Stanford Executive Briefings: Leadership

The Inspiring Leader

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Value-Based Leadership

Value-based leadership looks to the future rather than the past, addressing growth, innovation and entrepreneurship. Commodity and "big-bet" industries need metrics that take into account the uncertain, yet tremendous, potential of optionality and learning. Without these paradigms, your company may be falling short of its full potential.

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.