Category Archives: Management

by Bradford Smart Great companies don’t just depend on strategies—they depend on people. But, half of all employment decisions result in a mis-hire: The wrong person ends up in the wrong job. Any mis-hire can be damaging and a key mis-hire can be disastrous. The Topgrading concept is designed to make certain that you have the very best opportunity to add ‘A Players’ to your team and avoid the high cost of mistakes.Topgrading works for companies large and small in any industry.

by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan A legendary CEO and a top consultant team up to unravel one of the biggest problems in business today: delivering results. Together they’ve combined their knowledge and experience on how to close the gap between what a company’s leaders want to achieve and actual results. The discipline of execution is an understanding of how to link together people, strategy, and operations, the three core processes of every business. Making these processes work together is the real

by Patrick Lencioni   In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni offers a leadership fable that is thought-provoking and instructive. Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions, which go to the very heart of why teams, even the best ones, often struggle: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive,

by Dr. Henry Cloud One of the most important abilities a leader can have is knowing when and how to let go when something, or someone isn’t working—an employee, a business relationship, a sacred cow, a losing product or service, a set of assumptions, a poor business model, or even an entire business. Letting go is essential for business success. Getting to the next level in business always requires ending something you are doing today, leaving it behind, and moving on. Necessary

by John Kotter In Leading Change, John Kotter provides an excellent roadmap for all leaders trying to orchestrate change throughout their organizations. He identifies the most common mistakes leaders and managers make in attempting to create change and offers an eight-step process to become adept at change: establishing a greater sense of urgency, creating the guiding coalition, developing a vision, communicating the change vision, empowering others to act, creating short-term wins, consolidating gains and producing even more change, and anchoring new approaches

by Gary Hamel and C K Prahalad This is one of the best books on strategy. Period. Competing for the Future offers a blueprint for what a company must be doing today if it is to exploit the opportunities of tomorrow. The traditional view of strategy is much too static. Hamel and Prahalad contend that smart organizations are able to reshape their industries, they are able to reinvent things and reconceptualize their industries in ways that create a different future. The traditional

by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman No matter how generous its pay or how renowned its training, the company that lacks effective managers will suffer. But the most effective managers seem to have little in common. They differ in sex, age, and race. They employ vastly different styles and focus on different goals. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They do not hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman

by EliyahuGoldratt and Jeff Cox The Goal is a story that revolves around saving a manufacturing plant, but the principles used to save it apply to every industry and every kind of business. The Goal contains an important insight, the Theory of Constraints. The theory says that every system, no matter how well it performs, has at least one constraint that limits its performance – this is the system’s “weakest link.” These are where bottlenecks occur that prevent an organization from maximizing

by Chip Heath and Dan Heath Switch is about making change happen, despite our tendency to fight it. Change management traditionally focuses on process. But the authors of Made to Stick combine psychology, sociology, management, and case studies, to tell stories of people and organizations who have successfully implemented significant changes—even when change is hard. The Heaths show that some of the most transformative managers follow a pattern of change. They argue that the trick to making things happen quickly on a

by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown Multipliers delivers a thought-provoking assessment of why some leaders drain capability and intelligence from their teams while others amplify it to produce better results. “Multipliers” are leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the intelligence and capabilities of the people around them. On the other hand, “diminishers” are the idea killers, the energy sappers, the diminishers of talent and commitment. Multipliers can have a positive and profitable effect on organizations—getting more done with fewer resources, developing