Here are 100 books that The Effective Executive fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have worked for some really toxic leaders in my lifetime. Over the decades, I’ve figured out that even well-intentioned people can be toxic leaders without knowing it. As a team and leadership performance coach for the past 15 years, my job has been to help leaders show up as people others want to follow; to help employees feel cared for, and as a result, be intrinsically motivated to care about their company’s mission. These books represent the figurative fuel in my tank for this work, and I hope you find them useful.
We’ve heard that trust is a foundational part of high-performing teams for decades, but no one does as good a job connecting the dots between a lack of trust and low performance as Lencioni does in this book.
I continually use his five dysfunctions model in reverse to spot toxic company cultures and then walk leaders backward to see how the root cause is a lack of trust. Once leaders see this with their own eyes, they can’t shake it, and they immediately start to see how detrimental it is when they make their organizations unstable with constant reorganizations and layoffs. An understanding of what’s in this book was foundational for me to help leaders who don’t want to be toxic.
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams. Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as…
I’ve said all along that the people I’ve surrounded myself with are the most important part of everything I do - my crew is what helps push me forward and supports me when things are tough. It’s a really important skill to have to continually do two things: better understand myself, through both outside learning and deepening self-awareness, and continue to learn about other people and strengthen all of the relationships I have, both inside and outside of business.
I loved reading this book so much the first time that I then re-read it every year while I was building CITYROW and gifted it to all employees. Every time I picked it up, I extracted new learnings, saw ideas differently, and came back to my company with deeper insights.
This book is both wide and deep, and I found it compelling time and time again, reflective of where I was in my building journey. I still reference key points in all my work today and credit it as a foundation for some of the reasons why I have embarked on the entrepreneurial journey.
________________________________ Can a good company become a great one? If so, how?
After a five-year research project, Jim Collins concludes that good to great can and does happen. In this book, he uncovers the underlying variables that enable any type of organisation to make the leap from good to great while other organisations remain only good. Rigorously supported by evidence, his findings are surprising - at times even shocking - to the modern mind.
Good to Great achieves a rare distinction: a management book full of vital ideas that reads as well as a fast-paced novel. It is widely regarded…
Dr. Larry Osborne is a leadership mentor and practitioner with a rare mix of both theological and leadership expertise. He's been a mentor and major influencer for many of the largest and fastest-growing churches in the US while providing leadership to North Coast Church as it grew from 125 to over 13,000 in weekend attendance.
The value of this book is not in advocating for leaderless organizations. It's in understanding the inherent power of decentralized leadership to foster greater innovation, powerfully respond to crisis, and continually morph in the face of rapidly changing culture and environments.
If you cut off a spider's head, it dies; if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world.
What's the hidden power behind the success of Wikipedia, craigslist, and Skype? What do eBay and General Electric have in common with the abolitionist and women's rights movements? What fundamental choice put General Motors and Toyota on vastly different paths?
Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom have discovered some unexpected answers,…
I've been blessed in my career, beginning as a 16-year-old, being an assistant manager at 17, a general manager at 20, and the face of the franchise at the age of 30 for over 16 years. This has led to me learning how to get people more motivated to perform their work than they ever thought possible when they accepted the position. I spent over 30 years literally “growing up” with this company and in this business, having been exposed to some of the best companies within their respective industries, learning how they source, on-board, train, and retain their team members, as well as some of the most influential motivational speakers throughout the world.
This book took our customer service performance in our company to levels we had never seen before. All of our leaders read this book and then the magic began.
The premise is that satisfied customers just are not good enough. They need to be “raving fans’ of us meaning, they actually become advocates of your business! This led to sales and traffic that exceeded our peers in all measurable ways while truly making our work more fun than we ever thought.
A straightforward and snappy guide to successful customer service from the author of the bestselling The One Minute Manager.
Raving Fans, in a nutshell, is the advice given to a new Area Manager on his first day - in an extraordinary business book that will help everyone, in every kind of organisation or business, deliver stunning customer service and achieve miraculous bottom-line results.
Raving Fans is written in the parable style of The One Minute Manager and uses a brilliantly simple and charming story to teach how to define a vision, learn what…
Having begun my career in publishing, I worked for many years as a management consultant and trainer; alongside that, I have written and published many books offering advice on management, marketing, and job skills, like the time management book shown above, a bestseller now in its sixth edition. I have always thought management often fails by overlooking the importance of issues rather than finding things difficult; I hope my business writing helps identify priorities and shows that the deployment of various techniques and skills can be manageable–and useful.
This is a short book, a revised version of another classic, and I like its focus on the fact that the only sensible definition of management is achieving results through other people.
This demands a constructive approach, constructive criticism, and development, helping people achieve excellent performance. It is sound common sense in an area so often overpowered and neglected in today’s hectic, time-poor world.
A revised edition of the timeless business classic—updated to help today’s readers succeed more quickly in a rapidly changing world.
For decades, The One Minute Manager® has helped millions achieve more successful professional and personal lives. While the principles it lays out are timeless, our world has changed drastically since the book’s publication. The exponential rise of technology, global flattening of markets, instant communication, and pressures on corporate workforces to do more with less—including resources, funding, and staff—have all revolutionized the world in which we live and work.
Now, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson have updated The One Minute Manger…
Having begun my career in publishing, I worked for many years as a management consultant and trainer; alongside that, I have written and published many books offering advice on management, marketing, and job skills, like the time management book shown above, a bestseller now in its sixth edition. I have always thought management often fails by overlooking the importance of issues rather than finding things difficult; I hope my business writing helps identify priorities and shows that the deployment of various techniques and skills can be manageable–and useful.
