Books about Leadership

Extremely well-researched and a great read. It attempts to answer the question: If you are not already a great company, where do you start? How do companies that are just getting along make the transition to great companies and outpace their competitors? The author and his team have used statistics from thousands of public companies to identify a handful of Good-to-Great companies. Using a set of comparison companies, the book outlines the necessary conditions for an organization to truly make the cut.

Tags: leadership business management

The techniques in this book are immortal. Dale Carnegie's book is very compelling 70 years later. The most important aspect of the book is that first and foremost, it is a book about sincerity and deep human values. Winning friends and influencing people comes first from genuine respect and caring for others. The book's techniques provide additional guidance in identifying blind spots in one's behavior that turn off people and create unnecessary friction.

Tags: leadership business ethics

The authors use the theories of innovation developed by Christensen to make predictions about various industries such as healthcare, aviation and education. While the specific predictions may or may not have direct meaning to one's work, they serve as examples of how the innovation theories (refer "The Innovator's Dilemma") can be used in a practical manner. The examples themselves are very fascinating.

Tags: leadership innovation

Wow! What a book! Christensen's insight that organizations cannot produce disruptive innovations to its existing products is both amazing and disturbing at the same time. The book explains how rational and proper behavior on the part of managers can prevent innovation and shows that technical and managerial incompetence does not necessarily lie behind failures of innovation. Reading this book shows how easily we can fall into the trap of blaming people for failures when, in reality, correct processes, proper management and effective people may still lead to bad results because of the underlying rules.

Tags: leadership innovation

I heard this book on CD, instead of reading it. The book explained many concepts that I was very unfamiliar with. Goldratt presents the material by asking questions and giving examples. He becomes quite animated at times. Overall, it gives a much greater understanding of the several constraints that surround business decisions. This should be mandatory reading for all those executives who are prone to making quick calls without considering all the ramifications to the organization as a whole.

Tags: leadership business management

The cover of this book shows a well-dressed executive standing at the top of a series of steps, which is floating on thin ice. If the executive takes another step, he will fall off the steps and into the water. I don't purport to know the author's intentions, but the image strikes me as asking: How do smart people who have been successful for years (climbed the steps to reach the top) take the next step to catastrophic decisions? Why do they ignore evidence that is directly in front of them?

Finkelstein's "Why Smart Executives Fail" is an extraordinary exercise that looks at several business failures and endeavors to find the causes of failure in them. Almost all the stories were major crises in the researched companies, including many that resulted in bankruptcies. The losses were truly catastrophic, in terms of shareholder wealth destroyed and damage caused to employees. The executives had control over staggering sums of money and the mistakes were equally spectacular. The stories encompass a wide array of businesses and over a time span of several decades.

When a business venture fails, most people arrive at trivial reasons such as that the executives were stupid or unmotivated or that they did not have the necessary resources or followers. The author debunks such myths by showing obviously smart and inspired executives who had all the resources in the world to commit the mistakes they did. The author breaks down the book into three sections - The mistakes that were committed, the causes of failure and the lessons that can be learnt from those errors.

...Continued

Tags: leadership

It provides some good insights into what the successful habits of a great and visionary company are. I would rate it less than Good to Great, from the same author, because of the lack of detail and criteria for selecting companies.

Tags: leadership business management

One of the great management books of the 1980s, it is still very relevant today. It has the same subject matter as the later Jim Collins books "Built to Last" and "Good to Great". This book is different in that it discusses management theory, the Japanese threat and relies more on qualitative analysis. I liked the concepts discussed in "Three Pillars for the Structure of the Eighties" - many of these ideas are meaningful even in the current faster-paced global economy.

Tags: leadership business management

Fundamental shifts in the business environment could mean extinction of your company. Andy explains the story of how Intel weathered those storms. To understand what a Strategic Inflection Point means, read this book.

Tags: leadership

This is a series of audio recordings each handling a different aspect of business leadership. The last but one recording is a forum where Peters answers various questions based on his previous talks. Once again, everything he says is logical and makes perfect good sense. The recording uses examples of some companies who were excellent at the time, but later faltered, but overall is well presented with strong ideas.

