Career Leadership

Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar: Each was a master of war. Each had to look beyond the battlefield to decide whom to fight and why; to know what victory was and when to end the war; to determine how to bring stability to the lands he conquered. Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar had to be not only generals but statesmen. And yet each was a battlefield commander, a strategist, a leader of men - in short, a warrior.

Even the most successful people in the world experience setbacks. The secret is learning how to deal with them and make them work to our benefit. We can let failure sap our self-confidence and heighten our frustration, or we can stay true to our vision and embrace new opportunities. Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi has had to reinvent himself several times over, experiencing extraordinary success along with devastating failure.

Serving on a board is like having a second full-time job. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the 10 most important ones to help you address classic challenges such as increasing diversity, ensuring a culture that reflects company values, and providing strategic oversight while also addressing emerging issues such as shareholder activism, cybersecurity, and ever-shifting regulations.

In Put Happiness to Work, Karpinski draws on his deep experience at the intersection of business and psychology to lay out a step-by-step program that includes specific activities to enhance engagement and generate happiness at work. Utilizing existing work habits and meetings, these dynamic yet simple tools will hardwire effective changes into leaders' and employees' behavior, creating long-term, sustainable engagement.

Real critique has become a lost skill among collaborative teams today. Critique is intended to help teams strengthen their designs, products, and services, rather than be used to assert authority or push agendas under the guise of "feedback". In this practical guide, authors Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry teach you techniques, tools, and a framework for helping members of your design team give and receive critique.

The strength of any organization is determined by the quality of its managers. Want to be invaluable to your company? Just boost your management skills. When you discover what the most successful managers know, you'll unlock the secrets to turning even ordinary employees into extraordinary performers. Filled with proven techniques, this guide tells you how to bring out the best in your people - and hit new heights in your own career.

Great leaders of innovation know that creativity is not enough. They succeed not only on the basis of their ideas, but because they have the vision, reputation, and networks to win the backing needed to commercialize them. It turns out that this quality - called "innovation capital" - is measurably more important for innovation than just being creative. The authors have spent decades studying how people get great ideas (the subject of The Innovator's DNA) and how people test and develop those ideas (explored in The Innovator's Method).

If you want your customer service team to get creative about excellent customer service, this audiobook will do the job. An unforgettable true story about a young man with Down Syndrome who changes the culture of a grocery store.

Introverts may feel powerless in a world where extroverts seem to rule, but there’s more than one way to have some sway. As Jennifer Kahnweiler proves in this much-needed audiobook, introverts can be highly effective influencers when, instead of trying to act like extroverts, they use their natural strengths. Kahnweiler shows how you can use those strengths to challenge the status quo, provoke new ways of thinking, effect change, and inspire others to move forward.

Today's leaders are increasingly called upon to be coaches - to "psyche up" their employees and co-workers, to inspire teamwork, and to help their organization outperform the competition. At the same time, they need to inspire and maintain a work/ life balance with their families as well. In this exciting program, Coach Jim Harrick, head coach of the 1995 NCAA Champion UCLA Bruins, will show you how to maintain focus in all areas of life, and help you develop an attitude that will make you a winner.

In High Ten: An Inspiring Story About Building Great Team Culture, Martin Rooney draws from his extensive experience developing top-level teams around the world to help leaders of all kinds foster and sustain winning cultures. This engaging parable shows you that every business, sports team, and family has a culture.

Empathy is credited as a factor in improved relationships and even better product development. But while it's easy to say "just put yourself in someone else's shoes", the reality is that understanding the motivations and emotions of others often proves elusive. This collection of articles from HBR includes "What Is Empathy?" by Daniel Goleman; "Why Compassion Is a Better Managerial Tactic Than Toughness" by Emma Seppala; and much more.

Managing people is one of the most demanding yet career-enhancing and rewarding skills you can have. Skills for New Managers provides you with everything you need to excel as a manager from day one. From hiring productive employees to developing mentoring, leadership, and coaching skills, this fast-paced, easy-to-understand guide is your blueprint for managing your staff to success.

From Seth Godin, one of the world's most influential business thinkers and bestselling author of This is Marketing, comes an essential guide to thinking strategically in a complex, ever-changing world. This is Strategy is a modern classic that offers perspectives you'll find yourself returning to again and again. Rather than providing step-by-step formulas, Godin offers something more valuable: a new way of seeing and thinking about the challenges you face.

For over 500 years, The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli has been one of the most influential—and controversial—works ever written on leadership, politics, and human nature. This Complete Edition brings Machiavelli’s insights to today’s listener with a faithful line-by-line modernization that keeps the original tone, structure, and message fully intact. Designed to be both accessible and authentic, this edition allows modern listeners to engage directly with Machiavelli’s ideas—without the barriers of outdated language or dense phrasing.

It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day demands of your current job and lose sight of the big picture, but with a typical career spanning fifty years or more, you do so at your own peril. It's up to you to chart your own course to professional success. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the 10 most important ones to help you develop yourself, make the right career moves, navigate inevitable detours and disruptions, and turn your professional dreams into reality.

Most everyone has something they are passionate about. But without the ability to actually effect change...things just stay the same. In order to truly inspire change, we need to be able to effectively explain the problem, inspire people to join us, create a vision for the new reality, and then motivate people to take the actions that lead to the change. Inspiring change requires charisma - the ability to communicate a clear, visionary, and inspirational message that captivates and motivates an audience.

BE 2.0 is a new and improved version of the book that Jim Collins and Bill Lazier wrote years ago. In BE 2.0, Jim Collins honors his mentor, Bill Lazier, who passed away in 2005, and reexamines the original text of Beyond Entrepreneurship with his 2020 perspective. The book includes the original text of Beyond Entrepreneurship, as well as four new chapters and 15 new essays. BE 2.0 pulls together the key concepts across Collins' 30 years of research into one integrated framework called The Map.

Whether the application is business, sports, or the military, the Blue Angels have built a tested blueprint for taking human performance to unprecedented levels of excellence. Culture is everything in high performance, and with the right culture, amazing things are possible. High-Trust Leadership is a deep dive into the cultural blueprint that enables the Blue Angels to produce performance magic.

Hal Moore led his life by a set of principles - a code developed through years of experience, trial-and-error, and the study of leaders of every stripe. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Moore's life touched upon many historical events: the Occupation of Japan, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the refashioning of the US Army into an all-volunteer force. At each juncture, he learned critical lessons and had opportunities to affect change through measured responses.