Books

As a business leader, you’ve read dozens of books by the top thought leaders, learning from their research, principles, and tools. Each book dives deep into a specific area of expertise—strategy, execution, cash, people, culture, and leadership. All share powerful concepts on what to do to grow your business. But how do you efficiently unite these tools into a regimen that works for not just one specific area of your business, but for your entire team, company, and life? Metronomics unites top business thought leadership with over twenty years of proven practical experience. The outcome is a prescriptive progressive growth system for every business. In this book, you’ll learn how to build a high-performing business team that achieves superior results with ease, speed, and confidence. You’ll learn the practical progression that ensures your team is fiercely connected to your strategic execution system. No matter what level you and your team are at right now, Metronomics will meet you where you are—and grow with you to the next level and beyond. The best-kept business secret for the past twenty years, Metronomics will allow your company to win your business Olympics every year, and as a leader, it will set you free.

Every company needs a 3HAG--a 3 Year Highly Achievable Goal! The 3HAG WAY is a prescriptive framework that takes the guessing out of your strategy and ensures that you and your whole team are confident in where you are going. It breaks your strategy down into a clear and simple picture--so clear and simple that the whole team will be able to see where the company is going and where it will end up in three years' time. This strategic clarity will align, engage, and empower your team to make confident decisions in order to achieve your 3HAG.You'll find step-by-step instructions to gut out your first 3HAG while building the confidence required to execute with speed toward your goals. The core purpose of this book is to have a significant impact on CEOs, leaders, and their companies and enable them to confidently realize their goals more quickly than they thought possible. And by achieving these goals they will positively impact their families and their communities.Whether you run a team of four, forty or 40,000, the tools and framework in this book will help you articulate your company's strategy in simple terms and create a Strategic Execution System that works. We're going to take each step of the strategy and break it down for you so that you know exactly how to take these steps and why they're critical to achieving your goal.

In Scaling Up, Harnish and his co-authors share practical tools and techniques to help entrepreneurs grow an industry-dominating business without it killing them-and actually have fun. Many growth company leaders reach a point where they actually dread adding another customer, employee or location. It feels like they are just adding more weight to an ever-heavier anchor they are dragging through the sand. To make matters worse, the increased revenues haven't turned into more profitability, so at some point they wonder if the journey is worth the effort. Scaling Up focuses on the four major decisions every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution and Cash. The book includes a series of new One-Page tools including the famous and recently-revised One-Page Strategic Plan and the Rockefeller Habits Execution Checklist, which more than 40,000 firms around the globe have used to scale their companies successfully. Running a business is ultimately about freedom. Scaling Up shows owners how to achieve it, no matter how big and complicated a business grows.

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, author Patrick Lencioni turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight. Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams, even the best ones, often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a compelling fable with a powerful yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional team leaders.

After a five-year research project, Jim Collins concludes that good to great can and does happen. In this book, he uncovers the underlying variables that enable any type of organisation to make the leap from good to great while other organisations remain only good. Rigorously supported by evidence, his findings are surprising - at times even shocking - to the modern mind. Collin and his team found the key concepts that permitted these good-to-great companies to achieve cumulative stock returns 6.9 times the stock market in fifteen years. These are extraordinary numbers, made all the more so by the fact they came from previously unremarkable companies.

The Metronome Effect will guide you on your journey to predictable profit. It will ensure the habituation that excellence is derived from is engrained in your organisation. Every leader is empowered to set their metric beat to make sure the company is doing everything it needs to do to grow their profit. This book draws on the wisdom of some of the best business minds of our time, as well as the author's own experiences as a serial entrepreneur, to create a methodology that shows you a practical step-by-step process; how to rhythmically integrate all the crucial parts of your business. Every leader has a metronome--find yours and discover the path to predictable profit.

Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical and effective solution to what The Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent. The silver lining is that “who” problems are easily preventable. Based on more that 1,300 hours of interviews, with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEO’s, Who presents Smart and Street’s A Method for hiring. Refined through the largest research study of its kind ever undertaken, the A Method stresses fundamental elements that anyone can implement - and it has a 90 percent success rate. Whether you're a member of a board of directors looking for a new CEO, the owner of a small business searching for the right people to make your company grow, or a parent in need of a new babysitter, it's all about Who.

