business strategy

Herding tigers: Be the leader that creative people need

Herding tigers: Be the leader that creative people need / Todd Henry
New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2018.  259 p.

The old adage that leading creative people is like herding cats is wrong. It’s more like herding tigers. Doing the work and leading the work are very different things. When you make the transition from maker to manager, you give ownership of projects to your team even though you could do them yourself better and faster. You’re juggling expectations from your manager, who wants consistent, predictable output from an inherently unpredictable creative process. And you’re managing the pushback from your team of brilliant, headstrong, and possibly overqualified creatives. Leading talented, creative people requires a different skill set than the one many management books offer. As a consultant to creative companies, Todd Henry knows firsthand what prevents creative leaders from guiding their teams to success, and in Herding Tigers he provides a bold new blueprint to help you be the leader your team needs. Learn to lead by influence instead of control. Discover how to create a stable culture that empowers your team to take bold creative risks. And learn how to fight to protect the time, energy, and resources they need to do their best work. Full of stories and practical advice, Herding Tigers will give you the confidence and the skills to foster an environment where clients, management, and employees have a product they can be proud of and a process that works.

Contents:
Introduction: How To Draw Darth Vader - A primer on the definition of good creative leadership.
1: What Creative People Need - Creative people need two things more than anything else: stability and challenge. Part I Your Mind-Set:
2: Stop Doing The Work - To create stability, shift your mind-set from doing the work to leading the work
3: They Broke It, You Bought It - To create freedom, shift your mind-set from control to influence and from personal to total accountability
4: Level Up - To create stability, you need to distance yourself (a bit) from your team.
5: Lead Brilliance - To challenge your team, you need to help people see those aspects of their abilities to which they are blind. Part II Your Mechanics:
6: Earn The Right - To provide stability, you must earn, manage, and strive to maintain your team’s trust.
7: Prune Proactively - To create stability, you have to actively grow a healthy culture.
8: Stay On Target - To challenge your team, boldly and effectively channel its collective attention.
9: Defend Their Space - To create stability, manage your team’s margin by aggressing protecting “white space”.
10: Be The Muse - To challenge your team members, push them outside of their comfort zone.
11: Fight Well - To create stability, recognize that conflict isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s a sign of a healthy and productive team.
12: Be A Leader Worth Following - Your greatest impact comes not from the work you do — it comes from changing lives, including your own.

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The power of little ideas: A third way to innovate for market success

The power of little ideas: A third way to innovate for market success / David Robertson with Kent Lineback
Boston, US: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017.  236 p.

Conventional wisdom today says that to survive, companies must move beyond incremental, sustaining innovation and invest in some form of radical innovation. "Disrupt yourself or be disrupted!" is the relentless message company leaders hear. The Power of Little Ideas argues there's a "third way" that is neither sustaining nor disruptive. This low-risk, high-reward strategy is an approach to innovation that all company leaders should understand so that they recognize it when their competitors practice it, and apply it when it will give them a competitive advantage.
This distinctive approach has three key elements:
- It consists of creating a family of complementary innovations around a product or service, all of which work together to make that product more appealing and competitive.
- The complementary innovations work together as a system to carry out a single strategy or purpose.
- Crucially, unlike disruptive or radical innovation, innovating around a key product does not change the central product in any fundamental way.
In this powerful, practical book, Wharton professor David Robertson illustrates how many well-known companies, including CarMax, GoPro, LEGO, Gatorade, Disney, USAA, Novo Nordisk, and many others, used this approach to stave off competitive threats and achieve great success. He outlines the organizational practices that unintentionally torpedo this approach to innovation in many companies and shows how organizations can overcome those challenges.

Aimed at leaders seeking strategies for sustained innovation, and at the quickly growing numbers of managers involved with creating new products, The Power of Little Ideas provides a logical, organic, and enduring third way to innovate.

 

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Excuse me: The survival guide to modern business etiquette

Excuse me: The survival guide to modern business etiquette / Rosanne J. Thomas
New York: Amacom, 2017. 269 p
.

