The 2017 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards: Leadership & Strategy Book Giveaway
November 07, 2017
This week, we are giving away what we have deemed to be the five best books on leadership and strategy published in 2017.
We announced the longlist for the 2017 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year this morning, and will be dedicating our giveaways for the rest of the year to the books on the list.
We separate the books into eight categories, and recognize five books in each. We'll start this week with the Leadership & Strategy category, which are listed below along with the publisher's description of the book. (Check our "Inside the Longlist" post for our General Manager Sally Haldorson's take on these books.) Each of this week's winners will receive all five books in the category.
Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing - Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne, Hachette Books
Blue Ocean Shift is the essential follow up to Blue Ocean Strategy, the classic and 3.6 million copy global bestseller by world-renowned professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.
Drawing on more than a decade of new work, Kim and Mauborgne show you how to move beyond competing, inspire your people's confidence, and seize new growth, guiding you step-by-step through how to take your organization from a red ocean crowded with competition to a blue ocean of uncontested market space. By combining the insights of human psychology with practical market-creating tools and real-world guidance, Kim and Mauborgne deliver the definitive guide to shift yourself, your team, or your organization to new heights of confidence, market creation, and growth. They show why nondisruptive creation is as important as disruption in seizing new growth.
Blue Ocean Shift is packed with all-new research and examples of how leaders in diverse industries and organizations made the shift and created new markets by applying the process and tools outlined in the book. Whether you are a cash-strapped startup or a large, established company, nonprofit or national government, you will learn how to move from red to blue oceans in a way that builds your people's confidence so that they own and drive the process.
With battle-tested lessons learned from successes and failures in the field, Blue Ocean Shift is critical reading for leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs alike. You'll learn what works, what doesn't, and how to avoid the pitfalls along the way. This book will empower you to succeed as you embark on your own blue ocean journey. Blue Ocean Shift is indispensable for anyone committed to building a compelling future.
Creating Great Choices: A Leader's Guide to Integrative Thinking by Jennifer Riel & Roger Martin, Harvard Business Review Press
Move Beyond Trade-Off Thinking.
A practical four-step methodology for any leader or manager facing a tough choice, and for creating integrative solutions to big, complex and pressing problems.When it comes to our hardest choices, it can seem as though making trade-offs is inevitable. But what about those crucial times when accepting the obvious trade-off just isn't good enough? What do we do when the choices in front of us don't get us what we need? In those cases, rather than choosing the least worst option, we can use the models in front of us to create a new and superior answer. This is integrative thinking.
First introduced by world-renowned strategic thinker Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind, integrative thinking is an approach to problem solving that uses opposing ideas as the basis for innovation. Now, in Creating Great Choices, Martin and his longtime thinking partner Jennifer Riel vividly illustrate how integrative thinking works, and how to do it.
The book includes fresh stories of successful integrative thinkers that will demystify the process of creative problem solving, as well as practical tools and exercises to help readers engage with the ideas. And it lays out the authors' four-step methodology for creating great choices, which can be applied in virtually any context. The result is a replicable, thoughtful approach to finding a "third and better way" to make important choices in the face of unacceptable trade-offs.
Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Harper Business
Microsoft’s CEO tells the inside story of the company’s continuing transformation, tracing his own personal journey from a childhood in India to leading some of the most significant technological changes in the digital era. As much a humanist as engineer and executive, Nadella concludes with his vision for the coming wave of intelligent technologies and a distinct call to action for leaders everywhere.
Hit Refresh is about individual change, about the transformation happening inside of Microsoft and the technology that will soon impact all of our lives—the arrival of the most exciting and disruptive wave of technology humankind has experienced: artificial intelligence, mixed reality and quantum computing.
It’s about how people, organizations, and societies can and must transform “hit refresh” in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas and continued relevance and renewal. At its core, it’s about us humans and how our one unique quality—empathy—will become ever more valuable in a world where technological advancement will disrupt the status quo as never before.
Satya Nadella explores a fascinating childhood before immigrating to the U.S. and how he learned to lead along the way. He then shares his meditations as sitting CEO—one who is mostly unknown following the brainy Bill Gates and energetic Steve Ballmer. He tells the inside story of how a company rediscovered its soul—transforming everything from culture to their fiercely competitive landscape and industry partnerships. Nadella concludes with his vision for the coming wave of technology and by exploring the potential impact to society and delivering call to action for world leaders.
“Ideas excite me,” Nadella explains. “Empathy grounds and centers me.” Hit Refresh is a reflection, meditations and series of recommendations presented as algorithms from a principled, deliberative leader searching for improvement—for himself, for a storied company and for society.
Lead Right for Your Company's Type: How to Connect Your Culture with Your Customer Promise by William E. Schneider, AMACOM
Because one size does not fit all.
From turf wars to low morale, most companies attempt to cure what ails them with the latest management fad—and fail. They are treating the symptoms while ignoring the true problem.
Success starts with knowing the kind of business you're really in. Lead Right for Your Company's Type argues that every enterprise falls into one of four categories as dictated by their customer promise: customized (e.g. ad agency), predictable and dependable (e.g utility company), benevolent (e.g. educational institution), and best in class (e.g. high-tech company like Apple). When leadership practices fit the customer promise and company type, the organization thrives. But apply the wrong practices and the mismatch pulls the enterprise apart. Example after example exposes the fallout:
- A small arts college destabilized by top-down rules designed for a predictable and dependable company
- A mid-tier retail chain derailed by leadership demands for superior products instead of reliably low prices
- A software giant brought to its knees by prioritizing profits over innovation
Insightful and practical, the book's proven tools and five-step process will help you diagnose your organization's ills—and stop them at their source.
The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible by Josh Sullivan & Angela Zutavern, PublicAffairs
The Mathematical Corporation is the breakthrough book leaders have been waiting for, showing how the synergistic combination of human ingenuity and machine cognition takes the guesswork out of decision-making and leads to new products, services, and solutions that reshape business and society.
The most powerful weapon in business today is the alliance between the mathematical smarts of machines and the imaginative human intellect of great leaders. Together they make the mathematical corporation, the business model of the future.
We are at a once-in-a-decade breaking point similar to the quality revolution of the 1980s and the dawn of the internet age in the 1990s: leaders must transform how they run their organizations, or competitors will bring them crashing to earth—often overnight.
Mathematical corporations—the organizations that will master the future—will outcompete high-flying rivals by merging the best of human ingenuity with machine intelligence. While smart machines are weapon number one for organizations, leaders are still the drivers of breakthroughs. Only they can ask crucial questions to capitalize on business opportunities newly discovered in oceans of data.
This dynamic combination will make possible the fulfillment of missions that once seemed out of reach, even impossible to attain. Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern's extraordinary examples include the entrepreneur who upended preventive health care, the oceanographer who transformed fisheries management, and the pharmaceutical company that used algorithm-driven optimization to boost vaccine yields.
Together they offer a profoundly optimistic vision for a dazzling new phase in business, and a playbook for how smart companies can manage the essential combination of human and machine.