Systems Leadership

Today’s 21st-century leaders face tremendous pressure in an increasingly complex and fast-changing world, where traditional leadership models have become obsolete. To transform and transcend these challenges a new type of leadership is essential. The solution? Systems Inspired Leadership (SIL): a powerful alternative for innovative leaders. Instead of an outmoded and ineffective top-down, leader-knows-all style that results in stress, pressure, and anxiety, SIL offers a fresh proven approach for achieving optimal results for your organization.

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international best seller, Limits to Growth - the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet - Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem-solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world....

Whether you're imagining your new business to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley, a pivotal B2B provider, or an anchor in your local community, the Harvard Business Review Entrepreneur's Handbook is your essential resource for getting your company off the ground. Starting an independent new business is rife with both opportunity and risk. And as an entrepreneur, you're the one in charge: Your actions can make or break your business. You need to know the tried-and-true fundamentals - from writing a business plan to getting your first loan.

Toxic Workplace! is the first book to tackle the underlying systems issues that enable a toxic person to create a path of destruction in an organization, pervading others' thoughts and energies, even undermining their very sense of well-being. Based on all-new research with over 400 leaders, many from the Fortune 500 list, this book illustrates how to manage existing toxic behaviors, create norms that prevent the growth or regrowth of toxic environments, and ultimately design organizational communities of respectful engagement.

Transform Your Life and Leadership Applying the five transformative principles of the Human Operating System is so much more effective than hacking through the forest of leadership trade books, workshops, and management techniques. Many of these tools can be helpful, but they often function more like apps or accessories rather than a deeper operating system that can offer meaning, direction, and coherence to everything you might do as a leader. Jack Nicholson and Rob Murray have been developing the Human Operating System over many years of work with executive leaders, teams, and ...

Have you noticed that on some days, everything seems to go so smoothly? Those times when everybody shares the same deadline and all of a sudden everything gets done. What’s going on here? What’s different in these scenarios? At the core of each situation is a replicable occurrence, a behavior pattern, or a trend you can understand and utilize. In fact, with just a little bit of heightened awareness and increased focus on your situation, you can pinpoint these exact patterns and recreate them at will.

Learn about the Coach's Stance, the Four Phases of Coaching, and much more.

The Courage to Be Disliked, already an enormous best seller in Asia with more than 3.5 million copies sold, demonstrates how to unlock the power within yourself to be the person you truly want to be. Using the theories of Alfred Adler, one of the three giants of 20th-century psychology, The Courage to Be Disliked follows an illuminating conversation between a philosopher and a young man. The philosopher explains to his pupil how each of us is able to determine our own life, free from the shackles of past experiences, doubts, and the expectations of others.

The guru to the gurus at last shares his knowledge with the rest of us. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's seminal studies in behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, and happiness studies have influenced numerous other authors, including Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman at last offers his own, first book for the general public. It is a lucid and enlightening summary of his life's work. It will change the way you think about thinking. Two systems drive the way we think and make choices, Kahneman explains....

Competition is moving beyond industry to ecosystem. Are you ready? In the shift from pipeline to platform, value is no longer created by your company's product or process alone - it's created through interactions. And the strategy you used to become an industry leader won't help you compete in an evolving and complex ecosystem. If you listen to nothing else on platforms and ecosystems, listen to these 10 articles by experts in the field.

Plant managers are often the most important employees in manufacturing facilities. They are in charge of all aspects of plant operations, and they interact with virtually everyone involved with the business. This book examines these unique individuals by analyzing what they do and how they function while describing the challenges they must overcome to perform at peak levels. It also highlights the many different skills that these leaders must possess to accomplish organizational goals and objectives.

In Capitalism, Alone, leading economist Branko Milanovic explains the reasons for this decisive historical shift since the days of feudalism and, later, communism. Surveying the varieties of capitalism, he asks: What are the prospects for a fairer world now that capitalism is the only game in town? His conclusions are sobering, but not fatalistic. Capitalism gets much wrong, but also much right - and it is not going anywhere. Our task is to improve it.

4DX® is not theory. It is a proven set of practices that represents a new way of thinking essential to thriving in today’s competitive climate, making this 2nd edition a book that no business leader can afford to miss. The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) is a simple, repeatable, and proven formula for executing your most important strategic priorities in the midst of the whirlwind. By following the 4 Disciplines, leaders can produce breakthrough results, even when executing the strategy requires a significant change in behavior from their teams.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

The business of creating our built environment remains largely siloed and disconnected today. Owners, designers, construction managers, and trade contractors each defend their profit margins by shifting risk to others and focusing on their own piece of the puzzle. Lean thinking promises to change all this, yet has proven particularly difficult to implement in the building industry. Better Building provides a practical model for putting lean thinking into action and improving the experience of project work. Based on years of experience shifting mindsets and behaviors, this model answers the ...

In this classic text, Taiichi Ohno—inventor of the Toyota Production System and Lean manufacturing—shares the genius that sets him apart as one of the most disciplined and creative thinkers of our time. Combining his candid insights with a rigorous analysis of Toyota's attempts at Lean production, Ohno's book explains how Lean principles can improve any production endeavor.

This book is great for beginners and those seeking general knowledge. It examines leadership from many different aspects. It analyzes leadership styles, toxic leaders, micromanaging leaders, and the roles leaders play in organizational culture. It explores the thinking behind leaders' choices and the effects those choices have on workplaces. It also suggests ways to prevent negative leadership from occurring. The text is written for easy reader understanding at all levels, and examples are used throughout for illustration and clarification. Please note that all four topics discussed in this...

GUTS: Greatness Under Tremendous Stress is more than a motivation guide. It's a complete life-changing program full of powerful, transformational strategies straight from the Navy SEAL playbook. It's like a personal boot camp for retraining the brain, breaking bad habits and thought patterns, taking risks, and turning apathy into action.

As a coach to some of the country’s highest-profile executives, Daniel Harkavy has witnessed the transformation that comes when leaders utilize coaching to turn their paycheck-driven teams into vibrant and successful growth cultures. Since founding his company in 1996, Harkavy and his team have coached thousands and shared their knowledge by certifying coaching leaders across the country. Now, in this strategic and thought-provoking guide, he shares his proven strategy for improving your team’s performance while raising quality of life inside and outside of the office.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution provides a simple, proven formula for achieving the goals that every individual or organization needs to reach. From Marriott to the U.S. Navy, Covey and his team have worked with more than 200,000 people in hundreds of organizations to improve performance, identifying and honing four secrets of perfect execution: Focus on the Wildly Important; Act on the Lead Measures; Keep a Compelling Scoreboard; and Create a Cadence of Accountability.