Lead By Example by John Baldoni

I have just finished reading this book. I found the book interesting and educative as it provides insights on many facets of leadership.

In summary, effective leadership depends upon the ability to inspire a team to peak performance.

Lead by Example offers managers at every level advice on developing the character traits, attitudes, strategies, and actions that win the respect of teams.

The source of power behind great leadership is great character, and successful leaders focus on always setting the right example for their teams, from crisis management and relationship-building, to accountability and self-assessment.

By following the author John Baldoni’s 50 key points, leaders can work on building these essential skills and creating a dynamic professional image that benefits the team, the company, and ultimately themselves.

This a book you need in your library.

Happy reading...

The Attitude of Leadership

When I read this book I was literally taken to a higher level in my thinking and approach to leadership. The Attitude of Leadership is not a bunch of academic theories or hot new leadership techniques, it a book of timeless principles that anyone can use to become a more effective leader.

Hardly abstract, these principles are based on the real experiences of successful, inspirational, and motivational business leaders who make tough but necessary decisions every single day.

The Attitude of Leadership holds up a mirror to let you see your own leadership skills; offers inspired advice from other leaders on what works and what doesn’t; and helps you improve your ability to positively influence others. Use it to develop your skills as a leader and discover a whole new world of professional and personal fulfillment.

This book will help you measure your own effectiveness as a leader and provide practical guidance on applying these principles in your professional and even personal lives. You definitely need this book in your personal library.

To grab a copy click here: Amazon books.

To your success

Exective Warfare - By David D'Alessandro

I just finished reading a very exciting book on leadership by David D'Alessandro. It's not enough anymore to be smart, hard-working, and able to show results – because nowadays everybody is smart, hard-working, and able to show results. What really sets you apart are the relationships you build with people of influence. These people can include your peers, your employees, your organization's directors, reporters, vendors, and regulators – as well as the people directly above you in the organizational hierarchy. In senior management, you no longer answer to just one boss. This book will tell you how to lead all your many bosses to the inevitable conclusion that you and you alone have what it takes to run the show. In his bestsellers “Brand Warfare” and “Career Warfare”, author David D'Alessandro offered sharp advice for building a brand and building a career. Now “Executive Warfare” is the advanced class for the truly ambitious. It will teach you what it takes to rise to the top – and to do the even harder thing, which is to survive there.There is now a hazy matrix of hundreds of bosses both inside and outside the office, any one of whom can stop you cold or give you a tremendous push forward.

Attitude, Risk, and Luck: To rise, you may have to broaden your horizons, and you may have to look for an employer who will allow you to broaden them. You’ll also need three things to make the most of the chances you are given: the right attitude, a willingness to take calculated risks, and dumb luck. Attitude: It’s incredibly important to get your own head in the game if you intend to rise. If you are bossed around by your own greed, arrogance, or childish lack of discipline, you will give people reason to doubt you, and you will undermine yourself. Risk: One of the most significant attitude adjustments you will have to make as you move into higher management is your attitude toward risks. Higher management is all about handling risks intelligently and in a calculated fashion. Luck: There is no such thing in this world as a pure meritocracy. Nobody gets to the top without being lucky. Luck happens to the most deserving of people and some of the most undeserving.Not even the most powerful or ambitious person can force lighting to strike. But you can maneuver yourself into a position where it’s more likely you strike. Figure out how to stand tall in an open field as soon as you can. Bosses: The first rule of your relationship with your boss is to understand that it’s a business transaction. Most of the time, they are merely the major obstacle standing between you and the prize. Love them or hate them, what you really want is to get beyond them. If you are willing to give the boss the truth, you’re probably going to engage in some spirited debate with your boss as part of the decision-making process. This leads to the second thing you need to do to be a valuable instrument: Understand that once the decision is made, even if you don’t agree with it and have argued against it, you must drop your opposition and execute it to the best of your abilities. It also is helpful to understand something beyond the immediate goal. Be eager to always want to know what your boss’ next move is going to be. The fourth thing you have to do is to assure the boss that you are both loyal and discreet. No matter how incompetent or unpleasant he may be, never tell stories about your boss. Never make the boss feel betrayed – unless, of course, you are ready to grab the boss’ job. The new world is more analytical, more numbers-focused, more aggressive, more skeptical, and more unforgiving than ever before. You have to be effective in this world to make it to the top – but the real stand-out candidates will be the amateur psychologists, the humanists, and the humorists. If you want to rise, you have to demonstrate leadership to many different audiences. These include the people above and below you in the organizational hierarchy, the people who are competing with you for the next job and those resentful because they cannot compete for it, the outsiders and insiders and shareholders and donors and disinterested observers only looking for a juicy story to alleviate the tedium. You will never convince all these different audiences to trust you if you don’t have a very strong sense of yourself and a good idea of what integrity is. But you also have to listen to all these bosses, think about them, and try to understand their agendas. In today’s world, you have to be alert to win. This book is a must have in your library. To your sucess!!!!!

