Here are our top picks for the best leadership and business growth books this month.
How Great Leaders Think: the Art of Reframing uses compelling, contemporary examples to show how more complex thinking is the key to better leadership. Leaders who understand what’s going on around them see what they need to do to achieve the results they want. Bolman and Deal’s influential four-frame model of leadership and organizations—developed in their bestselling book, Reframing Organizations: Artistry Choice and Leadership—offers leaders an accessible guide for understanding four major aspects of organizational life: structure, people, politics, and culture. Tapping into the complexity enables leaders to decode the messy world in which they live, see more options, tell better stories, and find strategies that are more effective. Case examples of leaders like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Howard Schultz at Starbucks, Tony Hsieh at Zappos, Ursula Burns at Xerox, and the late Steve Jobs at Apple provide concrete lessons that readers can put to use in their own leadership.
From Harvard Business School Professor and Co-Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership: A guide to making better decisions, noticing important information in the world around you, and improving leadership skills.
Imagine your advantage in negotiations, decision-making, and leadership if you could teach yourself to see, and evaluate, information that others overlook. The Power of Noticing provides the blueprint for accomplishing precisely that. Max Bazerman, an expert in the field of applied behavioral psychology, draws on three decades of research and his experience instructing Harvard Business School MBAs and corporate executives to teach you how to notice and act on information that may not be immediately obvious.
Drawing on a wealth of real-world examples, from the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, Bazerman diagnoses what information went ignored in these situations, and why. Using many of the same case studies and thought experiments designed in his executive MBA classes, he challenges readers to explore their cognitive blind spots, identify any salient details they are programmed to miss, and then take steps to ensure it won’t happen again. While many bestselling business books have explained how susceptible to manipulation our irrational cognitive blindspots make us, Bazerman helps you avoid the habits that lead to poor decisions and ineffective leadership in the first place. His book provides a step-by-step guide to breaking bad habits and spotting the hidden details that will change your decision-making and leadership skills for the better, teaching you to: pay attention to what didn’t happen; acknowledge self-interest; invent the third choice; and realize that what you see is not all there is.
The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up.
But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel—and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time.
In a field that’s crowded with how-to coaching books and academic tomes on organization and leadership behavior, Destined to Lead breaks away from the crowd with its specificity and candor on how real cases unfolded in the hands of one of the world’s most respected pioneers of executive coaching. Karol M. Wasylyshyn provides an essential and accessible response to a significant void in the executive coaching literature, arriving at a time when executive coaching is booming as a consultation opportunity under the broad umbrella of talent management.
The Leadership Shadow tackles the dark side of leadership, delving into what causes leadership derailment and how to avoid it. It also explains the ways in which a leader’s performance can affect not just themselves, but the organization as a whole.
Using examples drawn from various executives’ experiences and descriptions of psychological behaviors based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) and the Hogan Personality Inventory model, the authors demonstrate how to find stability in the face of uncertainty, resilience in the face of grueling demand, and psychological equilibrium as a leader.