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New York Times best-selling author and expert on leadership John C. Maxwell explores the concept that success is really just a frame of mind. Good thinking. It's the one thing all successful people have in common. People who achieve their dreams understand the critical relationship between their level of thinking and their level of progress--and they know that when thinking is limited, so is potential. Now, John C. Maxwell explores this idea and identifies the specific skills people need to make their potential for success explode into results. From focused and creative thinking to thinking of the big picture or the bottom line, he provides examples of effective thinking for every situation. This book doesn't tell readers what to think, it teaches them how to think. After all, success is as simple as changing your mind.
Servant leadership is leadership the right way—a better way of being a manager and part of organizational life. Servant leadership will produce fulfilling emotional, psychological, and spiritual rewards for everyone involved. It will enhance productivity, encourage creativity, and benefit the bottom line.
In The Servant Leader, top-selling author, former Fortune 500 executive, and business consultant James A. Autry shows you how to remain true to the servant leadership model when handling day-to-day and long-term management situations. You'll learn how to manage with respect and honesty and how to empower employees to achieve new levels of satisfaction. Plus, you'll learn why servant leadership can be the guiding light to becoming the kind of leader and person you want to be. You'll discover how to:
·Maintain your spiritual focus while dealing with such challenging issues as firing, harassment, substance abuse, and performance problems
·Provide guidance during conflict and crisis
·Assure your continued growth and progress as a leader
·Train managers in the principles of servant leadership
·Transform a company with morale problems into a great place to work
·And more
Real leadership begins on the inside with your own commitment to inspire the best in others. But it's one thing to make the commitment; it's quite another to develop the skills to make that happen. If you are an executive, a manager, or someone who aspires to be in a leadership role, you will find the servant leadership philosophy to be a valuable, refreshing, and rewarding approach to leading others.
Twenty-five years ago Robert Greenleaf published these prophetic essays on what he coined servant leadership, a practical philosophy that replaces traditional autocratic leadership with a holistic, ethical approach. This highly influential book has been embraced by cutting edge management everywhere. Yet in these days of Enron and what VISA CEO Dee Hock calls our "era of massive institutional failure," Greenleaf's seminal work must reach the mainstream now more than ever. Servant Leadership helps leaders find their true power and moral authority to lead. It helps those served become healthier, wiser, freer, and more autonomous. This book encourages collaboration, trust, listening, and empowerment. It offers long-lasting change, not a temporary fix and extends beyond business for leaders of all types of groups.
Many business authorities have touted creativity and habitual renewal as integral to corporate longevity and viability, but few have the practical experience and insight of Mauzy and Harriman, who have spent 25 years consulting, with a focus on corporate creativity. Although creativity often cuts across the grain of old-fashioned corporate values, it is essential to success, even survival, particularly in a time when "tomorrow, with all its surprises, comes more relentlessly and more quickly than ever before." And the authors aren't just talking about targeted, sporadic creativity (e.g., breakthrough products and Super Bowl ads). They contend that organizations need to "nurture and apply creativity throughout their operations" and "be creative at all times, in all areas, in all activities" in order achieve "systematic creativity," a state in which creativity becomes everyone's responsibility. Not surprisingly, Mauzy and Harriman proclaim there's no one set formula for maximizing creativity, but they do identify (and explore) "four critical dynamics" that contribute to personal and organizational creativity. With real-life examples, specific suggestions and well-reasoned advice, this book should help any forward-thinking organization that wants to get ahead.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Change can be a blessing or a curse, depending on your perspective. The message of Who Moved My Cheese? is that all can come to see it as a blessing, if they understand the nature of cheese and the role it plays in their lives. Who Moved My Cheese? is a parable that takes place in a maze. Four beings live in that maze: Sniff and Scurry are mice--nonanalytical and nonjudgmental, they just want cheese and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it. Hem and Haw are "littlepeople," mouse-size humans who have an entirely different relationship with cheese. It's not just sustenance to them; it's their self-image. Their lives and belief systems are built around the cheese they've found. Most of us reading the story will see the cheese as something related to our livelihoods--our jobs, our career paths, the industries we work in--although it can stand for anything, from health to relationships. The point of the story is that we have to be alert to changes in the cheese, and be prepared to go running off in search of new sources of cheese when the cheese we have runs out.
A quick read because the concepts it describes are simple yet powerful. "The One Minute Manager" has evolved into a management classic since its first edition in 1981. Managers will take three precepts from this book: Efficient Goal Setting with employees, Praise, and Reprimands. In other words, make sure your people know precisely what they are to do, and then give them feedback whether they meet those expectations or not. That's it. Simple and effective. It takes an hour to read "The One Minute Manager", consider it an investment.
