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Book for May 2012:
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
by Liz Wiseman
Are you a Multiplier or Diminisher?
In this highly practical book, leadership expert Liz Wiseman explores these two leadership styles, persuasively showing how Multipliers get more done with fewer resources by developing and attracting talent and cultivating new ideas and energy to drive organizational change and innovation.
All attendees of this book review session will be asked to take an online assessment to understand your leadership style. You are not obligated to share your style with others, but it will make the discussion period far more interesting if you do. Just saying!
Book for April 2012:
The Inside Advantage
by Robert Bloom
In “The Inside Advantage,” author Bob Bloom helps identify your company’s Brand Promise, which is the underlying strategy to your business. What it is NOT is a slogan! This Brand Promise delivers a unique experience to your Core Customer, who is a real human being that has needs, wants and pains that your product will resolve. In other words, it is the reason you are in business. Come learn from the tools that have been used successfully by startups and Fortune 500 companies. Bob Bloom was the CEO of advertising giant Publicis Worldwide, where he has created growth strategies for companies that have become global household names.
Book for March 2012:
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose
by Tony Tsieh
Tony Tsieh, CEO of Zappos, built not one, but two successful companies from scratch, adding an average of $100M per year of stockholder value. His #1 priority was to create and maintain a strong company culture, which has led to highly-engaged and happier employees...who happen to be wildly productive as well as customer service fanatics. If you want to find happiness and inspiration in work and life, come join us in reviewing the book: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose.
Book for February 2012:
What Got You Here, Won't Get You There
by Marshall Goldsmith
The Harvard Business Review asked Goldsmith, “What is the most common problem faced by executives you coach?” Inside the book he answers this question by discussing not only key beliefs of successful leaders, but also the behaviors that hold them back. Ironically it can be the behavior that helped create the success you enjoy today, but is annoying to your colleagues. Okay...maybe you are not annoying, it’s everybody else!
We guarantee that you will get an actionable insight to become a more effective leader, person or spouse, by the end of this session.
Marshall Goldsmith was named by Forbes as one of the top five most respected coaches and a top ten educator by the Wall Street Journal. His one-on-one coaching comes with a six-figure price tag.
Book for January 2012:
Great by Choice
by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatness—beating their industry indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen years—in environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control. The research team then contrasted these “10X companies” to a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly extreme environments.
The study results were full of provocative surprises. Such as:
- The best leaders were not more risk taking, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons; they were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.
- Innovation by itself turns out not to be the trump card in a chaotic and uncertain world; more important is the ability to scale innovation, to blend creativity with discipline.
- Following the belief that leading in a “fast world” always requires “fast decisions” and “fast action” is a good way to get killed.
- The great companies changed less in reaction to a radically changing world than the comparison companies.
Finally, in the last chapter, Collins and Hansen present their most provocative and original analysis: defining, quantifying, and studying the role of luck. The great companies and the leaders who built them were not luckier than the comparisons, but they did get a higher Return on Luck.
Book for December 2011:
Who: The A Method for Hiring
by Geoff Smart and Randy Street
Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what the Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs companies hundreds of thousands of dollars. The silver lining is that the "who" problems are easily preventable. Based on 1,300 interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs, the authors have created a process that has a 90% success rate in hiring "A" players.
Book for November 2011:
Blue Ocean Strategy
by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
Learn the Six Principles that tomorrow's leading companies will succeed with—not by battling competitors, but by creating “blue oceans” of uncontested market space for growth. Strategic moves termed “value innovation” create powerful leaps in value for both the firm and its buyers, rendering rivals obsolete and unleashing new demand. Examples of using this strategy are Cirque de Soleil and Southwest Airlines.
Book for October 2011:
Mastering the Rockefeller Habits
by Verne Harnish
“I invested in a company doing $7 million, instituted the Rockefeller Habits, and it went to $1.2 billion in 3 years. The tools work!”
Alan Rudy, CEO, Into Great Companies
Verne has created a practical and tool-driven framework for fast growing small and mid-sized businesses based on John D. Rockefeller's disciplined approach to business. The focus of the book is based on the Four Decisions that you must get right or else risk leaving substantial business on the table. One will be most critical to your specific business.
The book starts with 100+ testimonials from among the 3,000 business owners around the world who have successfully used the Rockefeller Habits.
Book for September 2011:
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
by Patrick Lencioni
Think of great teams that you admire or have participated with in the past. What makes them special and so wonderful to observe—or better yet to be part of? Lencioni breaks down in simple terms the challenges businesses face in creating great teams and how to solve them. From a personal perspective, Bob Shannon, our B3 facilitator, had the good fortune to work with a great team that went through the process described in this book. As he will recount in our meeting, the results were quite staggering.
Book for August 2011:
Leadership Lessons of the U.S. Navy SEALS
by Jeff Cannon
Imagine running a business where the end result was not Profit or Loss, but Life or Death. The Navy Seals have similar challenges to businesses; they must have a clear vision and plan, understand their core competencies, recruit and train the best people and be able to execute flawlessly as a team. Learn how Navy leadership created systems to make the Seals the elite fighting force in the world from a business perspective.
