leaders encounter, and shows how individuals can protect themselves-emotionally as well as professionally-during what is often an intense and vulnerable period.
Concise and actionable, this is the survival guide no new leader should be without.
"Few companies develop a systematic 'on-boarding' process for their new leaders, even though this is a critical function with major organizational implications. Michael Watkins's The First 90 Days provides a powerful framework and strategies that will enable new leaders to take charge quickly. It is an invaluable tool for that most vulnerable time-the transition."
-Goli Darabi, Senior Vice President, Corporate Leadership & Succession Management, Fidelity Investments
"Every job-private- or public-sector, civilian or military-has its breakeven point, and everyone can accelerate their learning. Read this book at least twice: once before your next transition-before getting caught up in the whirl and blur of new faces, names, acronyms, and issues; then read it again after you've settled in, and consider how to accelerate transitions for your next new boss and for those who come to work for you."
-Colonel Eli Alford, U.S. Army
"Watkins provides an excellent road map, telling us what all new leaders need to know and do to accelerate their learning and success in a new role. The First 90 Days should be incorporated into every company's leadership development strategy, so that anyone making a transition in an organization can get up to speed quicker and smarter."
-Suzanne M. Danielle, Director of Global Leadership Development, Aventis
"Michael Watkins has nailed a huge corporate problem and provided the solution in one fell swoop. The pressure on new leaders to hit the ground running has never been greater, and the likelihood and cost of failure is escalating. Watkins's timing with The First 90 Days is impeccable."
-Gordon Curtis, Principal, Curtis Consulting
"The First 90 Days is a must-read for entrepreneurs. Anyone who's been the CEO of a start-up or early-stage company knows that you go through many 90-day leadership transitions in the course of a company's formative years. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Watkins provides crucial insights, as well as a toolkit of techniques, to enable you to accelerate through these transitions successfully."
-Mike Kinkead, President and CEO, timeBLASTER Corporation, serial entrepreneur, and Cofounder and Trustee, Massachusetts Software Council
Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box
by The Arbinger Institute
from Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Using the story/parable format so popular these days, Leadership and Self-Deception takes a novel psychological approach to leadership. It's not what you do that matters, say the authors (presumably plural--the book is credited to the esteemed Arbinger Institute), but why you do it. Latching onto the latest leadership trend won't make people follow you if your motives are selfish--people can smell a rat, even one that says it's trying to empower them. The tricky thing is, we don't know that our motivation is flawed. We deceive ourselves in subtle ways into thinking that we're doing the right thing for the right reason. We really do know what the right thing to do is, but this constant self-justification becomes such an ingrained habit that it's hard to break free of it--it's as though we're trapped in a box, the authors say.
Learning how the process of self-deception works--and how to avoid it and stay in touch with our innate sense of what's right--is at the heart of the book. We follow Tom, an old-school, by-the-book kind of guy who is a newly hired executive at Zagrum Corporation, as two senior executives show him the many ways he's "in the box," how that limits him as a leader in ways he's not aware of, and of course how to get out. This is as much a book about personal transformation as it is about leadership per se. The authors use examples from the characters' private as well as professional lives to show how self-deception skews our view of ourselves and the world and ruins our interactions with people, despite what we sincerely believe are our best intentions.
While the writing won't make John Updike lose any sleep, the story entertainingly does the job of pulling the reader in and making a potentially abstruse argument quite enjoyable. The authors have a much better ear for dialogue than is typical of the genre (the book is largely dialogue), although a certain didactic tone creeps in now and then. But ultimately it's a hopeful, even inspiring read that flows along nicely and conveys a message that more than a few managers need to hear. --Pat McGill
The "disease" of self-deception (acting in ways contrary to what one knows is right) underlies all leadership problems in today's organizations, according to the premise of this work. 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.
Leading Change
by John P. Kotter
from Harvard Business School Press
In Leading Change, John Kotter examines the efforts of more than 100 companies to remake themselves into better competitors. He identifies the most common mistakes leaders and managers make in attempting to create change and offers an eight-step process to overcome the obstacles and carry out the firm's agenda: establishing a greater sense of urgency, creating the guiding coalition, developing a vision and strategy, communicating the change vision, empowering others to act, creating short-term wins, consolidating gains and producing even more change, and institutionalizing new approaches in the future. This highly personal book reveals what John Kotter has seen, heard, experienced, and concluded in 25 years of working with companies to create lasting transformation.
The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't--and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger
by Daniel Gardner
from Dutton Adult
From terror attacks to the war on terror, real estate bubbles to the price of oil, sexual predators to poisoned food from China, our list of fears is ever-growing. And yet, we are the safest and healthiest humans in history. Irrational fear seems to be taking over, often with tragic results. For example, in the months after 9/11, when people decided to drive instead of fly—believing they were avoiding risk—road deaths rose by more than 1,500.
In this fascinating, lucid, and thoroughly entertaining examination of how humans process risk, journalist Dan Gardner had the exclusive cooperation of Paul Slovic, the world renowned risk-science pioneer, as he reveals how our hunter gatherer brains struggle to make sense of a world utterly unlike the one that made them. Filled with illuminating real world examples, interviews with experts, and fast-paced, lean storytelling, The Science of Fear shows why it is truer than ever that the worst thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Influencer: The Power to Change Anything
by Kerry Patterson
from McGraw-Hill
An INFLUENCER motivates others to change.