I loved this and found it both interesting and helpful when it first appeared, and I reckon anyone could still benefit from reading it now. Based on research across a range of industry sectors identifies what makes a manager and an organization successful and provides guidance about how action should be taken.
What I like about it is that once noted, its ideas seem like common sense (they are!) but are factors so easily missed or shortchanged in the hurley-burley of corporate life.
The "Greatest Business Book of All Time" (Bloomsbury UK), In Search of Excellence has long been a must-have for the boardroom, business school, and bedside table.
Based on a study of forty-three of America's best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, In Search of Excellence describes eight basic principles of management -- action-stimulating, people-oriented, profit-maximizing practices -- that made these organizations successful.
Joining the HarperBusiness Essentials series, this phenomenal bestseller features a new Authors' Note, and reintroduces these vital principles in an accessible and practical way for today's management reader.
Having begun my career in publishing, I worked for many years as a management consultant and trainer; alongside that, I have written and published many books offering advice on management, marketing, and job skills, like the time management book shown above, a bestseller now in its sixth edition. I have always thought management often fails by overlooking the importance of issues rather than finding things difficult; I hope my business writing helps identify priorities and shows that the deployment of various techniques and skills can be manageable–and useful.
Presentation is a skill that, love it or hate it, is necessary for so many in the corporate world, and many books are setting out how to go about it. This is different, and I love it because it is based on research and highlights not only what makes for a ‘good’ presentation but also what makes one truly persuasive.
What is more, I like it because it does it in a way that embraces the modern ways of PowerPoint, pitches, and a competitive world—no ‘death by PowerPoint’ here; quite the reverse.
This second edition has completely a new chapter on Web Presenting and links to several online seminars as well as a chapter on how to make your presentation content more memorable by using m62's Passive Mnemonic Processing techniques. The book illustrates its approach clearly and in detail: using real company examples and a series of 40 colour-images to show how such slides can work. Additionally, the book provides unique links to web sites where you can see more about this sort of presentation in action. Contents: Introduction, a new approach; Section one: Powerpoint; Section two: Messaging; Objective setting; Presentational intentions:…
Having begun my career in publishing, I worked for many years as a management consultant and trainer; alongside that, I have written and published many books offering advice on management, marketing, and job skills, like the time management book shown above, a bestseller now in its sixth edition. I have always thought management often fails by overlooking the importance of issues rather than finding things difficult; I hope my business writing helps identify priorities and shows that the deployment of various techniques and skills can be manageable–and useful.
I like this because you can easily pick from its one hundred separate sections. In a world where pressure on costs is so strident, it is easy to overlook ideas that might make a positive difference to any organization's financial status.
Many people in organizations suffer from what might be called a ‘numeracy shortfall’ and need some help in this area. This book is clear and understandable and could make the difference between profit and loss. Who would not like that?
Every company is now in the business of reducing costs wherever and whenever they can. No business owner or manager can avoid cost-cutting if they are to succeed, or indeed survive.
This book contains 100 great ideas to reduce and save costs in business organisations. Researched from leading companies around the world, each idea is described in a succinct way. You are then shown how to apply that idea to your own business situation. A simple formula which has the potential to reap great rewards.
After a career that took me from designer to design professor, I’ve spent the past decade leading user research practices for growing product organizations. I’m excited about user research because it positions us closer to the people we design for, and challenges us to capture and explain complex scenarios in service to them. Though there are many books that teach user research, my list of recommendations is meant to demonstrate why we research, how we make sense of what we learn, and where research might take us.
Authors Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen run consulting company ReD, where they put anthropologists, sociologists, economists, journalists, and designers together to deeply understand humans in service of their clients. In The Moment of Clarity, the authors share their methods and approach via rich case studies, including their impactful work supporting LEGO in better aligning its products to its customers.
Businesses need a new type of problem solving. Why? Because they are getting people wrong. Traditional problem-solving methods taught in business schools serve us well for some of the everyday challenges of business, but they tend to be ineffective with problems involving a high degree of uncertainty. Why? Because, more often than not, these tools are based on a flawed model of human behavior. And that flawed model is the invisible scaffolding that supports our surveys, our focus groups, our R&D, and much of our long-term strategic planning. In The Moment of Clarity, Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen examine the…
Everyone survives by selling something whether we wear the title or not. Selling has been my career, even before I was a salesperson. I started my career in engineering but quickly realised my passion was in developing business, not designing industrial ventilation systems. Helped by a boss who also saw I was better suited to roles other than engineering (he wasn’t so polite) I went on to enjoy a successful career spanning 4 decades working in Australian, Asian, and European markets that embraced all facets of sales and business development. Helped by great mentors and learning from the experience of others, I have endeavoured to give back by mentoring business owners, salespeople, and writing.
The internet delivers us a tsunami of information. Approximately 328.77 million terabytes of data are created each day – 60 times more than in 2010 and estimated to grow at 20% per year.
How can we make sense of this? What is valuable and what is not? What is real, what is fake?
Mardsbjerg argues that our fixation with data makes us lose touch with reality and that we need to be making sense of the world through deep, nuanced engagement with culture, language, and history.
A FINANCIAL TIMES BUSINESS BOOK OF THE MONTH (APRIL 2017) Humans have become subservient to algorithms. Every day brings a new Moneyball fix - a maths whiz who will crack open an industry with clean fact-based analysis rather than human intuition and experience. As a result, we have stopped thinking. Machines do it for us. Christian Madsbjerg argues that our fixation with data often masks stunning deficiencies, and the risks for humankind are enormous. Blind devotion to number crunching imperils our businesses, our educations, our governments, and our life savings. Too many companies have lost touch with the humanity of…
