The Harvard Business Review Leader's Handbook


Book Description

The one primer you need to develop your leadership skills. Put aside all the overhyped new frameworks, the listicles, the "10 best things you need to succeed as a leader today." The critical leadership practices--the ones that will allow a leader to make the biggest impact over time--are well established. They're about how you create a vision and inspire others to follow it. How you make difficult strategic choices. How you lead innovation. How you get results. These fundamental skills are even more important today as organizations and teams become increasingly networked, virtual, agile, fast-moving, and socially conscious. In this comprehensive handbook, strategy and change experts Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville distill proven ideas and frameworks about leadership from Harvard Business Review, interviews with senior executives, and their own experience in the field--all to help rising leaders stand out and have a big impact. In the HBR Leader's Handbook you'll find: Concise explanations of proven leadership frameworks from Harvard Business Review contributors such as Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Porter In-depth case studies of senior leaders such as Jim Wolfensohn at the World Bank, Paula Kerger at PBS, Darren Walker at the Ford Foundation, and Jim Smith at Thomson Reuters Step-by-step guidance to help you understand and start implementing six core leadership practices: building a unifying vision, developing a strategy, getting great people on board, focusing on results, innovating for the future, and leading yourself




The Harvard Business Review Manager's Handbook


Book Description

The one primer you need to develop your managerial and leadership skills. Whether you’re a new manager or looking to have more influence in your current management role, the challenges you face come in all shapes and sizes—a direct report’s anxious questions, your boss’s last-minute assignment of an important presentation, or a blank business case staring you in the face. To reach your full potential in these situations, you need to master a new set of business and personal skills. Packed with step-by-step advice and wisdom from Harvard Business Review’s management archive, the HBR Manager’s Handbook provides best practices on topics from understanding key financial statements and the fundamentals of strategy to emotional intelligence and building your employees’ trust. The book’s brief sections allow you to home in quickly on the solutions you need right away—or take a deeper dive if you need more context. Keep this comprehensive guide with you throughout your career and be a more impactful leader in your organization. In the HBR Manager’s Handbook you’ll find: - Step-by-step guidance through common managerial tasks - Short sections and chapters that you can turn to quickly as a need arises - Self-assessments throughout - Exercises and templates to help you practice and apply the concepts in the book - Concise explanations of the latest research and thinking on important management skills from Harvard Business Review experts such as Dan Goleman, Clayton Christensen, John Kotter, and Michael Porter - Real-life stories from working managers - Recaps and action items at the end of each chapter that allow you to reinforce or review the ideas quickly The skills covered in the book include: - Transitioning into a leadership role - Building trust and credibility - Developing emotional intelligence - Becoming a person of influence - Developing yourself as a leader - Giving effective feedback - Leading teams - Fostering creativity - Mastering the basics of strategy - Learning to use financial tools - Developing a business case




Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook


Book Description

The one primer you need to launch, lead, and sponsor successful projects. We're now living in the project economy. The number of projects initiated in all sectors has skyrocketed, and project management skills have become essential for every leader and manager. Still, project failure rates remain extremely high. Why? Leaders oversee too many projects and have too little visibility into them. Project managers struggle to translate their hands-on, technical knowledge up to senior management. The result? Worthy projects are starved of time and resources and fail to deliver benefits, while too much investment goes into the wrong projects. To compete in the project economy, you need to close this gap. The HBR Project Management Handbook shows you how. In this comprehensive guide, project management expert Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez presents a new and simple framework that will increase any project's likelihood of success. Packed with case studies from many industries worldwide, it will teach you how to manage your organization's projects, strategic programs, and agile initiatives more effectively and push the best ones ahead to completion. Timeless yet forward-looking, this book will help you win in the project-driven world. In the HBR Project Management Handbook you'll find: Everything you need to know about project management in practical, nontechnical language A definitive taxonomy of project types, from product launches to digital transformations to megaprojects A road map for becoming an effective project leader and executive sponsor A new, simple, and universal project framework, the Project Canvas, that breaks down any project into essential building blocks that can be easily understood by all project stakeholders Original concepts and exclusive case studies from public- and private-sector organizations worldwide You'll learn: A common language for project managers and executives to run successful projects across your organization When to use agile, traditional, or hybrid methods in your projects The twelve principles of successful projects, including purpose, agility, and a focus on outcomes Techniques for selecting and advancing the best projects and managing a strategic and balanced project portfolio How today's projects will help address some of the most pressing global trends, including automation, sustainability, diversity, and crisis management Why project management needed to be reinvented and what the future holds HBR Handbooks provide ambitious professionals with the frameworks, advice, and tools they need to excel in their careers. With step-by-step guidance, time-honed best practices, and real-life stories, each comprehensive volume helps you to stand out from the pack—whatever your role.