An INFLUENCER replaces bad behaviors with powerful new skills.
An INFLUENCER makes things happen.
This is what it takes to be an INFLUENCER.
Whether you're a CEO, a parent, or merely a person who wants to make a difference, you probably wish you had more influence with the people in your life. But most of us stop trying to make change happen because we believe it is too difficult, if not impossible. We develop complicated coping strategies when we should be learning the tools and techniques of the world's most influential people.
But this is about to change. From the bestselling authors who taught the world how to have Crucial Conversations comes Influencer, a thought-provoking book that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life. You'll be taught each and every step of the influence process-including robust strategies for making change inevitable in your personal life, your business, and your world. You'll learn how to:
- Identify a handful of high-leverage behaviors that lead to rapid and profound change.
- Apply strategies for changing both thoughts and actions.
- Marshall six sources of influence to make change inevitable.
Influencer takes you on a fascinating journey from San Francisco to Thailand where you'll see how seemingly “insignificant” people are making incredibly significant improvements in solving problems others would think impossible. You'll learn how savvy folks make change not only achievable and sustainable, but inevitable. You'll discover why some managers have increased productivity repeatedly and significantly-while others have failed miserably.
No matter who you are, or what you do, you'll never learn a more valuable or important set of principles and skills. Once you tap into the power of influence, you can reach out and help others work smarter, grow faster, live, look, and feel better, even save lives. The sky is the limit…for an Influencer.
Are you an Influencer ?
Find out at www.influencerbook.com
”You don't have to be a manager to realize that no one likes being told what to do. Yet lectures are still the main way we try to get people to change their behavior. Fortunately, social learning academics have been studying alternatives for decades. Patterson and his fellow consultants have now collected their findings in this engaging, example-rich book. The key message is hardly new, but it has gotten more sophisticated: Managers need to get out of the way and facilitate, not manage, the process of change for employees. They can do this by offering vicarious experiences, restructured environments, peer pressure, and frequent tests-all geared so that people embrace the change as authentic to them, not imposed by an outsider. Missing are only success stories of organizations that persuaded managers to drop their controlling habits and choose to be mere facilitators.”-John T. Landry, Harvard Business Review
Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence
by Daniel Goleman
from Harvard Business School Press
Business leaders who maintain that emotions are best kept out of the work environment do so at their organization's peril. Bestselling author Daniel Goleman's theories on emotional intelligence (EI) have radically altered common understanding of what "being smart" entails, and in Primal Leadership, he and his coauthors present the case for cultivating emotionally intelligent leaders. Since the actions of the leader apparently account for up to 70 percent of employees' perception of the climate of their organization, Goleman and his team emphasize the importance of developing what they term "resonant leadership." Focusing on the four domains of emotional intelligence--self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management--they explore what contributes to and detracts from resonant leadership, and how the development of these four EI competencies spawns different leadership styles. The best leaders maintain a style repertoire, switching easily between "visionary," "coaching," "affiliative," and "democratic," and making rare use of less effective "pace-setting" and "commanding" styles. The authors' discussion of these methods is informed by research on the workplace climates engendered by the leadership styles of more than 3,870 executives. Indeed, the experiences of leaders in a wide range of work environments lend real-life examples to much of the advice Goleman et al. offer, from developing the motivation to change and creating an improvement plan based on learning rather than performance outcomes, to experimenting with new behaviors and nurturing supportive relationships that encourage change and growth. The book's final section takes the personal process of developing resonant leadership and applies it to the entire organizational culture. --S. Ketchum
National Bestseller Available in Paperback
"Just as Goleman's first book redefined intelligence, his new treatise…reassesses what makes a great leader."
-Time magazine
"Daniel Goleman has done it again! …a fascinating account of how emotions are at the heart of effective leadership. This book is a gem."
--David Gergen, Director, Center for Public Leadership, John F. Kennedy School, Harvard University
Drawing from decades of research within world-class organizations, the authors show that great leaders-whether CEOs or managers, coaches or politicians-excel not just through skill and smarts, but by connecting with others using Emotional Intelligence competencies like empathy and self-awareness. The best leaders, they show, have "resonance"-a powerful ability to drive emotions in a positive direction to get results-and can fluidly interchange among a variety of leadership styles as the situation demands. Groundbreaking and timely, this book reveals the new requirements of successful leadership.
Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition)
by Michael Michalko
from Ten Speed Press
THINKERTOYS will teach you how to generate new ideas for businesses, markets, sales techniques, and products and product extensions. Packed with fun and practical tools and exercises, it outlines 30 practical linear and intuitive techniques that can be used by individuals or groups to tackle and solve business problems in fresh, creative ways.
An updated edition of the best-selling business creativity book, with more than 30 brainstorming techniques and hundreds of creative-thinking tips and tricks. Revision includes new techniques, examples, and sections on group brainstorming and endgames.
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