"Outthinkers" are entrepreneurs and corporate leaders with a new playbook. They see opportunities others ignore, challenge dogma others accept as truth, rally resources others cannot influence, and unleash new strategies that disrupt their markets. Outthink the Competition proves that business competition is undergoing a fundamental paradigm shift and that during such revolutions, outthinkers beat traditionalists. Outthink the Competition presents stories of breakthrough companies like Apple, Google, Vistaprint, and Rosetta Stone whose stunning performances defy traditional explanation and will inspire readers to outthink the competition. It's time to buck tradition in order to stay ahead. Outthink the competition and uncover opportunities hiding in plain sight.

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organisation needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-colour design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organisation. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyse and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition. Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organisations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"

In The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, Patrick Lencioni offers a novel that stresses the importance of a leader's role when building a healthy organisation. The follow up to his previous book; The Five Temptations of a CEO, focuses on helping his readers understand the power of creating a harmonious and successful organisation and delves into the four key decisions a leader should follow to achieve this. In this book, readers experience the leadership challenges of fictional CEO Rich O’Conner and follow along with his experience as he faces leadership challenges and threats to his company. Patrick Lencioni encourages readers to grasp what makes a truly exceptional leader.

Jim Collin’s book, Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 is a staple for small and early-stage companies aiming to build and strengthen their leadership. Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 takes the findings from his original book and builds this information to help smaller companies create the 2.0 version of themselves. Businesses will learn that they will face challenges as their leadership/leadership teams grow and become stronger. Jim Collins uses the 2.0 version to combine the key ideas from the original Beyond Entrepreneurship book and key concepts from his thirty years of research into The Map. The Map is an integrated framework that assists companies in achieving endurance and results, it compiles decades of research and key concepts on what makes a great company tick.

The Ideal Team Player, written by Patrick Lencioni focuses on the individual member of a team and the three necessary behaviours that make team members stand out. Readers are presented with a powerful framework that helps the organisation find their ideal team player in any workforce. Patrick Lencioni works through what it means to be an ideal team player through the eyes of fictional character, Jeff Shanley. This novel assists readers to understand the behaviours that make one stand out and ultimately guide one to understand the importance of building a culture of hiring and development around the three necessary behaviours.

The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey offers a look into how trust drives every relationship and action within the organisation. Stephen Covey emphasises that work cannot be done without communicating through people therefore, it is important to immediately establish trust within the workplace. The book stresses that trust is vital, however it is rarely discussed. To encourage organisations to open themselves up to the discussion of trust, the book focuses on emphasising how trust determines how fast your business will go as it impacts every aspect of the organisation. Within this book, trust is divided into four core components: integrity, intent, capability and result. By measuring these four components, the reader is able to understand how they can build, repair and extend their trust.

Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead is all about encouraging and transforming individuals to show the reader how they can step up and lead. The book reflects on twenty years of studying courage, vulnerability, shame and empathy to uncover what makes a daring leader. The book encourages the reader to evaluate how they embed the value of courage in their work culture. Throughout the book, Brown discusses the key findings she had found over the course of her research and identified that daring leadership is a collection of four skills. Courageous and daring leadership does not come easy however Brown stresses that it's important to be brave and take control of your life and work.

Scaling Leadership by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams explore how senior leaders develop leadership that works and scales. Scaling leadership is a concept that focuses on the leadership skills and strategies that are needed to effectively manage and lead organisations as they grow. The book’s goal is to help organisations develop the leadership skills that are necessary to adapt to change. As an organisation becomes more complex, leaders need to be able to develop new skills to effectively communicate with their team and the organisation. Scaling Leadership assists teams and leaders to position themselves to effectively navigate growth and thrive in the long run.

How Will You Measure Your Life? By Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon examines the importance of finding personal fulfilment and happiness in life. The book stresses that success in a career or personal life should not be measured on financial or personal achievements, instead, it should be measured by the fulfilment it has on an individual's life. One can achieve fulfilment by aligning their personal values with their goals and priorities. The authors emphasise that goal setting is important in both a personal and career environment and that one should not chase after ideas that society deems successful.

Rita McGrath stresses that any success in a business requires the ability to anticipate any changes that may come your way. Seeing Around Corners, discusses the changes that one may experience (known as inflection points) and how it can be difficult to anticipate these major turning points. Rita McGrath shares how it is possible to identify these potential inflection points before they take over by keeping an eye on industry trends, monitoring market conditions and staying aware of any possible disruptions. This will help the business to take action and be flexible so that they can effectively take control of any major changes.