Reinvent: A Leader’s Playbook for Serial Success By Fred Hassan
In “Reinvent,” renowned CEO and business leader Fred Hassan explains how to transform a struggling business into a raging success by reinventing the culture, attitude, and behaviors of organizations and people. Leaders who want to change cultures and individuals need a cool head, a clear vision, and a well-refined ability to inspire that change. Here, Hassan explains how a productive organizational culture leads to real success. The first part of the book focuses on how you, as a leader, can unleash your full powers by learning to be authentic, purposeful, and connected with your organization. The second part of the book focuses on groups, how to lead them, how to be a role model for the effort you expect, and how to keep winning and innovating. Taken together, these principles fuel smarter strategies, more effective execution, and better governance.
From Values to Action: The Four Principles of Values-Based Leadership by Harry M Jansen Kraemer
In this highly-anticipated book, Harry Kraemer argues that today’s business environment demands values-based leaders who, in “doing the right thing,” deliver outstanding and lasting results. The journey to becoming a values-based leader starts with self-reflection. He asks, “If you are not self-reflective, how can you know yourself? If you do not know yourself, how can you lead yourself? If you cannot lead yourself, how can you lead others?” Kraemer identifies self-reflection as the first of four principles that guide leaders to make choices that honour their values and candidly recounts how these principles helped him navigate some of the toughest challenges he faced in his career.
Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? by Seth Godin
In Seth Godin’s most inspiring book yet, he challenges readers to find the courage to treat their work as a form of art. Everyone knows that Icarus’s father made him wings and told him not to fly too close to the sun. But he ignored that warning and plunged to his doom. We’ve retold this myth, and many others like it, to generations of kids. All these stories have the same lesson: Play it safe. Obey your parents. Listen to the experts. It was the perfect propaganda for the industrial economy. What boss wouldn’t want employees to believe that obedience and conformity are the keys to success?
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by A G Lafley, Roger L Martin
Lafley, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble and one of the most successful business leaders of the last century, and Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, say most firms shy away from difficult strategic choices, settling instead for false approaches that can lead to irreversible blunders.
Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy by John Wood
The inspirational story of a former Microsoft executive’s quest to build libraries around the world and share the love of books, what’s happened since John Wood left Microsoft to change the world? Just ask six million kids in the poorest regions of Asia and Africa. In 1999, at the age of thirty-five, Wood quit a lucrative career to found the nonprofit Room to Read. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world,” he strived to bring the lessons of the corporate world to the nonprofit sector–and succeeded spectacularly.