Blending different generations, genders, and cultures brings energy and fresh perspectives to the workplace. But the flip side is an environment ripe for confusion and social blunders. Mix in increasingly open-plan workplaces and constant connectivity, and the chance that we'll unintentionally annoy or offend others increases exponentially.
Exactly what are the rules these days? Is it acceptable to text your boss at home? What is the polite way to ask a colleague to take a distracting conversation behind closed doors? What about the use of smartphones in meetings? Merging classic rules of behavior with new realities of modern business, Excuse Me spotlights dozens of puzzling situations, with suggestions for bridging divides. The book untangles the nuances of:
Meeting etiquette - Interview expectations - Proper office attire - Electronic manners - Privacy in tight spaces - Eye contact and nonverbal cues - Small talk - Business dining - Social media use - Working remotely and flexibly - And more.
While the youngest employees might seem unruly, the oldest can seem rigid. Good manners create an atmosphere of respect, and smooth the way for everyone to succeed

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Ethical leadership: Indian and European spiritual approaches

Ethical leadership: Indian and European spiritual approaches / Madhumita Chatterji, László Zsolnai eds.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 343 p.

This original contribution to business ethics brings together chapters by leading European and Indian scholars and practitioners. Addressing issues of human values, ethics, spirituality and leadership in business the authors aim to create a dialogue and interchange between Indian and European cultural traditions. Topics include spiritual orientations to business in Hindu, Buddhist and Christian traditions; the effect of spirituality upon contemporary leadership theories; sustainable business models in India and Europe and a comparison between Indian and European philosophies of leadership. In exploring what India and Europe can offer to one another in the development of ethical business leadership, Ethical Leadership aims to demonstrate ways to achieve sustainability, peace and well-being.

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The purpose economy: How your desire for impact, personal growth and community is changing the world

The purpose economy: How your desire for impact, personal growth and community is changing the world / Aaron Hurst
Boise: Elevate, 2014. 271 p.

A series of shifts are happening in our economy: Millennials are trading in conventional career paths to launch tech start-ups, start small businesses that are rooted in local communities, or freelance their expertise. We are sharing everything, from bikes and cars, to extra rooms in our homes. We now create, buy and sell handcrafted products in our local communities with ease.

Globally recognized entrepreneur, founder of Taproot Foundation and CEO of Imperative, Aaron Hurst, argues in his latest book that while these developments seem unrelated at first, taken together they reveal a powerful pattern that points topurposeas the new driver of the American economy. Like the Information Economy, which has driven innovation and economic growth until now, Hurst argues that our new economic era is driven by connecting people to their purpose. It's an economy where value lies in establishing purpose for employees and customers through serving needs greater than their own, enabling personal growth and building community. 

This book is at once a personal memoir of Aaron Hurst’s own awakening as a purpose driven entrepreneur, when he left a well-paying tech job in 2001 to launch Taproot, creating a pathway for millions of professionals and Fortune 500 companies to volunteer for nonprofits. It's also a blueprint for a new economic era that is transformingcompanies, markets and our careers to better serve people and the world. (https://elevatepub.com)

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Friend & Foe: When to cooperate, when to compete, and how to succeed at both

Friend and foe: When to cooperate, when to compete, and how to succeed at both / Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer
New York: Crown Business, 2015. 312 p.

What does it take to succeed? This question has fueled a long-running debate. Some have argued that humans are fundamentally competitive, and that pursuing self-interest is the best way to get ahead. Others claim that humans are born to cooperate and that we are most successful when we collaborate with others.

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The everything store

The economic socialisation of young peopleThe everything store / Brad Stone
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013. 372 p.


Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech's other elite innovators--Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg--Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.
THE EVERYTHING STORE will be the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.

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A leadership perspective on decision making

The economic socialisation of young peopleA leadership perspective on decision making / Selart, Marcus
Oslo: Cappelen, 2010. 232 p.


This book is concerned with helping you improve your approach to decision-making. The author examines judgement in a selection of managerial contexts and provides important understanding that can help you make better leadership decisions. This book also pinpoints the in-house politics of organisational decision-making. Drawing on the very latest research, it introduces practical techniques that show you how to analyse and develop your own decision-making style. It will help you to deliver sharp and insightful analyses of your business and develop effective solutions. In addition, it presents simple checklists that will give you vital insights throughout the decision-making process. Students and practitioners of leadership, management, and allied fields will find this book useful in order to understand and implement useful methods.

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