A Change to the Positive

The Power of Positive Leadership: How and Why Positive Leaders Transform Teams and Organizations and Change The World – Jon Gordon – (Wiley)

Visit your favorite book store; depending on if it’s a large chain outlet or a local Mom and Pop shop, it’s likely you will find at least a rack full or an entire section dedicated to self-help, positive thought and changing your life in a positive way. While you’re there, ask the staff to point you in the direction of the books on how to be more negative. (Insert cricket sounds here…) It’s not likely that they will be able to point you to even one book that would fall into the category.

The reason is that we are generally wired to gravitate towards being negative. Let’s face it; it’s easy to look at what’s not working in our lives or in our businesses and chew on that for a while. Would it make more sense to focus on what it working well and then amplify that or see if there is a way to take what’s working replicate it in other areas of life and work?

Bestselling business guru Jon Gordon serves up a boatload of examples of how focusing on the positive has had a genuine impact on businesses and teams in his new book, The Power of Positive Leadership: How and Why Positive Leaders Transform Teams and Organizations and Change The World. It would be so easy to slip off into the Pollyanna of positive-ness, but Gordon avoids that by clearly delineating real world examples of how positive leaders, many of whom he has worked with, have super-charged results by making the choice to be positive in the way they approach business, competition and how they operate.

Unlike so many leadership and business books that have hit the racks lately, Gordon does focus only on how the big dogs do things, not everyone is Google or Amazon. Instead he gives actionable steps that any business leader at any stage of development can put into play and see a positive impact on their outcomes.

Gordon does a great job of taking researched ideas how to make the change to the positive and then pairs them with great examples of leaders who have effectively put the ideas into practice.

Growth is Essential

Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success – Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown (Crown Business)

Let’s face it, if you’re in business growth is essential for you to continue to be in business. So the search for growth is an ongoing focus. We spend countless hours developing growth strategies and plans that are designed to get us new business and grow our bottom line.

It is that age old process that is in the spotlight in Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown’s new book, Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success. Ellis and Brown aren’t looking at growth from a traditional approach, but rather they are focused on how you can add new agility and speed to the process of growth and sprint to new business.

While the playbook for growth that the pair espouse and illustrate with “real” world examples makes total sense based on the data driven building blocks they want you to put in place, I am not certain that most businesses have the depth of business intelligence and capital to make this process work where the rubber meets the road. There is a level of sophistication and finance that tech companies and startups can bring to the table that the average small business just can’t swing.

There seems to be a “magic bullet” optimism to Ellis and Brown’s approach that I can’t see as realistic for most businesses. While some may think this is a new business Bible and go to resource, I think the take away here is that businesses do need to focus on developing a method for gathering intel on their customers, their competitors and their own product/service offerings.

Strategy From a Different Perspective

Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything – Bryce G. Hoffman (Crown Business)

Your seen firsthand. You probably at one point participated in it. Someone higher up the management food chain comes to the table during a strategic planning session and present what they think is a brilliant idea and they can site statistics and dialogue that soundly supports their take on things; it sounds like a winner. Then all of the yes men line up and sound off in support of the proposal, no one steps into the breach to challenge any assumptions.

Then six months or a year into the execution cycle the wheels fall off and the strategy either heads back to the drawing board for a retooling or gets scraped completely. More often than not no one gets held accountable and we all move on to the next brilliant strategy that we can all get behind. If you’re like me, this kind of thing will drive you crazy. As I gained experience and confidence, more and more often I would offer push back to challenge assumptions and often tweak or improve on strategies. Often, that’s not an easy thing to do.

So what’s a better why to be the contrarian in the room? While it’s being billed as a revolutionary new way of approaching strategic thinking, red teaming as it’s been dubbed, is a strategic approach that has been around for awhile, but more recently gained the title and has evolved and been honed into a business planning strategy.

Bestselling author Bryce G. Hoffman (American Icon) has penned book to 

summarize not only the process but of his stint working side by side with the 

military to learn firsthand how the process all works. In Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything Hoffman gives you the historical reference for red teaming and walk through how the process moved from military application to the board room and how major corporations and even small business can used the process to improve results.

The process really boils down to elevating critical thinking and expanding the strategic planning process. While so often we tend to focus on our own business during the planning process, Red Teaming really forces us to change our focus; to help identify holes in the plan, challenges from the competition and I think most importantly identify opportunities in the competitive environment.

For the strategist that is familiar with the red teaming process, Hoffman’s book may seem a bit basic, but it never hurts to have access to a primer on any subject. For those looking to delve deeper into the process I would recommend searching out the military’s Applied Critical Thinking Handbook, which was formerly called the Red Teaming Handbook. You can easily Google it and find it in PDF form or Amazon has the Kindle Version for less than ten bucks.

Leaders Are Built…Not Born

Leaders Made Here: Building a Leadership Culture – Mark Miller (Berrett-Koehler Publishers)

“___Fill in the blank____ is the only sustainable competitive advantage”

After stringing together millions of them over the course of my career, I have to admit, that I am a sucker for words. So when I read a great line that literally jumps off the page at me, I tend to get fired up.

When I read the opening part of the line above in leadership guru and bestselling author, Mark Miller’s new book, Leaders Made Here: Building a Leadership Culture, I perked up. What was the answer? A quick Google search will yields things like innovation, a business’s ability to learn faster than their competition (?) but it is Miller who truly hits on the answer. “Leadership is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

While learning at a greater velocity is a competitive advantage and innovation certainly is as well, it is the sustainability piece that make it more difficult. But when it comes to leadership and building a culture of leadership, that all important bench strength, is something that is doable if a business makes the commitment to make it happen.