Jack Welch - Winning

I have just finished reading a book authored none other than the don of leadership himself Mr Jack Welch formerly CEO of General Electric.Welch has written several books since he stepped down from the CEO position at GE. Most of his books have focused on leadership, management and CEOing one of the biggest and most complex corporations in the world. In Winning, Welch talks about his formula for successful management on all it’s aspects: hiring, firing, prioritization, mergers and acquisitions, dealing with change, work life balance, budgeting, six sigma, and dealing with a bad boss. I have sumarised the book in 7 key topics for easy reading.

Making Managers Lead

Welch had a seven-point program for management: (1) Develop a vision for the business; (2) Change the culture to achieve the vision; (3) Flatten the organization; (4) Eliminate bureaucracy; (5) Empower individuals; (6) Raise quality; and (7) Eliminate boundaries. The difference between a leader and a manager is likened to that of a general and an officer down the line. A leader’s job is to allocate resources available (people and money) rigorously in order to generate optimum results. The results, in turn, will be gained under the “management” of the “officers”. The role of a manager is not to spread resources out evenly (to Welch, this is bureaucracy) but to make dynamic choices.

Controlling Bureaucracy. Welch waged a war on bureaucracy. He removed layers upon layers of heads who were, according to him, harmful and whose roles where vague, who slowed decision-making, blurred responsibility, and created undoable jobs. 

Sharing Information. Welch believed in the power of sharing information. He uses meetings and committees not as a form of control but as his most powerful management tool. The critical sessions are what he called Corporate Executive Council (CEC) which is attended by the company’s top executives and where he checks on progress, and exchanges ideas and information. The leaders in these sessions shared their lessons of successes and failures, transferred new ideas. 

Pursuing Best Practices. The principle of “best practices” is also deeply rooted in Welch’s philosophy. Welch uses these regular meetings to share and publicize achievements of other groups and the methodology behind them. The decision to adopt these practices, however, is left to the individual businesses and their leaders.

Delegating Responsibility. Welch’s leadership theory depends heavily on the power of delegation. Welch, however, does not just relinquish all power to good people. He balances hands-off management – giving his business heads full autonomy and the power of decision – with hands-on leadership. He keeps his “direct reports” on their toes by the unpredictability of his interventions in sometimes, lesser matters. 

Exceeding Commitments. Welch leads by having clearly setout goals for productivity, inventory turns, quality, working capital, customer satisfaction, and so on. These goals are treated as rock-solid commitments. As Welch believes in the survival of the fittest, the meetings become jungles where the combatant who comes out top in exceeding commitments wins.

Winning Hearts and Minds. Welch saw the liberation and empowerment of middle managers as the key to productivity gains. In order to win them over, Welch recipe was as follows: (1) Free managers to manage – and to rise; (2) Defeat bureaucracy and rigidity; (3) Generate and use new ideas; (4) Empower workers to flourish and grow. In addition, Welch believes leadership must be personal. Nobody at GE gets a formal letter from him – it comes in his own handwriting and rewards are always accompanied by frank, face-to-face evaluations. The rewards were tremendous as long as performance matched and exceeded expectations. 

Knowing the People. Welch’s greatest pride is in his ability to find and nurture highly able managers. To Welch, these people must possess what he describes as “E to the fourth power” where the “E” stands for Energy, Energizing others, competitive Edge and Execution. A leader should really get to know the top people in the organization.

 Looking to the Future. Toughness is an essential element in the leadership that Welch practices and admires. The demands include the stipulation that senior executives should strive to develop their own excellent replacements. The ultimate test of a leader is not what happens during his or her leadership – but what follows after he or she has departed. Welch’s ideas about his own successor, therefore, sounded much like a self-portrait. Among the characteristics are: Incredible energy, Ability to excite others, Ability to define a vision, Finding change fun and not paralyzing, Feeling comfortable in Delhi or Denver, Ability to talk to all kinds of people.

To your Success