Blog Post: Summer Reading List, Part 2: Visionary Leader’s Edition

Last month, we introduced you to several books that had the potential to lift your career into the stratosphere through maverick, outside-the-box thinking. Today, we introduce you to several more books, this time centered around the theme of training yourself to think like a visionary leader.

Check these titles out and supercharge your career! All of them are being discussed this year at the Alumni Association through our internal staff book club.

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You, by John C. Maxwell

Want to make the projects and organizations you lead successful? Learn the rules of the managerial road with this introduction to such laws of leadership as the Law of Solid Ground, the Law of Navigation and the Law of Respect. Maxwell combines insights learned from his 40-plus years of leadership successes and mistakes with observations from the worlds of business, politics, sports, religion, and military conflict.

Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service, by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles
Want to make the most important person in your business happy—your customer? Then this is the book for you.
Written in the parable style of The One Minute Manager, “Raving Fans” uses a charming story about a golfer and his (male) fairy godmother to teach how to define a vision, learn what a customer really wants, institute effective systems, and make Raving Fan Service a constant feature--not just another program of the month.
The book includes tips and techniques that can help anyone create a revolution in any workplace—and turn their customers into raving, spending fans.

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable, by Seth Godin
Godin asserts that you can stand out in your industry by being remarkable—like a purple cow in a pasture filled with the black-and-white variety—or you can be invisible. “Purple Cow” shows readers how to chuck old ideas about what works in marketing, product development and service delivery and how find their business’s inner purple bovine, one which is organic to the enterprise and not just slapped on for effect. Godin cites examples from members of what he considers to be a remarkable purple herd—including HBO, Starbucks, JetBlue, and many others. A challenging read for challenging times!

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies , by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras

Collins, author of Good to Great, is joined in writing this book by Jerry Porras, his colleague at the Stanford's Graduate School of Business. The two authors bust the prevailing myth about “visionary companies”—that success is due to a great product and/or a charismatic leader who pushes the company into the future.
What Collins and Porras found in their research was that the companies they studied tended to be characterized by a total lack of an initial business plan or key idea and by remarkably self-effacing leaders. What the companies did share was this: an almost cult-like devotion to a "core ideology" or identity, and active indoctrination of employees into "ideologically commitment" to the company.
Collins and Porras cut through the ever-growing thicket of management buzzwords and fads to discover timeless qualities that have consistently distinguished outstanding companies.