Career Leadership

Real Madrid is the most successful sports team on the planet. The soccer club has more trophies than any other sports team, including 11 UEFA Champions League trophies. However, the story behind the triumph goes beyond the players and coaches. Generally unnoticed, a management team consisting mostly of outsiders took the team from near bankruptcy to the most valuable sports organization in the world. How did Real Madrid achieve such extraordinary success? Columbia Business School adjunct professor Steven G. Mandis investigates.

How working parents can lead more purposeful lives, characterized by harmony, connection, and impact.

Most everyone has something they are passionate about. But without the ability to actually effect change...things just stay the same. In order to truly inspire change, we need to be able to effectively explain the problem, inspire people to join us, create a vision for the new reality, and then motivate people to take the actions that lead to the change. Inspiring change requires charisma - the ability to communicate a clear, visionary, and inspirational message that captivates and motivates an audience.

It's been over a decade since Verne Harnish's best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits was first released. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't is the first major revision of this business classic. In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team share practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business.

In Impact Players, New York Times best-selling author and researcher Liz Wiseman reveals the secrets of these stellar professionals who play the game at a higher level. Drawing on insights from leaders at top companies, Wiseman explains what the most influential players are doing differently, how small and seemingly insignificant differences in how we think and act can make an enormous impact, and why - with a little coaching - this mindset is available to everyone who wants to contribute at their highest level.

Despite the billions of dollars invested every year into leadership development, leaders aren’t collectively becoming more successful. Existing tools like assessments, models, and styles have proven largely inadequate in equipping leaders for today’s age of work. For leaders to succeed in a landscape more unpredictable than ever, they need a new perspective and a brand-new set of skills that center around what is missing in the models and existing tools: flexibility.

Reward and recognition programs can be costly and inefficient, and they primarily reward employees who are already highly engaged and productive performers. Worse still, these programs actually decrease employee motivation because they can make individual recognition, rather than the overall success of the team, the goal. Yet many businesses turn to these measures first-unaware of a better alternative. So, when it comes to changing your organizational culture, carrots and sticks don't work!

No one knows how to turn unrelenting self-belief into hard-and-fast career results better than Dre Baldwin. When everyone and everything was telling him to give up on his goal of playing pro basketball, he got focused on his future, and met the challenge head on. In the end, Baldwin succeeded - making a living playing basketball in leagues around the world - and in this book, he shares all his secrets. Whether you're just starting out in business or looking to take your career to the next level, Work On Your Game provides the strategy you need to succeed from the inside out.

5 Voices is the code for unlocking your capacity to have honest conversations and build deeper, more authentic relationships with your teams, your families, and your friends. In order to lead others effectively, we need a true understanding of ourselves, our natural tendencies, and patterns of behavior.

Empathy is credited as a factor in improved relationships and even better product development. But while it's easy to say "just put yourself in someone else's shoes", the reality is that understanding the motivations and emotions of others often proves elusive. This collection of articles from HBR includes "What Is Empathy?" by Daniel Goleman; "Why Compassion Is a Better Managerial Tactic Than Toughness" by Emma Seppala; and much more.

Innovation requires teaming. (Put another way, teaming is to innovation what assembly lines are to car production.) This book brings together key insights on teaming, as they pertain to innovation. How do you build a culture of innovation? What does that culture look like? How does it evolve and grow? How are teams most effectively created and then nurtured in this context? What is a leader's role in this culture?

NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR CAREER is a real playbook. It’s about how work really works and how you can get work to work for you. It’s about thank you notes and thankless tasks, the energy in meetings and energy vampires, how to pick a boss and how to get a boss to pick you. It’s about being all in (but not bringing your whole self to work—some of you is better left at home) and becoming valuable to your workplace. It’s about participating—with your brain, your skills, your experience, and your willingness to pitch in and offer yourself up for something you may not even know how to do yet.

Number one New York Times best-selling author John C. Maxwell responds to the most popular questions he's received to help listeners achieve greater success. John Maxwell, America's number one leadership authority, has mastered the art of asking questions, using them to learn and grow, connect with people, challenge himself, improve his team, and develop better ideas. In this compact derivative of Good Leaders Ask Great Questions, he gives detailed answers to the most popular and intriguing questions posed to him by people at all stages of their careers.

The Failure of Risk Management provides effective solutions to significant faults in current risk analysis methods. Conventional approaches to managing risk lack accurate quantitative analysis methods, yielding strategies that can actually make things worse. Many widely used methods have no systems to measure performance, resulting in inaccurate selection and ineffective application of risk management strategies. These fundamental flaws propagate unrealistic perceptions of risk in business, government, and the general public.

Rethink how your organization creates, delivers, and captures value - or risk becoming irrelevant. If you listen to nothing else on business model innovation, listen to these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you reach new customers and stay ahead of your competitors by reinventing your business model.

We've seen the negative impact of self-serving leaders in every sector of our society. Not infrequently, they end up bringing down their entire organization. But there is another way. Servant leaders lead by serving their people, not by exalting themselves. In this collection, edited by legendary business author and lifelong servant leader Ken Blanchard and his longtime editor Renee Broadwell, leading businesspeople, best-selling authors, and spiritual leaders offer tools for implementing this proven - but for some, still radical - leadership model.

Mastering Business Negotiation is a great resource for any leader or manager who needs practical strategies and ideas when conducting business negotiations. Grounded in solid research, the authors - experts in the field of business negotiation - reduce the huge volume of available information into an important audio for busy executives who need to prepare for everyday negotiations as well as for more demanding and complex negotiation situations.

Here for the first time, Hastings and Erin Meyer, best-selling author of The Culture Map and one of the world's most influential business thinkers, dive deep into the controversial philosophies at the heart of the Netflix psyche, which have generated results that are the envy of the business world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees from around the globe and never-before-told stories of trial and error from his own career, No Rules Rules is the full, fascinating, and untold story of a unique company making its mark on the world.

Leadership teacher Kelly Wendorf offers a new approach to leading and living inspired by two profound sources of ancient wisdom: original peoples and Equus (the horse), grounded in evidence-based principles of neuroscience. In her groundbreaking EQUUS training program, Wendorf teaches a way of leadership modeled on a 56 million-year-old system of the horse herd - a path that has allowed humans and horses alike to survive the kinds of global and societal threats we now face, such as climate change and mass extinction.

Being a CEO at any of the world’s largest companies is among the most challenging roles in business. Billions, and even trillions, are at stake—and the fates of tens of thousands of employees often hang in the balance. Yet, even when “can’t miss” high-achievers win the top job, very few excel. For those who shoulder the burden of being the one on whom everyone counts, a manual for excellence is sorely needed. To identify the 21st century’s best CEOs, the authors of CEO Excellence started with a pool of over 2,400 public company CEOs.