Leadership Problems

Who makes the important decisions in your organization? Strategy, product development, budgeting, compensation - such key decisions typically are made by company leaders. That's what bosses are for, right? But maybe the boss isn't the best person to make the call. That's the conclusion Dennis Bakke came to, and he used it to build AES into a Fortune 200 global power company with 27,000 people in 27 countries.

Creativity, new ideas, innovation - in any age they are keys to success. Yet, as Stanford Professor Robert Sutton explains, the standard rules of business behaviour and management are precisely the opposite of what it takes to build an innovative company. We are told to hire people who will fit in; to train them extensively; and to work to instil a corporate culture in every employee. In fact, in order to foster creativity, we should hire misfits, goad them to fight and pay them to defy convention and undermine the prevailing culture.

Ask better questions, and you will get better results. Top business coach Mark Moses has identified four critical questions every business leader should explore on their journey to business and life success.

The Risk-Driven Business Model will help you manage risk better by showing how the key choices you make in designing your business models either increase or reduce two characteristic types of risk - information risk, when you make decisions without enough information, and incentive-alignment risk, when decision makers' incentives are at odds with the broader goals of the company. Leaders who understand how the structure of their business model affects risk have the power to create wealth, revolutionize industries, and shape a better world.

We've decided by consensus that consensus is good. In In Defense of Troublemakers, psychologist Charlan Nemeth argues that this principle is completely wrong: left unchallenged, the majority opinion is often biased, unoriginal, or false. It leads planes and markets to crash, causes juries to convict innocent people, and can quite literally make people think blue is green. In the name of comity, we embrace stupidity. We can make better decisions by embracing dissent. Dissent forces us to question the status quo, consider more information, and engage in creative decision-making.

“Do it Like a Pilot” takes the reader into the flight deck – one of the most complicated workplaces ever designed and operated by among the most efficient teams ever trained. The success of flight crews can be attributed to clarity, simplicity and process. This involves taking what may seem to be involved and overwhelming, or even life-threatening tasks and breaking them down into smaller, logical and achievable steps. Simple and concise - this book will explain these methods and offers a framework that can be overlaid upon your business, or your life.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, leaders often face challenges that can overwhelm the most seasoned professionals. While executive coaching can offer powerful results, it isn’t always accessible when needed. That’s when leaders can turn to Dr Katie Best. In this book, Best works through ten of the trickiest and most common leadership challenges.

Though technology has evolved at hyper-speed over the past 100 years, management styles have mostly stayed the same. The higher-ups make the decisions, and the employees grind it out, often without knowing the endgame. In 1983, Jack Stack created a new game: the great game of business. Get in the Game further explains the rules of this game: To win, you must get everyone, at all levels of the business, as informed, involved, and engaged as the owner.

This is clearly abook every manager should listen to. One of the issues Mintzberg addresses is the frenetic pace and relentless pressures of the job - most managers hardly have time to think. So Mintzberg has done some revising and some updating and has distilled the essence of his original book into a lean, action-oriented shortened version. The core of the book remains the same: Mintzberg's observations of twenty-nine different managers, from business, government, and nonprofits, working in diverse settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra.

Winning with Data explores the cultural changes big data brings to business, and shows you how to adapt your organization to leverage data to maximum effect. Authors Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien draw on extensive background in big data, business intelligence, and business strategy to provide a blueprint for companies looking to move head-on into the data wave. Instrumentation is discussed in detail, but the core of the change is in the culture.

Are you ready to embark on a transformative journey toward mastering the art of conflict resolution and effective communication? "Navigating Life's Conflicts: Strategies for Effective De-Escalation and Communication" invites you to step into the heart of true-to-life scenarios where tensions rise, emotions flare, and understanding seems out of reach. In this immersive and scenario-driven approach, you'll not only learn invaluable conflict resolution skills, but you'll also apply them in these true-to-life situations, challenging yourself to navigate the complexities of human interaction. ...

Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, the school teacher next door who amassed a million-dollar fortune.... Did these people succeed because they were more motivated or because they were more disciplined? The answer to both questions is yes - but not in the ways you might think. Anyone can achieve extraordinary things. The secret is setting goals that test the very limits of your abilities. In Hard Goals, Mark Murphy, the acclaimed author of Hundred Percenters, explains the science behind getting from where you are to where you want to be in your career, business, and life.

In Wise Decisions: A Science-Based Approach to Making Better Choices, a team of accomplished industry experts delivers an evidence- and research-based blueprint for making the best decisions you can with the information you have. You'll learn to make the targeted, repeated investment of energy required to turn your decision-making process into one informed by reason, emotion, intuition, and science.

One of the biggest challenges for managers today is recruiting and maintaining quality employees. Authoritative managerial styles don’t work anymore. Today’s employees aren’t interested in blindly taking orders from the top and working dead-end jobs.

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.

How do you blow up your company's growth? Start with high quality training. Follow that up with thoughtful coaching by managers who refuse to rescue and value learning experiences. Implementing this proven algorithm creates a thinking company that generates exponential growth. Author Jill Young shares her vast experience in helping entrepreneurs discover and celebrate the creation of thinkers in their company, identify gaps in their system, and close those gaps.

For many organizations, the word strategy conjures up endless ideas, concepts, and tools - while the intent is correct, the awful reality is most companies do not have a simple, common definition of strategy or a simple approach to make the big decisions. Too many PowerPoints, not enough one pagers that can be put into practice. The lack of a common approach to strategy frustrates executives, creates conflict where there is none, fast-tracks dubious alternatives, lengthens decision-making, and hampers the quality of the decisions that finally emerge.

Much of our business thinking is shaped by delusions that distort our understanding of the real reasons for a company's performance. The most pervasive delusion is the Halo Effect. When a company's sales and profits are up, people often conclude that it has a brilliant strategy, a visionary leader, capable employees, and a superb corporate culture. When performance falters, they conclude the opposite. In fact, little may have changed.

Let’s face it, as an entrepreneur or small business owner, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of growing your empire. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all guidebook for people who are just starting out to follow. But the truth is, no matter what kind of business you are building if you don’t have a solid foundation in place, the storms that will inevitably come could cause you to lose everything you’ve worked for.

In this, his final work, finished only weeks before his passing, Peres offers a long-awaited examination of the crucial turning points in Israeli history through the prism of having been a decision maker and eyewitness. Told with the frankness of someone aware this would likely be his final statement, No Room for Small Dreams spans decades and events, but as much as it is about what happened, it is about why it happened.