Tags: leadership

Filled with lots of interesting examples and stories, Marcus Buckingham talks about the most important thing that one needs to know about great managing, about great leadership and about sustained individual success. He talks about some interesting concepts such as the common fears of people, the different styles of learning and biological limitations on learning. The ideas expressed in the book are very simple and, on the surface, easy to follow. The only weakness of the book is that it doesn't offer too much evidence, especially in the case of sustained individual success.

Tags: leadership management

"The Prince" is an all-time reviled book and the term "Machiavellian" is closely associated with evil and cunning. But read it and you will find that it is astonishingly relevant to our times, especially world politics and business competition. Machiavelli became notorious because he put on paper what many people actually think and he put his focus on the ends instead of the means. There is evil in this world and people exhibit selfish, ungrateful and destructive behavior. For someone to succeed as a leader in the real world, it is necessary to expect and prepare for it. Modern issues like the Iraq War and Business Outsourcing can be analyzed through the lens of this book and it is interesting to see what answers they reveal. The only minus of this book is its use of long-forgotten examples from the times of the author. You cannot fault the author for doing that, of course, as he wouldn't have known that centuries later, people would be still be reading him.

Tags: leadership politics ethics

This narrative provides a great view into the philosophy and management at Toyota. The long-term thinking and the ideas that shape the creativity and manufacturing process at Toyota is very different from Corporate America. Toyota is out to conquer the world, but not at the expense of quality or the right process. People may not agree with the decade-long nature of their growth, but they cannot argue with how Toyota has shaped the industry. A great company and a book that shows how it became great.

Tags: leadership business management

Tom Peters makes a good statement when he says that most of the old management theory makes very little sense today because they belonged to a time when change was not so rapid. In this book, he provides various prescriptions for survival of the corporation. Most of what he says is basic common sense, yet it is amazing how many companies don't follow them. The only blemishes are that the book is a little outdated (written way back in 1988) and also has some minor inconsistencies with regard to resource allocation issues.

Tags: leadership

This is a book for successful executives who find themselves handicapped by personality defects that arise due to their very success. The author, Marshall Goldsmith, is a famous executive coach who explains the various types of personality problems that afflicts top business leaders and the ways to identify and rectify such problems. A very useful manual for managers in any company.

Tags: business leadership

This is a follow-up from Jim Collins "Good To Great". It is a very short monograph explaining how the topics in "Good to Great" applies to non-profit organizations. The book contains some very good insights into the motivations and constraints in the social sectors, especially the lack of "hire-and-fire" capability. A good read.

Tags: business management leadership

Another book with some good points about servant leadership.

Tags: leadership

This book has inspired many generals and business people. One does need to spend time interpreting the ideas in the book and relating to daily experience. Unlike a modern book, it does not go into explaining its edicts. Only some of the ideas are really applicable to business dealing with competition.

Tags: leadership politics

I am not a great fan of parables and stories, because they can be easily manipulated to suit one's viewpoint. However I find Lencioni's disciplines very consistent with my personal experiences in organizational behavior. The disciplines and the details mentioned can serve as a good guide for upper level management in establishing the right foundation to move the company forward.

Tags: leadership

This explains the concept of the servant leader. The ideas are presented in an easy and practical manner.

Tags: leadership

Some good points here and there, but generally a big boring tome

Tags: leadership

Call me a heartless bastard, but Randy Pausch's book did not bring forth the emotions of nostalgia and heartbreak that I thought it would. I feel the problem with the book is its heavy emphasis on process: how Randy came to deliver the Last Lecture. The behavior of his wife comes up looking selfish instead of caring. And this affects the rest of the book.

In any case, I have very mixed feelings about observing death in progress. On one hand, a person who knows that he is at death's doorstep and talks about his greatest moments and dreams is a celebration of life and something very special. At the same time, death is tragic. To see a loved someone fade away is the most devastating thing for anyone. Countless movies, some of them quite popular, romanticize such deaths. I suppose they offer catharsis to some, but to me, they offer false hope and wistfulness.



Tags: leadership

Very corny and condescending. However, it does have some good points summarized in the last pages. Go to the library and read them instead of buying this book.

Tags: leadership

The ideals explained in this book are good, but overall this is not a very exciting book. Personal stories make it difficult not to treat the book as biased.

Tags: leadership