I want to share with you something to make you immediately more efficient. This is the list of books I require my managers and clients to read before we start working together. This is the absolute minimum if we want to get serious.
These are the very best books that I have collected in the past 15 years on the topics of accelerating managers and leaders.
This is about accomplishing more with less, Now!
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan.
The book that shows how to get the job done and deliver results . . . whether you're running an entire company or in your first management job. Larry Bossidy, one of the world's most acclaimed CEOs, and Ram Charan, legendary advisor to senior executives and boards of directors, pooled their knowledge and experience into the one book on how to close the gap between results promised and results delivered.
The New One Minute Manager
Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
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 have all revolutionized the world.
The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey
Ken Blanchard
When a person goes to the boss with a problem and the boss agrees to do something about it, the monkey is off his back and onto the boss's. How can managers avoid these leaping monkeys? Here is priceless advice from three famous experts: how managers can meet their own priorities, give back other people's monkeys, and let them solve their own problems.
The One Minute Manager Builds High Performing Teams
Ken Blanchard
Ken Blanchard teams up with Donald Carew and Eunice Parisi-Carew to explain how all groups move through four stages of development on their way to becoming high performing teams: orientation, dissatisfaction, integration and production. The authors then show how a manager can help any group become effective quickly and with a minimum of stress.
Who Moved My Cheese?
John Spencer
Most people are fearful of change, both personal and professional, because they don't have any control over how or when it happens to them. Exploring a simple way to take the fear and anxiety out of managing the future, Who Moved My Cheese? can help you discover how to anticipate, acknowledge, and accept change in order to have a positive impact on your job, your relationships, and every aspect of your life.
Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions
John Kotter
This is a simple story about doing well under the stress and uncertainty of rapid change. It is based on John Kotter's pioneering research into the eight steps that can produce needed change in any sort of group. After finishing the story, you'll have a powerful framework for influencing your own team, no matter how big or small.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen R. Covey
Stephen R. Covey presents an approach to being effective in attaining goals by aligning oneself to what he calls "true north" principles of a character ethic that he presents as universal and timeless. Covey defines effectiveness as balancing obtaining desirable results with caring for that which produces the desirable results.
Emotional Intelligence
Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman's brilliant report from the frontiers of psychology and neuroscience offers startling new insight into our "two minds"—the rational and the emotional—and how they together shape our destiny. Goleman delineates the five crucial skills of emotional intelligence, and shows how they determine our success in relationships, work, and even our physical well-being. What emerges is an entirely new way to talk about being smart.
What Color Is Your Parachute?
Richard N. Bolles
It is one of the most highly regarded career advice books in print. The book recommends networking to find "the person with the authority to hire you", rather than sending out resumes in bulk, shotgun fashion. It also recommends carefully figuring out what one is best at and what one enjoys most, which (the author says) tend to coincide.
Coaching for Performance
John Whitmore
Featuring the influential GROW model, this book is the founding text of the coaching profession. It explains why enabling people to bring the best out of themselves is the key to driving productivity, growth, and engagement. A meaningful coaching culture has the potential to transform the relationship between organizations and employees and to put both on the path to long-term success.
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And if you are a really go-getter and these 10 books are not enough for you, you can also check my last book What Color Is Your Sky?. You will learn to uncover your core motivation and use it to keep moving forward, stirring your passion to reach your goals while creating balance by nurturing your soul.
Are you facing serious transformational challenges in your company? If you are, simply drop me a line at sky@herve.com.
