Vital Friends: The People You Can't Afford to Live Without

John William Gardner

On Leadership

In this insightful classic, John Gardner unpacks what it means to be a leader, stressing the importance of dispersed leadership and a primary understanding of leadership as applied across all sectors of society. "A masterpiece."--Walter F. Ulmer, Jr., President and CEO, Center for Creative Leadership Leaders today are familiar with the demand that they come forward with a new vision. But it is not a matter of fabricating a new vision out of whole cloth. A vision relevant for us today will build on values deeply embedded in human history and in our own tradition. It is not as though we come to the task unready. Men and women from the beginning of history have groped and struggled for various pieces of the answer. The materials out of which we build the vision will be the moral strivings of the species, today and in the distant past. Most of the ingredients of a vision for this country have been with us for a long time. As the poet wrote, "The light we sought is shining still." That we have failed and fumbled in some of our attempts to achieve our ideals is obvious. But the great ideas still beckon--freedom, equality, justice, the release of human possibilities. The vision is to ...

John P. Kotter

Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management

John P. Kotter shows with compelling evidence what leadership really means today, why it is rarely associated with larger-than-life charismatics, precisely how it is different from management, and yet why both good leadership and management are essential for business success, especially for complex organizations operating in changing environments. The critics who despair of the coming of imaginative, charismatic leaders to replace the so-called manipulative caretakers of American corporations don't tell us much about what leadership actually is, or, for that matter, what management is either. Leadership, Kotter clearly demonstrates, is for the most part not a god-like figure transforming subordinates into superhumans, but is in fact a process that creates change -- a process which often involves hundreds or even thousands of "little acts of leadership" orchestrated by people who have the profound insight to realize this. Building on his landmark study of 15 successful general managers, Kotter presents detailed accounts of how senior and middle managers in major corporations, in close concert with colleagues and subordinates, were able to create a leadership process that put into ...

Nancy Mingus

Alpha Teach Yourself Project Management in 24 Hours

A structured tutorial for learning how to organize, estimate, build and manage a complex project. -- Excellent use of the proven Teach Yourself in 24 Hours format, giving readers a one-hour lesson for each major portion of project management. -- Author is an experienced trainer and writer as well as an expert in software and other tool-based methods of project management. -- Covers the project in a chronological fashion going in-depth to each stage including the traditional and technical methods of tracking. Now you don't have to be an MBA or advanced specialist to learn the principles of project management. Alpha Teach Yourself Project Management in 24 Hours gives readers a lesson-by-lesson approach to learning the ins and outs of budgets, team-building and tracking. Recognizing that most projects are managed electronically or online today, the author also shows better and more efficient ways to track and achieve goals.