Harvard Business Review Entrepreneur's Handbook


Book Description

The one primer you need to develop your entrepreneurial skills. Whether you're imagining your new business to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley, a pivotal B2B provider, or an anchor in your local community, the HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook is your essential resource for getting your company off the ground. Starting an independent new business is rife with both opportunity and risk. And as an entrepreneur, you're the one in charge: your actions can make or break your business. You need to know the tried-and-true fundamentals--from writing a business plan to getting your first loan. You also need to know the latest thinking on how to create an irresistible pitch deck, mitigate risk through experimentation, and develop unique opportunities through business model innovation. The HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook addresses these challenges and more with practical advice and wisdom from Harvard Business Review's archive. Keep this comprehensive guide with you throughout your startup's life--and increase your business's odds for success. In the HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook you'll find: Step-by-step guidance through the entrepreneurial process Concise explanations of the latest research and thinking on entrepreneurship from Harvard Business Review contributors such as Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman Time-honed best practices Stories of real companies, from Airbnb to eBay You'll learn: Which skills and characteristics make for the best entrepreneurs How to gauge potential opportunities The basics of business models and competitive strategy How to test your assumptions--before you build a whole business How to select the right legal structure for your company How to navigate funding options, from venture capital and angel investors to accelerators and crowdfunding How to develop sales and marketing programs for your venture What entrepreneurial leaders must do to build culture and set direction as the business keeps growing HBR Handbooks provide ambitious professionals with the frameworks, advice, and tools they need to excel in their careers. With step-by-step guidance, time-honed best practices, real-life stories, and concise explanations of research published in Harvard Business Review, each comprehensive volume helps you to stand out from the pack--whatever your role.




Harvard Business Review on Developing Leaders


Book Description

Developing Leaders Most organizations struggle with the question of leadership. How do you identify leaders in the making? How do you train them, taking into account their unique strengths and weaknesses? This collection of articles examines the ways in which managers and executives develop as leaders, and then helps readers apply successful tactics in real-life settings. Using innovative as well as time-honored approaches, this book guides readers through the challenges of leadership development.




John P. Kotter on what Leaders Really Do


Book Description

Widely acknowledged as the world's foremost authority on leadership, the author provides a collection of his acclaimed "Harvard Business Review" articles.




Return on Character


Book Description

Does the character of our leaders matter? You may think this question was answered long ago. Countless business authors and analysts have assured us that great leadership demands great character. Time and again, we’ve seen that truth play out, as once-thriving organizations falter and fail under the guidance of leaders behaving badly. Why, then, do so many executives remain skeptical about the true value of leadership character? A winning strategy and a sound business model are what really matter, they argue; character is just the icing on the cake. What’s been missing from this debate is hard evidence: data that shows not only that leadership character matters for organizational success, but how it matters; and concrete evidence that it leads to better business results. Now, in this groundbreaking book, respected leadership researcher, adviser, and author Fred Kiel offers that evidence—solid data that demonstrates the connection between character, leadership excellence, and organizational results. After seven years of rigorous research based on a landmark study of more than 100 CEOs and over 8,000 of their employees’ observations, Kiel’s findings show that leaders of strong character achieved up to five times the ROA for their organizations as did leaders of weak character. Return on Character goes on to reveal: • How leadership character is formed, how it creates value, and how that value spreads throughout the organization • How low-character leaders undermine the success of even the best business plans • How leaders at any level can develop the habits of strong character and “unlearn” the habits of poor character The book also provides a character-building methodology—step-by-step advice and techniques for assessing your own character habits and improving your performance and that of your organization. Return on Character provides the blueprint for building your own leadership character and creating a character-driven organization that achieves superior business results.




