Book Reviews
Squirrel Inc.: A Fable of Leadership through Storytelling Stephen Denning Josey-Bass/A Wiley Imprint (2004) Nuts R Us Think about it. Who are among the greatest storytellers throughout history? My own list includes Homer, Plato, Chaucer, Aesop, Jesus, Dante, Boccaccio, the…
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Breaking Away: How Great Leaders Create Innovation That Drives Sustainable Growth – and Why Others Fail Jane Stevenson and Bilal Kaafarani McGraw-Hill (2011) How and why to create a “magic mix” of innovation leadership with innovation processes Year after year,…
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The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results George B. Bradt, Jayme A. Check, and Jorge E. Pedraza John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2009) “Finis origine pendet” (The end depends on…
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The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition Steven J. Spear McGraw-Hill (2009) The power of causal mechanisms that can drive a continuously self-improving system Clayton Christensen’s high praise of Steven Spear and this book…
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Harvard Business Review on Building Better Teams Various Contributors Harvard Business Review Press (2011) How and why some teams “shoot out the lights”…and most don’t Those who aspire to help create and then lead create teams that deliver high-impact results…
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The Great Workplace: How to Build It, How to Keep It, and Why It Matters Michael Burchell and Jennifer Robin Jossey-Bass/A Wiley Imprint (2011) This is a book I have eagerly awaited. Year after year, Fortune posts its annual list…
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The Wisdom of Bees: What the Hive Can Teach Business About Leadership, Efficiency, and Growth Michael O’Malley Portfolio/Penguin (2010) “What they have done has worked for them”…and can work for us as well. I read this book when it was…
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Harvard Business Review on Communicating Effectively Various Contributors Harvard Business Review Press (2011) How to customize the delivery of your presentation to almost any audience for “maximum persuasive power” Those who aspire to master several different high-impact communication styles will…
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The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future — Just Enough Vivek Ranadivé and Kevin Maney Crown Business (2011) The power of prediction-based talent: Intuition on “the other side of complexity” At least a century ago, Oliver Wendell…
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Thomas Jefferson: Author of America Christopher Hitchens Harper Perennial (2009) Who was behind “the opaque curtain”? About this time of year, I re-read brief biographies of my favorite U.S. Presidents such as this one, written by one of the most…
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