Leader's Beacon | The Leadership Experts » Book Reviews

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

Ian Cook — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:00:00 +0000

by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, & Marty Linsky Harvard Business Press, 2009 ISBN #978-1-4421-0576-4 Reviewed by Ian Cook Dealing with change and problem solving–these tasks are at the core of what leader/managers do. But there are two distinctly different types of challenges that precipitate change and bring on problems for managers. The authors of this [...]

Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life

Ian Cook — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:39:05 +0000

by Kevin Cashman Berrett-Koehler, 2008 ISBN #978-1-57675-599-0 Reviewed by Ian Cook At the point our body and our senses (eyes, ears, touch, etc.) meet the world lies a crossroads. At this very point we experience a constant, two-way flow from the… Outside in–situations, actions and events in their environment Inside out–how we feel, interpret, process [...]

Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?: What It Takes To Be An Authentic Leader

Ian Cook — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:51:13 +0000

by Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones Harvard Business School Press, 2006 ISBN #1-57851-971-3 Reviewed by Ian Cook People want to be led by a person, the authors contend, not by someone with a fancy job title or a manager who has amassed a vast chunk of organizational turf. Employees will choose to follow only a [...]

Influencer: The Power To Change Anything

Ian Cook — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:44:10 +0000

by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan & Gareth Jones McGraw-Hill, 2008 ISBN #978-0-07-148499-2 Reviewed by Ian Cook If you are like me, and like most of the managers we all know, you have a default strategy for influencing people around you. You TELL them what they should do! You SHARE your wisdom [...]

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Ian Cook — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:55:54 +0000

By Carol S. Dweck Random House, 2006 ISBN #1-4000-6275-6 Reviewed by Ian Cook John McEnroe reached great heights in the world of professional tennis but, by his own admission, he did not fulfill his potential. Whenever he lost, it was not his fault. Even his defeat at the 1984 French Open he blamed on sound [...]

The Dynamic Path: Access the Secrets of Champions to Achieve Greatness Through Mental Toughness, Inspired Leadership, and Personal Transformation

Ian Cook — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:56:49 +0000

By James M. Citrin Rodale, 2007 ISBN #978-1-59486-358-5 Reviewed by Ian Cook Ground-breaking tennis great Billie Jean King won 20 Wimbledon titles, 13 US Opens, the French and Australian Opens, and was ranked the world’s No. 1 woman tennis player seven times. She went on to do pioneering work on Title IX legislation for women’s [...]

Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work

Ian Cook — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 23:00:19 +0000

By David Rock HarperCollins Publishers, 2006 ISBN #978-0-06-083590-3 Reviewed by Ian Cook Managers are default programmed to solve problems. That’s what they are paid to do. That’s what they are good at. And that is how they see themselves, at a subconscious level. So, when an employee comes with a problem, the manager’s knee-jerk reaction [...]

True North: Discover your Authentic Leadership

Ian Cook — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 23:03:37 +0000

by Bill George with Peter Sims John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007 ISBN #978-0-7879-8751-0 Reviewed by Ian Cook How do you become and remain an authentic leader? This was the question Bill George posed in his in-depth study of 125 leaders drawn from corporations to not-for-profits, to the arenas of politics and academia. George was [...]

A Leader’s Legacy

Ian Cook — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:07:29 +0000

By James M. Kouzes & Barry Z. Posner Jossey-Bass, 2006 ISBN #978-0-7879-8296-6 Reviewed by Ian Cook As a leader, would you say one of your goals is to leave a legacy? Based on their observations of leaders over the last twenty years, Kouzes and Posner expect your answer is probably “yes.” By “legacy,” we don’t [...]

The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers Into Great Leaders

Ian Cook — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:08:47 +0000

By John H. Zenger & Joseph Folkman McGraw Hill, 2002 ISBN #0-07-138747-1 Reviewed by Ian Cook “Good leaders…neither they nor their leaders appear to recognize the substantial contribution they could make by moving from being merely good to great” This is just one of the many intriguing new perspectives this book brings to the subject [...]

Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time

Ian Cook — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:11:45 +0000

By Margaret J. Wheatley Berrett-Koehler, 2005, ISBN #978-1-57675-317-0 Reviewed by Ian Cook Margaret Wheatley, back in 1992 with her book, Leadership and the New Science, was one of the first writers to bring into mainstream discussion the idea that organizations share a lot of the characteristics of living, self-organizing systems in nature. Large weather systems, [...]

Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job

Ian Cook — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:14:41 +0000

By Dennis W. Bakke PVG, 2005 ISBN #0-9762686-0-4 Reviewed by Ian Cook In 1982 Dennis Bakke co-founded the energy company AES and led it, by the year 2000, to $8.6 billion revenue, over $33 billion in assets in thirty-one countries, 40,000 employees, and an energy provider to over 100 million consumers. He resigned in 2002, [...]