Total Leadership


Book Description

National Bestseller “Students talk about Stewart D. Friedman, a management professor at the Wharton School, with a mixture of earnest admiration, gratitude and rock star adoration.” —New York Times In this national bestseller, Stew Friedman gives you the tools you need to achieve “four-way wins”—improved performance in all domains of life: work, home, community, and self. Friedman, celebrated professor and founding director of the Wharton School’s Leadership Program and its Work/Life Integration Project, explains how three simple yet potent principles—be real, be whole, and be innovative—can help you, no matter what your age or what you do for work, become a better leader and have a richer life. In this engaging adaptation of his hands-on Wharton course, he offers step-by-step instruction to help you create positive, sustainable change in your world. This proven, programmatic method teaches you how to produce stronger results at work, find clearer purpose, feel less stressed, strengthen connections with the people who matter most to you, contribute further to important causes, and gain greater support for your vision of your future. If you’re ready to learn to lead in all parts of your life—this is the book for you. For a full array of Total Leadership tips and tools, visit totalleadership.org. Also look for Stew Friedman’s book, Leading the Life You Want, which builds on Total Leadership by profiling well-known leaders—from Bruce Springsteen to Michelle Obama—who exemplify its principles and demonstrate how success in your work is accomplished not at the expense of the rest of your life, but as the result of meaningful attachments to all its parts.




The Opposable Mind


Book Description

If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following best practice can help in some ways, it also poses a danger. By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you'll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking, creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions including: What are the causal relationships at work here? and What are the implied trade-offs? Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, and The Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.




HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership, Vol. 2 (with bonus article "The Focused Leader" By Daniel Goleman)


Book Description

Stay on top of your leadership game. Leadership isn't something you're born with or gifted as a reward for an abundance of charisma; true leadership stems from core skills that can be learned. Get more of the leadership ideas you want, from the authors you trust, with HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership (Vol. 2). We’ve combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you maximize your own and your organization's performance. With insights from leading experts including Michael D. Watkins, Herminia Ibarra, and Michael E. Porter, this book will inspire you to: Identify areas for personal growth Build trust with and among your employees Develop a more dynamic and sophisticated communication style Try out different leadership styles and behaviors to find the right approach for you--and your organization Transform yourself from a problem solver to an agenda setter Harness the power of connections Become an adaptive and strategic leader This collection of articles includes "Leadership Is a Conversation," by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind; "How Managers Become Leaders: The Seven Seismic Shifts of Perspective and Responsibility," by Michael D. Watkins; "Strategic Leadership: The Essential Skills," by Paul J.H. Schoemaker, Steve Krupp, and Samantha Howland; "The Authenticity Paradox," by Herminia Ibarra; "'Both/And' Leadership," by Wendy K. Smith, Marianne W. Lewis, and Michael L. Tushman; "Are You a Collaborative Leader?" by Herminia Ibarra and Morten T. Hansen; "Cross-Silo Leadership," by Tiziana Casciaro, Amy C. Edmondson, and Sujin Jang; "How CEOs Manage Time," by Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria; "The Best Leaders Are Great Teachers," by Sydney Finkelstein; "Nimble Leadership," by Deborah Ancona, Elaine Backman, and Kate Isaacs; and "The Focused Leader," by Daniel Goleman.