Stanford Executive Briefings: Leadership

Executive Leadership Collection

Strong leadership is critical to the success of any enterprise, and the most powerful value-based leadership styles are powerful. Effective leaders frequently use everyday actions to model the traits that reflect the values of their organizations. This 10-DVD set presents invaluable skills and leadership techniques from some of the brightest thought leaders in modern business.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sustainability Matters

With consumers favoring products and services that are better for the environment, companies are finding competitive advantage in the environmental impact of their activities.

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.

The Inspiring Leader

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

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 to employees both the WIIFM benefits of your plan and the negative consequences for the viability of your team if they don't get on board.

How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People

Dr. Charles O'Reilly argues that the source of sustained competitive advantage already exists within every organization. O'Reilly's prescription for an overheated labor market: abandon the obsession with hiring high-priced stars, instead motivating ordinary people to build a great company and achieve extraordinary results.

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.

Building a Winning Team

Jon Gordon’s strategies for successfully uniting teams build on the premise that communication is key.

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.

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.

Liberating Leadership: How to Build a Radical Freedom-of-Initiative Organization

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.

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.

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 Brady 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Leadership in a Wired World

Tim Sanders explains his advocacy of compassion in business, and helps you understand why genuine kindness and caring make bottom-line sense. Sanders believes that, in a wired world, nice guys finish first.

Structuring Strategic Business Alliances

Strategic alliances and other collaborative inter-firm agreements have become commonplace in today's economy. Companies are moving away from large, control-based structures to more flexible and relationship-oriented partnering. With emphasis on the three phases of the Alliance Life Cycle, Dr. Shavers explores the ingrediants to successful partnerships, focusing on the impact the alliance will have on each partner's bottom line.

Corporate Legends and Lore

Every organization has its own unique legends and lore that become part of the very fabric of its identity. These corporate stories have tremendous power to increase productivity, implement change, and motivate employees. One good story can accomplish more than a thousand memos.

Frontiers of Excellence

Conventional management wisdom says shareholder needs come first. Mr. Waterman challenges this assumption as he examines the success of companies that elevate the needs of their employees as well as the needs of customers. Organizational arrangement, not clever strategy, is their edge. Looking at some of America's most admired companies, Mr. Waterman shows how these organizational arrangements work and why America is the most productive nation in the world.