Leadership Problems

No one knows leadership like Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric. Along with his wife and best-selling co-author, Suzy Welch, he explores with Daniel Goleman what it means to be a great leader, and what elements must be present for any leader to be successful. Key elements of emotional intelligence, from self-awareness to the ability to instill core values in a team, are part of that success.

To edge out the competition in today's disruptive environment, you need to ensure that your company is agile - that it can respond to change instantly and effectively. Because fast and furious change is the only thing you can count on in business today. Network expert Michael Arena helped enable GM's legendary turnaround. In this book, he explains how you can transform your own company through the concept of adaptive space.

Agile project management has grown in popularity over the past several years. Change is occurring so fast that many organizations are unable to keep up with the demands of a changing global world. Your ability to quickly change and adapt to your environment will make or break, not only your career but could be the deciding factor as to whether your company survives in the coming years.

Dr. Adizes’s premise, developed in this book, is that the ideal leader, manager, or executive - ideal in the sense that he can fulfill by himself all the roles necessary for the long- and short-term effectiveness and efficiency of an organization - does not and cannot exist. And that is the problem with contemporary management literature: It presents what the executive should do (because that is what the organization needs), even though no one can do it.

Governor Charlie Baker, one of the most popular governors in the United States, with a reputation for getting things done, wants to put the service back into public service. Results is the much-needed implementation guide for anyone in public service, as well as for leaders and managers in large organizations hamstrung by bureaucracy and politics. With a broad range of examples, Baker, a Republican, and Kadish, a Democrat, show how to move from identifying problems to achieving results in a way that bridges divides instead of exacerbating them.

How Stella Saved the Farm is a simple parable about making innovation happen. Written by the authors of the New York Times best-selling Reverse Innovation: Create Far from Home, Win Everywhere, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, the story resonates in organizations of all types - public sector, private sector, and social sector, from mammoth corporations to small organizations employing just a few dozen people.

Pig Wrestling is a simple story with a powerful message. Whenever we find ourselves wrestling with a sticky situation, we need to stop struggling and instead take the time to clean our thinking. Through a short story about a young manager who is struggling to create the change that he needs, the book introduces the principles of ‘Problem Cleaning’ in a truly memorable way. Based on the authors’ work with the world’s elite sports and business performers, Pig Wrestling gives us the tools to create change whenever and wherever we need it.

Tackle your thorniest problems using the wise fool's savvy strategies! The wise fool is the archetypal contrarian known for his creativity, irreverence, and humor. He looks at life in unorthodox ways and pushes back against the status quo. Throughout history, powerful decision-makers (Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese emperors, Persian sultans, and European kings) consulted wise fools to question the assumptions that kept them mired in stale and obsolete solutions.

In today's ultra-competitive business world, the difference between success and failure lies in the ability to get every employee to think and behave like a strategist. Think to Win helps business leaders expand strategic thinking out of the purview of “the elite few” and into the company culture as whole. It offers a simple, proven approach to analyzing and solving old or new challenges and provides a common language anyone at any level in the organization can understand.

Learn how to take the bold yet intelligent risks that will help you thrive in business - and in life. How can you challenge and change yourself when you need it most? We're creatures of habit, programmed by evolution to favor the safe and familiar, especially when the stakes are high. This bias no longer serves us in a world of constant change. Through stories of trailblazers in business, health, education and activism, Jonah Sachs reveals a path to higher performance and creativity for anyone ready to step out of their comfort zone.

Almost every major company today has made innovation its number one priority. Yet fewer than one in four executives believe their organizations are effective innovators. The pressure to innovate and the price paid for failure keeps rising while most companies haven't progressed at all. They are still using the same antiquated techniques pioneered decades ago. This is why some of the biggest corporations in the world manage to lose entire markets to start-ups they've never heard of.

Generating and executing great ideas is the key to staying ahead in a rapidly changing world. It seems so basic. Why is it so hard to actually get right? According to innovation expert Phil McKinney, the real problem is that we're teaching people to ask the wrong questions about their businesses - or none at all. There has to be a better way. In Beyond the Obvious, McKinney will help you use his proven FIRE (Focus, Ideation, Rank, Execution) Method to dig deeper and get back to asking the right questions - the ones all companies must ask to survive.

Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms zeros in on the cutting-edge thinkers who repeatedly create and deliver breakthrough innovations and new products in large, mature organizations. These employees are organizational powerhouses who solve consumer problems and substantially contribute to the financial value to their firms.

By combining practical case studies with cutting-edge research, Never Go With Your Gut will help you make the best decisions and prevent these business disasters. The leading expert on avoiding business disasters, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, draws on over 20 years of extensive consulting, coaching, and speaking experience to show how pioneering leaders and organizations - many of them his clients - avoid business disasters.

Since the groundbreaking work of Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, the concept of the Balanced Scorecard has achieved increasing popularity in the business world. In this book, the authors draw on their extensive experience with scorecard projects to provide a step-by-step method for introducing the Balanced Scorecard into an organization. This book will provide senior and operational managers, consultants, and business academics with a comprehensive view of emerging Balanced Scorecard practice supported by both business advice and a theoretical foundation.

I spent all my formative years at work, growing up as a farmhand to farmers. It does not matter what age you are, what stage in life you are, what career you are in. These lessons apply. I wish everyone could have worked on the farm for at least one summer. It was life-changing. But since many of you did not, you can get a little taste of the experience, laugh a little, cry a little, but through it all learn the lessons, apply the lessons, and share them with others.

The media is saturated with images of leaders as powerful, headstrong individuals who are certain of their position and willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their organizational goals or personal ambitions. In reality, far too often, a leader’s ego gets in the way of sound decision-making, adversely affecting the organization and the individuals involved. This insightful book, based on cutting-edge research, advances a new model for understanding effective leadership.

Ori Brafman and management consultant Judah Pollack dramatically demonstrate how even the best and most efficient organizations - from Fortune 500 companies to today's US Army - can become more innovative by allowing a little unstructured space and "contained chaos" into their planning and decision-making. Through their consulting work, they realized that while structure and hierarchy are essential both in large corporations and small groups, too much of either can stifle creativity.

Jennings and Haughton traveled the globe and penetrated the world's fastest companies to witness the methods used by quick, dominant leaders in business ranging from retail sales to fast food, from financial services to communications. If you want to think faster, all the information you need is here. You'll find lessons from the speediest international companies on how to become faster than anyone else in today's ever-changing business world.

Everybody hates meetings. And why shouldn't they? Most meetings are poorly led, counterproductive, and time-wasting. Based on decades of practice and research, best-selling authors Weisbord and Janoff have come to the conclusion that most people lead meetings incorrectly. They, instead, propose 10 contrarian principles that actually get things done.