Here are our top picks for the best leadership and business growth books this month.
Sally Hogshead believes the greatest value you can add is to become more of yourself.
Hogshead rose to the top of the advertising profession in her early 20s, writing ads that fascinated millions of consumers. Over the course of her ad career, Sally won hundreds of awards for creativity, copywriting, and branding, and was one of the most awarded advertising copywriters right from start of career, including almost every major international advertising award.
She frequently appears in national media including NBC’s Today Show and the New York Times. Hogshead was recently inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame, the industry’s highest award for professional excellence. Her advertising work hangs in the Smithsonian Museum of American History.
The science of fascination is based on Hogshead’s decade of research with 250,000 participants, including dozens of Fortune 500 teams, hundreds of small businesses, and over a thousand C-level executives.
America’s first “celebrity” general, William Tecumseh Sherman was a man of many faces. Some of them were exalted in the public eye. Others were known only to intimates—his family, friends and lovers, and the soldiers under his command. In this rich and layered portrait, Robert L. O’Connell captures the man in full for the first time. From his early exploits in Florida, to his role in California at the start of the Gold Rush, through his brilliant but tempestuous generalship during the Civil War, and to his postwar career as a key player in the building of the transcontinental railroad, Sherman was, as O’Connell puts it, the “human embodiment of Manifest Destiny.”
Here is Sherman the military strategist of genius, a master of logistics whose uncanny grasp of terrain and brilliant sense of timing always seemed to land him in the right place at the most opportune moments. O’Connell shows how Sherman’s creation of an agile, improvisational fighting force—the Army of the West—helped turn the tide of the Civil War and laid the foundation for modern U.S. ground forces. Then there is “Uncle Billy,” Sherman’s public persona, a charismatic hero to his troops and quotable catnip to the newspaper writers of his day.
The employer-employee relationship is broken, and managers face a seemingly impossible dilemma: the old model of guaranteed long-term employment no longer works in a business environment defined by continuous change, but neither does a system in which every employee acts like a free agent.
The solution? Stop thinking of employees as either family or as free agents. Think of them instead as allies.
As a manager you want your employees to help transform the company for the future. And your employees want the company to help transform their careers for the long term. But this win-win scenario will happen only if both sides trust each other enough to commit to mutual investment and mutual benefit. Sadly, trust in the business world is hovering at an all-time low.
We can rebuild that lost trust with straight talk that recognizes the realities of the modern economy. So, paradoxically, the alliance begins with managers acknowledging that great employees might leave the company, and with employees being honest about their own career aspirations.
By putting this new alliance at the heart of your talent management strategy, you’ll not only bring back trust, you’ll be able to recruit and retain the entrepreneurial individuals you need to adapt to a fast-changing world.
Why do most growth companies stop growing? What can their leaders do to overcome the barriers to growth? The Curve Ahead tackles these questions focusing in on “gazelles,” defined as high-growth companies that growrevenue 20% annually. Their challenge is to transition from entrepreneurial focus to a repeatable process for innovation and sustained growth – and the stakes are high.
The Curve Ahead utilizes the power of storytelling to teach company leaders how to sustain long-term growth. Dave Power explores examples of “the curve” in many relevant companies including LoJack, which soared to success only to be brought down by competitors such as OnStar; MySpace, which was quickly overshadowed by the success of similar social networking sites; and Groupon which suffered from “customer fatigue” and a business model that was too easy for competitors to emulate.
This book will help thousands of mid-sized companies overcome the growth hump by providing the tools necessary to not only succeed but thrive in the future.
There are enormous differences between managing and coaching. Yet many companies and organizations encourage their leaders to coach teams without ever teaching them how and without creating a culture that supports coaching.
Fostering employees’ belief in the culture of a company
Resolving issues proactively rather than reactively and creating an involvement that constantly pushes employees to be their best
Focusing on the more humane principles of leadership—gratitude, positivity, and recognition—that keep morale high
Holding teams and individuals accountable
Constantly recruiting talent (“building the bench”) rather than filling positions only when they are empty
Combining research, interviews, and inspiring stories with the lessons that have earned Jamail the respect of the world’s foremost corporations including CISCO, FedEx, Sprint, the U.S. Army, and State Farm; The Leadership Playbook will dominate the category for years to come.