Miller, a Chick-fil-A executive and co-author of a number of bestselling leadership books with Ken Blanchard, uses the time-tested business parable to impart his story and the leadership culture lessons in Leaders Made Here. While I am not a huge fan of this style of book, I think Miller does a great job of pretty clearly delineating actionable steps that businesses can take to create and grow a leadership culture.

He provides the building blocks that you can put in place to form the cornerstone of your leadership culture; from agreeing on basics of a definition of leader and some of the potential roadblocks that can create within a business if everybody is not on the same page. This would make for a great exercise to gauge what your leadership team is thinking and how to build on a unified platform. It cuts down on wasted time, inconsistent messages and agendas and the lack of focus.

Real Rubber Meets the Road Advice

Move: How Decisive Leaders Execute Strategy Despite Obstacles, Setbacks and Stalls – Patty Azzarello (Wiley)

What are some of the chronic challenges that your business faces when it comes to executing on strategy? You know, those nagging problems that just ever seem to change or go away, but continue to roadblock change, expansion and acceleration of growing your business.

There are plenty of high powered, highly recognizable business consultants that you can hire, familiar names like KPMG, McKinsey, Bain Consulting and dozens more you can hire to help guide you through the process. Pay them a substantial fee and in return you will get a very well educated MBA; think Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton, who will assess your business issues and then try to pigeonhole them into their patented way of thinking, based on their consultants perspective. This won’t be based on the thought process of someone who has actually run a business, but on a protocol or set of protocols based on their companies approach to things.

It’s like those “smarter than you” folks who make careers in academia who try to tell business owners what they are doing wrong. That’s why I think Patty Azzarello’s new book, Move: How Decisive Leaders Execute Strategy Despite Obstacles, Setbacks and Stalls, is so different. This is REAL, rubber meets the road, actionable business intelligence.

Azzarello compiles a business “greatest hits” in the pages of Move, and displays a real bias towards action. She offers up tried and true advice for breaking through those age old barriers to create actual forward motion, hence the title. Change can be uncomfortable for those folks who like things the way they are or as they have always been. Azzarello addresses those sticky issues of engagement and details how no successful project moves forward without full on buy in from the team. She gives you the tools to get people on board.

I love books that give you the tools that you can put into play today and Move certainly accomplishes that without coming off as a one size fits all approach to business.

Snowflakes Beware

Extreme You: Step Up. Stand Out. Kick Ass. Repeat – Sarah Robb O’Hagan (Harper Business)

For me the word EXTREME just conjures up the image of a millennial decked out in a brightly colored outfit either strapped to or dangling off of some kind of motorized device or board(s) of some variety, flying through the air without giving gravity a second thought. So when I read the title of Sarah Robb O’Hagan’s latest book, Extreme You: Step Up. Stand Out. Kick Ass. Repeat, I had a level of certainty that it was somehow a motivational/career advice book for the millennial set…and it the end of the day I was completely wrong and completely right!

O’Hagan has seen meteoric rises and equally high speed, epic falls during the course of her career in leadership roles and at the helm of companies like Virgin Atlantic, Nike, Gatorade and Equinox and whether riding high on the wave or face planting on the sand, she has maintained an even keel and pressed on in the face of any setback. She truly practiced what she preaches in Extreme You, putting a driving passion and a go big or go home attitude at the heart of everything she does.

Her takedown of the everybody is a winner, everyone gets a trophy world we find ourselves in, just overflowing with special Johnny’s and special Susie’s had me convinced that O’Hagan could be the perfect leader to move millennials out of their safe places and into the real world; convincing them that losing doesn’t mean you give up, suck your thumb and pull out the Play Doh. It’s time to take that defeat, learn from it, hone your skills, work harder and come back even stronger next time out.

The list of folks who would benefit from O’Hagan’s advice certainly includes those that are just starting out or are early in their careers, but even veteran leaders and mid-career path types can take the advice gathered in Extreme You, from a wide range of folks and equally diverse backgrounds and put it to work when kicking things to the next level. No you won’t have to dangle from the conference room light fixtures, but you can level up and bring the best possible you to the table.

Limitless

No Limits: Blow the CAP Off Your Capacity – John C. Maxwell (Center Street)

Think about it; there seems to be no limits to what bestselling author, speaker and coach can bring his ability and focused training skills to. Clearly he delivers the goods on leadership, but he has also trained countless folks on positive thinking, communication, influence, success, team work, growth and relationships.

With his latest book, No Limits: Blow the CAP Off Your Capacity, Maxwell shifts his focus to examine how folks can expand their capacity and drive themselves to even greater success. When you ponder the word capacity it is easy to view it as a measure of our limitations, but Maxwell posits that any limits on your capacity is based on something that we consciously set for ourselves. He makes the persuasive case that by re-working your thinking you can actually grow your capacity in a wide array of areas.

Maxwell has identified seventeen areas for capacity growth ranging from; leadership to attitude and production to partnership. One area that I found particularly useful was the chapter on creative capacity; while my day job is in a creative role, I find that more and more my work with community organizations, leadership coaching and my writing side hustle has taxed my creative energy. Maxwell gave me actionable steps I can put into play to leverage untapped resources in the creative realm.

That was one of the great things about No Limits; while it hangs together well, you can really pick and choose to tap into the very specific nature of areas that you may feel the need to grow your abilities in. As a bonus it’s all delivered in the clear, concise style that has made John Maxwell a go to resource for so many folks.