Executive Leadership

Executive Leadership Collection

Strong leadership is critical to the success of any enterprise, and effective leaders inspire and unify their workforce, set challenging but attainable goals, and provide a solid image to the outside world. This 10-program set presents invaluable skills and leadership techniques from some of the brightest thought leaders in modern business.

The Art of Leadership

Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell Soup company understands that it’s in the moments of saying “just the right thing at just the right time” that leaders can make a positive, constructive impact on others, and shares six guiding principles of leadership for doing so.

Strategy for Transformational Change

When Brad Smith took over as CEO, Intuit founder Scott Cook advised him to “Question everything.” In this highly informative presentation, Smith shares secrets that have led to revolutionary new products, sky-high productivity, and a ranking on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For.

Leadership Lessons from the Gridiron

Giving us glimpses of his experience on the field—from ignominious interceptions to come-from-behind wins—with self-deprecating humor and passion for the game, Steve Young shares his lifelong takeaways.

Seven Principles for Building Successful Businesses

Based on 25 years of experience in Silicon Valley, David DeWalt details his seven principles for building a successful enterprise. While not all seven are neccessarily critical to success, DeWalt says if you can't get the first two right you're bound to fail.

The Inspiring Leader

Jack Zenger explains the most impactful attribute shared by highly effective leaders.

The Values-Based Leader

Practical advice on how to lead while staying true to your moral compass. Values-based leadership is possible for anyone to achieve, at any point in a career, by adhering to four guiding principles of behavior.

Strategy and the Purpose-Driven Leader

In the past 25 years, thousands of articles have been written about strategy, but virtually none about the leadership vital for doing it well. Strategy has been transformed from an art to a science—but science alone is not enough. Cynthia Montgomery makes the case for bringing people back into the equation.

Leadership for Innovation

Professor Hill explains that leaders at many high-profile and innovative companies have built communities of people who are both “willing and able to innovate.” They develop willing teams by pulling people together with a shared purpose, values, and rules of engagement.

A Leader's Legacy

Based on 25 years of research, Jim Kouzes explores the tough and often ambiguous issues that today's leaders must grapple with, including how you can't take trust for granted, why failure should always be an option, and how to liberate the leader in everyone.

Leveraging the Spotlight of Leadership

Managers and executives sit in a natural spotlight because of their leadership role. The best leaders harness the spotlight as a powerful tool to get things done – influencing the behavior and decision-making of their staff, even when they are not present.

The Mastery of Speaking as a Leader

Terry Pearce demonstrates ways in which a leader can elevate a speech into a more powerful and ultimately productive experience for both speaker and listener. Pearce explains three rules that set the stage for consistently engaging presentations: speak on topics you care about, incorporate personal experiences, and structure your speech as a story.

Leading in a Connected World

Professor Cross explains what high-quality, energy-building networks look like and how to manage your organization’s interpersonal networks to drive business results.

Good Boss, Bad Boss

Great bosses are self-obsessed—but not for egotistical reasons. The best are those who understand their people’s opinions of them and what it’s like to work for them.

Liberating Leadership

Dr. Getz shares examples of phenomenal business results that can be realized when employees are provided with a culture of self-direction and the freedom to act in the best interests of the company.

Coaching a Winning Team

Whether it be in basketball or business, a successful team is created by strengthening individual qualities and focusing them on a singular goal. Using honesty and positive reinforcement as the cornerstones of her process, Stanford women's basketball coach Tara VanDerveer explains how to maintain team unity and focus.

The Exceptional Leader

Jack Zenger believes that average managers can develop the traits shared by exceptional leaders—traits that improve retention, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and bottom-line profitability. Based on the best practices of leading organizations, he offers ten specific recommendations proven to enhance leadership development.

Building a Feedback-Positive Organization

An effective leader must be prepared to offer timely and honest feedback, both to employees and to other members of the management team. David Bradford examines what it takes to have a "feedback-rich" organization, while Scott Brady relates how feedback propelled his own organization through tremendous growth.

People-First Management

Daniel Amos follows two straightforward management principles: he sets clear expectations, and he listens to employee concerns. His focus is communication followed by action. Amos ensures that employees experience an evenhanded response to their input, and he provides a reward system that gives them a vested interest in the profitability of the company.

Fear of Feedback

In most organizations, there is a two-way conspiracy of silence that subverts honest feedback and causes a downward spiral of maladaptive behaviors. Myra Strober and Jay Jackman detail a road map for moving out of the fear and anger that lie beneath these behaviors, and into a mode that encourages open communication.

Executing Leadership Transitions

Scott McNealy believes leaders cannot be created—only identified. But even natural leaders need exposure. That's where coaching comes in. McNealy explains how to develop your own strengths to lead other leaders, and shares his methods for selecting and grooming dynamic leaders.

The Psychology of Power

While there are many benefits that come from having power, there are also many risks. Deborah Gruenfeld explains how a lack of consequences can allow powerful people to make serious errors in judgment that have far-reaching impacts on themselves and on their organizations.

