Here are our top picks for the best leadership and business growth books for June 2015:
Holacracy is a revolutionary management system that redefines management and turns everyone into a leader.
Holacracy distributes authority and decision-making throughout an organization, and defines people not by hierarchy and titles, but by roles. Holacracy creates organizations that are fast, agile, and that succeed by pursuing their purpose, not following a dated and artificial plan.
This isn’t anarchy – it’s quite the opposite. When you start to follow Holacracy, you learn to create new structures and ways of making decisions that empower the people who know the most about the work you do: your frontline colleagues. Some of the many champions of Holacracy include Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com (author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Delivering Happiness), Evan Williams (co-founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium), and David Allen.
Invisibles: Celebrating The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Promotion by David Zweig
An inspiring look at the hidden stars in every field who perform essential work without recognition
In a culture where so many strive for praise and glory, what kind of person finds the greatest reward in anonymous work? Expanding from his acclaimed Atlantic article, “What Do Fact-Checkers and Anesthesiologists Have in Common?” David Zweig explores what we can all learn from a modest group he calls “Invisibles.” Their careers require expertise, skill, and dedication, yet they receive little or no public credit. And that’s just fine with them.
Zweig met with a wide range of Invisibles to discover first hand what motivates them and how they define success and satisfaction. His fascinating subjects include: * a virtuoso cinematographer for major films. * the lead engineer on some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers. * a high-end perfume maker. * an elite interpreter at the United Nations.
Despite the diversity of their careers, Zweig found that all Invisibles embody the same core traits. And he shows why the rest of us might be more fulfilled if we followed their example.
At David Usher’s company, CloudID Creativity Labs, there is a sign on the wall that reads: “Dream big, let the elephants run!” The words are a reminder for us to hold a place in our minds for creativity, where big ideas can form and our imagination can run free. Based on his wildly popular speaking engagements, Let the Elephants Run shows us how to reignite creativity whether in the head office, the home office or the artist’s studio.
Usher believes creativity is in our DNA; it’s in everyone, not just the creative class. We all start our lives as creative beings but for many that spark becomes lost over time. How do we jump-start our creative process as adults? What does it means to be a creative person? How do we follow through with our ideas and turn them into tangible outcomes?
Usher empowers readers to achieve more “aha” moments through two cornerstone principles of creativity: freedom and structure. Using a mix of personal anecdotes and professional examples from the worlds of industry, technology, science, music and art, he shows us that creativity is not magic; it is a learnable skill that any person or business can master. The dynamic full-colour design includes photographs, artwork and illustrations, as well as action pages to help readers start cultivating the habit of documenting their ideas for future execution.
Let the Elephants Run is an essential guidebook to reconnecting with our imaginations and nurturing our creativity in accessible and productive ways.
What do the best leaders have in common? As president of MAP, John Manning should know. MAP has helped tens of thousands of top executives accelerate their leadership and management performance. Manning says the answer is one word: discipline. But for Manning, discipline has a very specific meaning.
All leaders have scores of things they could do. But a disciplined leader is one who identifies and focuses on the Vital Few: the 20 percent of activities that will drive 80 percent of the results. And the results that are most important are those tied to the organization’s most precious asset: its people.
The Disciplined Leader offers fifty-two succinct lessons to help you home in on your own Vital Few in three critical areas: leading yourself, leading your team, and leading your organization. Each lesson comes with recommended tactics and practical “Take Action!” tips for implementing it, so there are literally hundreds of pieces of must-know, time-tested advice here. The chapters are self-contained, so you can read them in any order and come back to the ones that resonate with you—your own Vital Few! This is a hands-on, nuts-and-bolts guide to leadership practice that’s built to inspire action, drive change, and achieve results.
ghSMART, the bestselling team behind Who: The A Method for Hiring, returns with a breakthrough formula for how the best leaders and teams deliver results. “ghSMART is the world’s top firm for helping leaders hire talented teams and run them at full power. Nothing is more important.”—Marshall Goldsmith, bestselling author of Mojo and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There “The most useful book about leadership.” That is what we hope you and your team will say after finishing Power Score. Is your team running at full power?
Only 10 percent of leaders run their teams at full power.
The formula you are about to learn is based on the most extensive research of its kind, spanning more than 15,000 careers with over 9 million data points. The idea has been battle-tested for more than two decades by leaders in every major industry. It works.
Successful leadership starts with three key questions:
1. Priorities—Do we have the right priorities? (Only 24 percent of leaders do.) 2. Who—Do we have the right people on the team? (Only 14 percent of leaders do.) 3. Relationships—Do we have the right relationships that deliver results? (Only 47 percent of leaders do.)
Learn how to calculate your team’s Power Score, and how to improve each of the three key areas of leadership. Learn what to do, and what not do, from compelling statistics and inspiring stories of those leaders who have succeeded and those who have failed.
With the exception of sleep, humans spend more of their lifetimes on work than any other activity. It is central to our economy, society, and the family. It underpins our finances and our sense of meaning in life. Given the overriding importance of work, we need to recognize a profound transformation in the nature of work that is significantly altering lives: the incoming tidal wave of shadow work.
Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations. It has slipped into our routines stealthily; most of us do not realize how much of it we are already doing, even as we pump our own gas, scan and bag our own groceries, execute our own stock trades, and build our own unassembled furniture. But its presence is unmistakable, and its effects far-reaching.
Fueled by the twin forces of technology and skyrocketing personnel costs, shadow work has taken a foothold in our society. Lambert terms its prevalence as “middle-class serfdom,” and examines its sources in the invasion of robotics, the democratization of expertise, and new demands on individuals at all levels of society. The end result? A more personalized form of consumption, a great social leveling (pedigrees don’t help with shadow work!), and the weakening of communities as robotics reduce daily human interaction.
Shadow Work offers a field guide to this new phenomenon. It shines a light on these trends now so prevalent in our daily lives and, more importantly, offers valuable insight into how to counter their effects. It will be essential reading to anyone seeking to understand how their day got so full—and how to deal with the ubiquitous shadow work that surrounds them.
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