Business Leadership Management

The world's elite athletes and coaches achieve high performance through inspiring leadership, mental toughness, and direction-setting strategic choices. Harvard Business Review has talked to many of these high performers throughout the years to learn how their success translates to the world of business. If you read (or listen to) nothing else on management lessons from the world of sports, listen to these ten articles by athletes, coaches, and leadership experts.

According to a study published in Chief Executive Magazine, the most valued skill in leaders today is strategic thinking. However, more than half of all companies say that strategic thinking is the skill their senior leaders most need to improve. Elevate provides leaders with a framework and toolkit for developing advanced strategic thinking capabilities.

Moneyball reveals a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the giant offices of major league teams and the dugouts. But the real jackpot is a cache of numbers collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors.

Leadership expert Sally Helgesen and best-selling leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith have trained thousands of high achievers - men and women - to reach even greater heights. Again and again, they see that women face specific and different road blocks from men as they advance in the workplace. In fact, the very habits that helped women early in their careers can hinder them as they move up. Simply put, what got you here won't get you there...and you might not even realize your blind spots until it's too late.

Why is 1001 Ways to Reward Employees, with over 1.4 million copies in print, such an extraordinary bestseller? Because a little over 10 years ago Bob Nelson took the seeds of an idea and turned it into something indispensable for business. The idea? That it's not a raise that motivates an employee, and it's not a promotion ¿ what really sparks a person to perform are those intangible, unexpected gestures that signify real appreciation for a job well done.

Whether you are building a small business from the ground up or managing a multinational company, you can learn the seven key traits for leadership success from one of the greatest business innovators and creative thinkers of the 20th century: Walt Disney. Whether you know him as the first to produce cartoons in Technicolor, the mastermind behind the theme park Disneyland, or the founder of the largest entertainment conglomerate, Walt's story of creativity, perseverance in spite of obstacles, and achieving goals resonates and inspires as much today as it ever has.

Managing an effective sales organization is key to revenue generation, customer satisfaction, and business results. But whether you're a sales manager or leading a large sales force, it's increasingly challenging to balance success today with driving the digital sales transformation that will position your team for the future. With actionable insights and examples from many industries worldwide, the HBR Sales Management Handbook provides the resources you need to build value for your company, your customers, and your sales teams.

Best-selling author and scholar Michael Roberto presents a thorough investigation of organizational obstacles to creative thought. Highly relevant to the growth crises many enterprises face in today's economic landscape, this book examines how to break barriers to spark creativity and foster new ideas.

It Worked for Me is filled with vivid experiences and lessons learned that have shaped the legendary career of the four-star general and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. At its heart are Powell's "Thirteen Rules" - such as "Get mad, then get over it" and "Share credit" - that introduce his principles for effective leadership: conviction, hard work, and, above all, respect for others. A natural storyteller, Powell offers warm and engaging parables with wise advice on succeeding in the workplace and beyond.

Based on Dave Kraft's 35 years of leading, teaching leadership, and coaching dozens of Christian leaders, Leaders Who Last moves through three stages of leadership: foundations, formation, and fruitfulness. Concise, anecdotal, and packed with wisdom, this book will help you aim your ambitions, refine your character, and position yourself to be an effective leader who endures.

The audiobook shows you how to apply each idea to the challenges of the modern workplace and combine it with what you discover about yourself as you delve into your own strengths and weaknesses. You'll develop your own ability to see The Big Picture, connect with members of your organization, foster a meaningful and productive work environment, and steer your corporate ship through any challenge. Skills and experience might land you a leadership position... but they don't make you a true leader.

Change is the one constant in business, and we must adapt or face obsolescence. Yet certain challenges never go away. These are the ten seminal articles by management's most influential experts, on topics of perennial concern to ambitious managers and leaders hungry for inspiration—and ready to run with big ideas to accelerate their own and their companies' success.

Hiring and firing are hard to get right - and potentially costly to get wrong. Two of the most crucial tasks you face as a manager, they are vital to both the success of the enterprise...and your own career. No need to worry. This handy guide breaks down the simple but powerful strategies you can use to bring better employees onboard - and weed out the weaker ones.

Meet a genuine American folk hero cut from the homespun cloth of America's heartland: Sam Walton, who parlayed a single dime store in a hardscrabble cotton town into Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world. The undisputed merchant king of the late 20th century, Sam never lost the common touch. Here, finally, inimitable words. Genuinely modest, but always sure of his ambitions and achievements. Sam shares his thinking in a candid, straight-from-the-shoulder style. In a story rich with anecdotes and the "rules of the road" of both Main Street and Wall Street, Sam Walton chronicles the inspiration, heart, and optimism that propelled him to lasso the American Dream.

Networking: It’s the most effective way to build a career, right? It is if you do it the right way, building trust along with your list of contacts. Tiffany Pham, author of You Are a Mogul, shows you how making connections is just the start. How you treat them is what really matters. Pham teaches you how to be a giver and not an exploiter, treating your network as a collection of lasting friendships that require nurturing and communication. She shares how networking can help you conquer imposter syndrome by giving you opportunities to show your strengths.

Your organization's culture can feel like something that has a life of its own; it's long-standing, inherited, and seemingly impermeable - in fact, a strong culture is often an obstacle to doing new things or going in new directions. But leaders are the stewards of a company's culture and have the power to shape it. The best leaders know that organizational culture is a fundamental and powerful management tool that can drive positive outcomes.

In Eat, Sleep, Innovate, innovation expert Scott Anthony and his impressive team of coauthors use groundbreaking research in behavioral science to provide a first-of-its-kind playbook for empowering individuals and teams to be their most curious and creative - every single day.

In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that the Objectives and Key Results system has spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

Why do sales organizations fall short? Every day expert consultants like Mike Weinberg are called on by companies large and small to find the answer - and it's one that may surprise you. Typically the issue lies not with the sales team - but with how it is being led. Through their attitude and actions, senior executives and sales managers unknowingly undermine performance. In Sales Management. Simplified. Weinberg tells it straight, calling out the problems plaguing sales forces and the costly mistakes made by even the best-intentioned sales managers.

In The Answer Is a Question, multi-award-winning performance consultants Dominic and Laura Ashley-Timms set out a simple approach for rehumanising the practice of management. In a step-by-step walk-through of their groundbreaking STAR® model (used by FTSE and Fortune 500 companies), they’ll show how you can develop a new superpower that’s been proven to work by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in a major academic study across sixty-two organisations.