Book Summaries

What Happens Now? shows leaders how to reinvent themselves in order to attain personal growth and organizational success by inspiring people, nurturing relationships, energizing teams, grooming successors and influencing stakeholders.

There are countless leadership books, but how many will actually help a Taco Bell shift manager, a Fortune 500 CEO, a new entrepreneur, or anyone in between? David Novak's new book Taking People with You will. Novak knows that managers and leaders can make things happen by one skill: getting people on their side. He offers a step-by-step guide to setting big goals, getting people to work together, blowing past your targets, and celebrating after you shock the skeptics. And then doing...

In companies, fear can take many forms: fear of not meeting a deadline, of not getting a bonus, of losing decision rights and respect. Fear compels employees and managers to protect themselves by creating seemingly impenetrable barriers fortified by rules and practices that benefit one group while harming others. By learning from the real-world lessons in this book, leaders, managers, and employees can overcome the barriers that plague their company. The results promise to be transformational.

For more than 20 years, Ohio State University Professor Paul C. Nutt has studied how decisions are made and has written extensively about what works, what doesn’t and why. His key finding in all this work is startling: Decisions fail half of the time. Organizations spend vast sums of money and commit significant amounts of resources without realizing any benefits. Nutt writes that failures can be traced to three blunders and seven traps that ensnare decision makers; avoiding these blunders and t