Harvard Business School Press

Leading Change

5 stars (Great Business Manual!) - This book is a great business manual for executives at all levels. Another book I really enjoyed to read was "The Wal-Mart Way". It was very insightful and had many good ideas for bulding a strong company. 5 stars (Solid Principles for Growth) - I was a little concerned when I started reading this title, wondering if it would apply to churches as well as corporations. I was not disappointed. Kotter's ideas here are valid for any organization that is in the change process. The author's eight steps are nuggets of truth that will help pastors as well as CEOs. I recommend this book highly for pastors of growing, changing congregations. 5 stars (Packed with Knowledge!) - The picture on the cover of John P. Kotter's book tells it all: a group of penguins are shuffling their feet nervously on an icy precipice, while one brave bird leaps for the water below. The question is, which penguin are you? In too many organizations, executives shy away from the precipice, while someone lower down in the pecking order jumps in to test the landing conditions. Kotter says managers and leaders are quite different. A manager, he explains, is trained to think in a linear, one-two-three, risk-limiting way. Transformational change, however, can only be attained when true leaders push forward on several fronts at once - eight of them to be exact. Every successful change initiative begins with a coalition of leaders who create a sense of urgency. Kotter's book stems from a 1995 Harvard Business Review article titled, " Leading Change : Why Transformation Efforts Fail." It will probably sound hauntingly familiar to managers who have watched change initiatives begin in the front courtyard with a marching band and end a few months later, ushered out the back door like a diner who can't pay the tab. If you want to know why your last change initiative fizzled, we say read this book. Better yet, study it to ensure that your next leap of faith is a flying succe...
Harvard Business School Press :: Structural Adjustment :: Strategic planning :: Organizational change :: Organization Development :: Leadership In Business :: Leadership :: Industrial organizatio :: Leading Change

Leadership on the Line- Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading

5 stars (Packed with Knowledge!) - Leadership isn't easy. The best leaders force their followers to face unpleasant realities and then figure out the solutions for themselves. That's why leadership is so risky, argue Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky in this engaging tome. The authors analyze the successes and failures of leaders ranging from Yitzhak Rabin to Bill Clinton, with stops along the way to examine the leadership styles of former Coca-Cola CEO M. Douglas Ivester and NBA coach Phil Jackson. At times, the authors' rules of thumb seem too general. Yet, their real-world examples blend well with their leadership theory to present a useful guide to leadership. We recommend this excellent book to anyone facing a difficult leadership situation. 5 stars (Why is Leadership so hard) - For me the measure of a book is whether it breaks through and reaches me in some way. This often occurs when the writing pushes me to think about my experiences in new ways. This book has done that many times over. It goes beyond mechanistic models to help me consider and reconsider my role as leader and as follower. 4 stars (Exercise your leadership!) - This book you may change your definition of "leadership" slightly. In this book we can see not only how Presidents exercised their leadership but also that middle management class people are on the line as well to achieve their goals and they definitely used their leadership. Those people are analyzed in the same manner regardless of their social status. Same people, both famous and anonymous, appear in the book again and again in different occasions as different examples. The authors weaved them into the narrative story. Sometime they failed, the other time they succeeded. You would feel them closely, even Presidents. Further more, we need to be our own master and for that sake we need to be able to manage ourselves. It means you must exercise leadership for yourself! Since same people and story appeared several times,...
Harvard Business School Press :: Leadership :: Entrepreneurship :: Business&Economics :: Business & Economics & Finance :: Business & Economics :: Ronald A Heifetz :: Martin Linsky :: :: Leadership on the Line- Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading

Primal Leadership- Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

4 stars (Great book! ) - This book is very well written and will keep your interest. The book covers some very important facets of leadership mainly: integrity, ethics, trust, and other peoples feelings. If you are reading this review and you don't really know why those factors are keystones to leadership then this book would be a good addition to your leadership skills. If leadership were a pie this book would be several slices but not the whole pie. For an in-depth look at leadership read the army field manual for leadership. 5 stars (Primal Leadership) - The book by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Anne Mc Kee is a wonderful study on all modern leadership styles, and how to learn how to lead with Emotional Intelligence. Several cases are presented, on worldwide and US companies, providing us with the best and thorough analysis on how to achieve the highest performance, by focusing on the diverse aspects of Emotional Intelligence. I believe it is a must for top executives, managers and counsellors from Organizations, and for all of those seeking to improve their emotional skills, be them focused on job or on life improvement. 2 stars (Too stretching) - I really liked Dan Goleman's previous books on Emotional Intelligence (EI). Goleman's article on "Primal Leadership" appeared in Harvard Business Review (HBR) a few years ago. His book version of primal leadership is a little too stretching. If you are not keen on reading the not-so-interesting details, I would recommend the article version in HBR, which gives a very good synopsis of the book. ...
Harvard Business School Press :: Psychology :: Psychological aspects :: Management :: Leadership :: Executive ability :: Entrepreneurship :: Emotions :: Emotional intelligence :: Business&Economics :: :: Primal Leadership- Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

