Suggested Reading

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• Necessary Endings

  The Employees, Businesses, And Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward

  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 Endings gives readers the tools they need to confront the brutal facts, say good-bye to what’s not working and move on.
  

• Leading Change

  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 in the culture. By improving their ability to change, organizations can increase their chances for success, both now and in the future. Every business leader can profit from Kotter’s thinking on change.
  

• Competing for the Future

  Breakthrough Strategies for Seizing Control of Your Industry and Creating Markets of Tomorrow

  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 view of strategy is almost like a Sun Tzu, Art of War, approach: How do we compete given the conditions of the battlefield? Hamel and Prahalad argue that you should change the rules, change the battlefield, and change the game.
  

• First, Break All the Rules

  What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

  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 of the Gallup Organization present the findings of their study of great managers across organizations of all types and sizes. Whatever their situations, the managers who ultimately became the focus of Gallup’s research were invariably those who excelled at turning each employee’s talent into performance. This book has important lessons for managers at every level of an organization.
  

• The Goal

  A Process of Ongoing Improvement

  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 its performance and reaching its goals. Constraints can involve people, supplies, information, equipment, or even policies, and they can be internal or external to an organization. A leader must continually focus on identifying and unlocking the primary constraint of the business. The Goal is a must-have book for any leader with a serious desire to drive real, organizational improvement and change.
  

• Switch

  How To Change When Change Is Hard

  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 large scale is to sync emotional thinking with rationale thinking. Switch is an entertaining read and makes its points with humor and diverting anecdotes.
  

• Multipliers

  How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

  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 and attracting top talent, and cultivating new ideas and energy by accessing all the intelligence that sits inside their organizations.
  

• Moneyball

  The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

  by Michael Lewis

  Most businesses measure the wrong things. Traditional financial statements tell something about where the business has been but they don’t reveal very much about the “why” or give much of an idea about where the business is going. Using his masterful storytelling skills, Lewis tells a captivating story of how one baseball team used data to become one of the most successful teams of its era, despite having the lowest payroll. “Moneyball” delivers an urgent business lesson about moving beyond the way things have always been done and challenging the conventions of your profession, your industry, and your own way of thinking—to find new ways to succeed. “Moneyball” is a good sports book, but an outstanding business book.