Leading by Example

The foundation of George Zimmer's success is his company's corporate culture, centered on "servant leadership" values, which seek to involve others in decision making and enhance the personal growth of workers. Zimmer explains how his experience proves that a culture based on strong ethical values can succeed even within a competitive business environment.

Collective Leadership

Analyzing and increasing the understanding of who leaders need to work with, what they want to achieve, and how their people work together effectively enables leaders to act with accuracy to create the conditions for success.

Gen Y Decoded: Insights and Tactics for Leaders

Today’s young workers are a new breed. Socio-cultural factors, such as the self-esteem movement and ubiquitous technology, shaped a generation that thinks differently than its predecessors. Leaders that adjust their communication styles and expectations will succeed in connecting with and motivating this group. Dr. Yarrow’s tips for effectively managing Gen Y include providing context, relevance, and purpose for their work.

How Great Decisions Get Made

Great companies are built upon great decisions. But too many organizations are held back by "mind games" and debates that get in the way of great decision making. Don Maruska has a plan to help you find solutions to the toughest issues you face, making it possible to reach decisions based on accessing every participant's best thinking and greatest hopes.

Getting the Best from Others

Not understanding what motivates each individual, managers offer incentives that are not meaningful, or "encouragement" that backfires and alienates their staff. Doug Harris explains the steps for reaching awareness, managing biases, and "doing unto others as they want to be done unto."

X-Teams

Deborah Ancona challenges the dominant wisdom that effective teams focus internally on the roles, synergies, and collaboration of team members to produce results. Building on twenty-five years of research, she shows that the most successful teams instead focus externally—on customers, competition, and the marketplace—tapping into an expanded knowledge base and skills set to move forward quickly.

How to Manage People Through Continuous Change

Change is now business as usual. But employees are increasingly skeptical about committing to business strategies that are constantly being redefined. Carol Kinsey Goman presents specific methods for communicating your plan and the negative consequences for your team if they don't get on board.

Idea Hunting

Arriving at new ideas does not require genius. Andy Boyton explains that to become an effective idea hunter, be receptive to creative inspiration from unfamiliar or unusual sources.

How Leaders Boost Productivity

Having made significant increases in product quality and customer service, the biggest challenge facing managers today lies in improving the productivity of their organizations. John H. (Jack) Zenger discusses practical methods to help your organization shed its past and raise its standard for higher performance.

Managing with Power

It's one thing to have good ideas—it's another to get them implemented. The ability to get things done in any organization is a critical skill, and a source of advantage. Jeffrey Pfeffer discusses the importance of recognizing when power and influence are critical, understanding where power comes from, and identifying strategies and tactics for the effective use of influence.

Visionary Companies

Dr. Jerry Porras and his colleague Jim Collins created a conceptual framework for managers seeking to build a company of enduring greatness. In this talk, Porras explains how forward-thinking companies adapt to and drive change, and details two fundamental components: an organization's core ideology and its drive for progress.

Life Lessons from the Playing Field

Jim Thompson describes youth sports as an illustration of the teamwork and high achievement that every organization wants to see in its employees. He explains the right way—and the wrong way—to motivate individuals to do their very best, and shares ten valuable leadership lessons gleaned from his experience as a coach and crusader for young athletes.

Leadership Aikido

Leadership skills develop from business experience, but also from the pursuit of self-knowledge. With the command-and-control leader becoming a personality of the past, John O'Neil outlines the emergence of the Aikido-style leader, who works to achieve inner calm when under attack and learns to blend energy with a competitor to move forward.

The Enterprise of the Future

Jim Bramante distills the findings of IBM’s latest Global CEO Study, based on interviews with one thousand CEOs worldwide, to define the Enterprise of the Future.

Managing for Both Bottom and Top Line Performance

Managers have spent the past few years in a bunker mentality, ruled by cost-cutting and bottom-line retrenchment. Now that headcount and expenses have been cut to the bone, attention to the top line must once again reign supreme. As Jeff Rodek explains, your goal must be a company-wide commitment to teamwork and accountability, with the belief that profit is the only effective test of performance.

Managing Innovation

iRobot operated without venture capital and on a break-even basis for eight years, developing a number of products for industry and the military without commercial success. An engineer who minored in business, Angle shares the practical lessons learned from these early failures: from managing a business struggling month-to-month to make payroll, to fostering early collaboration between engineering and marketing, to “rebuilding the plane you are flying” when growth ultimately takes off.

Mindset, Motivation and Leadership

People are fairly evenly divided between those with either a growth or a fixed mindset about intelligence and talent. And leaders’ mindsets, Professor Dweck shows, influence their ability to grow on the job and to develop successful teams. Leaders with a growth mindset (who assume talents can be developed) place high value on learning, are open to feedback, and are confident in their ability to cultivate their own and others’ abilities. Leaders with a fixed mindset (who assume basic talents are carved in stone) place greater value on looking smart and are less likely to believe that they or others can change.

Innovation Management and Incentives Design

Innovation generates value when supported by an infrastructure that provides discipline without killing passion. To accomplish this, management systems for innovation require careful design. Antonia Dávila provides guidance for setting goals and incentives that ensure your strategies foster, rather than stifle, the creative strength of your organization.