Harvard Business Review on Entrepreneurship

4 stars (Simply easy to read with many examples) - If you are looking to become an entrepreneur, or if you are are one, I recommend you read this book. 5 stars (The most important handbook for entrepreneurs) - As an entrepreneur with varying degree of success and failure, I found this book to be the most accurate writing on the subject. If I could read this book many years ago, I would have avoided many expensive mistakes. If you are looking to become an entrepreneur, or if you are are already one, I strongly recommend you read this book--and take notes because virtually everthing in this book applies to every entrepreneur. This is a must read for every business person. 4 stars (A Guide to Entrepreneurship) - This book is a collection of easy to read articles by eminent faculty as well as venture capitalists teaching and supporting entrepreneurship. These articles offer an insight into the problems faced by a start-up as well as methods to prioritize their activities. It does offer ideas to entrepreneurs to manage and grow a start-up. Overall a good collection of articles with some very contrasting schools of thought. ...
Harvard Business School Press :: Entrepreneurship :: Business & Economics & Finance :: Business & Economics-Entrepreneurship :: Business & Economics :: James Stancill :: William A Sahlman :: Ama :: Harvard Business Review on Entrepreneurship

Information Rules- A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy

5 stars (A Must Read for Internet Entrepreneurs) - Although this book was written in 1998, it is just as relevant if not more so today. The book discusses how Internet entrepreneurs should price their goods/services; how they can create lock-in effects to instill customer loyalty; and perhaps most importantly, how they can create network effects so as to exponentially increase their client base and barriers to entry. A brilliant book written by two leading authorities on economics. 3 stars (Approaches management problems from an economic standpoint) - The authors say that the circumstances of one era may be unique, but the underlying principles that govern the exchange of goods in a free-market economy are the same. The book is about the economy rather than managing information itself. 2 stars (Really?) - The book starts by proclaiming that neo-classical economics is adequate for explaining the information economy. This claim is not backed up in the book. First, textbook neo-clasical equilibrium theory contains neither money nor 'information'. Second, the book merely discusses qualitatively and nonsystematically ideas like positive feedback and increasing returns that were better presented by Brian Arthur. Third, even asymmetric information is not discussed (Ackerlof and Stiglitz are not even mentioned). Fourth (or zeroth), there is not a single empirical graph in the entire book, and nothing of modern ideas of network theory. So I would say that the book is more or less on the same level as Kelly's (pre-bubble-bust) "New Rules for the New Economy". All of these books implicitly hype the unregulated free market, in the face of both qualitative and empirical evidence that unregulated markets are not only unstable but are detrimental to human health and well-being. ...
Harvard Business School Press :: Management Information Systems :: Information Management :: Economics - General :: Computers-Management Information Systems :: Computers :: Business & Economics :: Information Rules- A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy

Serious Play- How the World-s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate

4 stars (Readable User-Friendly Book on Innovation) - I am enjoying this book. I like the title "Serious Play", but I dislike the sub-title "How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate". Companies don't innovate people do is my thought. I think the author could have taken this concept one step further. That is tie in the concepts of how innovation relates to chaos theory and fractals and larger concepts. The author's ideas are not that new to me because I am a project manager in a software engineering environment where prototyping and iterations is the name of the game. We have at most 3 months to make a difference, to deliver and then we are swept into the ocean of change. You have a small window of opportunity before both the game and the players change. I think that the world may be on the verge of moving so fast that we begin to see things like the wiki, open source culture in that it takes all of us innovating collectively in serious play. Long term I wonder if you are not free, workable and now, you are not in the game. Some concepts for me are: 1) Importance of being able to improvise in the moment 2) Prototyping both reveals the underlying power cutural structures and changes them. 3) Human beings are relationship morphing entities. 4) the importance of shared collaboration space that invite clever interactions between people. 5) Treating prototypes as conversation pieces 6) Watch for the underlying feeling of geniune fun 7) The importance of the challenge or obstacles to the game 8) We shape our models, our models shape us 9) "In order to have actionable meaning, the fuzzy mental models ... must be externalized in representations in ways... that can be grasped" 10) Prototypes force individuals to confront the tyranny of tradeoffs (i.e. difficult decisions) 11) "All models are attempt to manage the complexity by making it simpler and more accessible" While the text is very readable I had trouble pulling out the underlying structure of the b...
Harvard Business School Press :: Technology :: Technological Innovations :: Strategic Planning :: Simulation methods :: Nanotechnology :: Models and model making :: Management :: Decision Making & :: Serious Play- How the World-s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate