President's List of Recommended Business & Leadership Books

The West's Last Chance - by Tony Blankley The West, says author Tony Blankley in this shocking new book, is down to its last chance. Within our lifetimes, Europe could become Eurabia: a continent overwhelmed by militant Islam that poses a greater threat to the United States than even Nazi Germany did. In The West’s Last Chance, Blankley shows how that could happen—and what we must do to prevent it. In The West’s Last Chance, you’ll learn: · What really happens if Islamist terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction—it’s worse, and more likely, than you think · How Europe is already well on its way to being a launching pad for Islamist terrorism · Why Europe’s plummeting birthrates could wreak huge upheavals on the Continent—and how the United States could face a similar fate · What’s holding our government back from fighting the Islamist threat to the best of its ability · Why the U.S. has ignored the lessons of World War II—lessons that could hold the secret to winning the War on Terror · How liberalism degenerated from the war-winning policies of FDR to an ideology of Western suicide Tony Blankley asks the hard questions—and gives the straight answers—that our country needs to hear. Frightening, provocative, and instructive, The West’s Last Chance is the most important political book of the year. It will change the way we think about—and fight—the War on Terror. BUY HERE!

Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right - by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan From Publisher's Weekly: On the heels of their business bestseller Execution, retired Honeywell chairman and CEO Bossidy and corporate guru Charan take a step back and focus on the more fundamental issue of figuring out what to execute in the first place. The message is simple ("relentless realism"), and their solution is a return to the "ancient analytical tool" of a three-part business model that includes external realities (such as customer demand and industry conditions), financial targets (such as cash flow and revenue growth) and internal realities (such as operational and workforce capabilities). Bossidy and Charan use that model to analyze how companies such as EMC, Cisco & Sun reacted to the meltdown of the high-tech sector, and how Home Depot built efficiency  and Thomson Corp. restructured its focus. BUY HERE!

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't - by Jim Collins Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In this book Collins, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11--including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo--and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Good to Great is one of those books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come. --Harry C. Edwards  BUY HERE!

Steeling America's Future: A CEO's Call to Arms: Saving Manufacturing through Free Trade - by Dan DiMicco Dan DiMicco is Chairman, President, and CEO of Nucor Corporation, the world's largest recycler and the largest U.S. steel producer. He has emerged as a national leader in the movement to create a comprehensive agenda to restore strength and growth to American manufacturing. He has spearheaded a series of town hall meetings across the county to broaden awareness and spur political action to implement reform to international trade and domestic areas such as the American regulatory, legal, and health care systems. DiMicco continues to be a forceful advocate for returning manufacturing industries to a position of prominence in the American economic system. BUY HERE!

101 Things About Associations We Must Change - by "Five Independent Thinkers" "We have always done it that way" is no longer a viable leadership philosophy for associations. The long-term growth and success of these organizations depends on their ability to innovate, and this book explores a wide variety of issues and ideas that should be the basis for meaningful dialogue about how to make that happen. By challenging association leaders to change the way they think, lead and run their associations, the authors hope to spark a genuine renaissance of associations in the 21st century. The Five Independent Thinkers are Jeff De Cagna, David Gammel, Jamie Notter, Mickie Rops, and Amy Smith. BUY HERE!

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century - by Thomas L. Friedman The World Is Flat is Thomas L. Friedman's account of the great changes taking place in our time, as lightning-swift advances in technology and communications put people all over the globe in touch as never before-creating an explosion of wealth in India and China, and challenging the rest of us to run even faster just to stay in place. This updated and expanded edition features more than a hundred pages of fresh reporting and commentary, drawn from Friedman's travels around the world and across the American heartland-from anyplace where the flattening of the world is being felt. From ThomasLFriedman.com. BUY HERE!

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful! - by Marshall Goldsmith From Publisher's Weekly: Goldsmith, an executive coach to the corporate elite, pinpoints 20 bad habits that stifle already successful careers as well as personal goals like succeeding in marriage or as a parent. Most are common behavioral problems, such as speaking when angry, which even the author is prone to do when dealing with a teenage daughter's belly ring. Though Goldsmith deals with touchy-feely material more typical of a self-help book—such as learning to listen or letting go of the past—his approach to curing self-destructive behavior is much harder-edged. For instance, he does not suggest sensitivity training for those prone to voicing morale-deflating sarcasm. His advice is to stop doing it. To stimulate behavior change, he suggests imposing fines (e.g., $10 for each infraction), asserting that monetary penalties can yield results by lunchtime. While Goldsmith's advice applies to everyone, the highly successful audience he targets may be the least likely to seek out his book without a direct order from someone higher up. As he points out, they are apt to attribute their success to their bad behavior. Still, that may allow the less successful to gain ground by improving their people skills first. BUY HERE!

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - by Doris Kearns Goodwin Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln's political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president. This brilliant multiple biography and New York Times bestseller is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history. From doriskearnsgoodwin.com. BUY HERE!

Savage Peace Hope and Fear in America: 1919 - by Ann Hagedorn Savage Peace is the bold story of America in the watershed year of 1919, a startling time when the nation’s struggles eerily resembled ours today and when the intense clash of hope and fear defined modern America. Written with the sweep of an epic novel and grounded in extensive research into contemporary documents, Savage Peace is a striking portrait of American democracy under stress. It is the extraordinary story of a time in our nation’s history when Americans worried about terrorism and were deeply divided over the issues of domestic spying, free speech, immigration and U.S. intervention abroad. From savagepeace.com. BUY HERE!

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant - by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne For the past twenty-five years the field of strategy has focused principally on how to build competitive advantages to beat the competition within established market boundaries. While important, with supply exceeding demand in more and more industries this often leads to a red ocean of bloody competition. Instead of battling rivals, companies need to go beyond this. They need to create blue oceans of uncontested market space to prosper in the future. This article addresses the following key questions: What makes the creation of blue oceans increasingly imperative? How can companies create blue oceans in an opportunity-maximizing risk-minimizing way? Why has the field of strategy to date paid scant attention to how to reconstruct market boundaries to open up blue oceans of uncontested market space? From insead.edu. BUY HERE!

No Substitute for Victory: Lessons in Strategy and Leadership from General Douglas McArthur - by Theodore Kinni & Donna Kinni From Publisher's Weekly: With a focus on his role as Japan's proconsul following WWII, this collaboration from spouses Theodore Kinni (Future Focus) and former Kemper Securities v-p Donna Kinni makes good use of MacArthur's military career to elucidate 52 chapter-based business principles. Military history buffs will note that the section on strategy downplays MacArthur's failure to properly organize the evacuation of the Philippines garrison to the Bataan peninsula, and that the discussion of his leadership looks past his mostly loyalty-based minions. But the leavened, level-headed lessons that the Kinnis draw from the career, presented in the kind of clear, even prose absent from so many inspirational business books, make any hagiographic impulses less problematic. When the Kinnis note that "MacArthur's expectations... acted as a performance bond," they are talking less about the man than about the power of taking a firm position of belief and trust when asking someone to do something or collaborating. The book is full of small anecdotes that lead to larger lessons and for which one need not clamp a pipe between one's teeth or hide one's gaze behind aviator sunglasses. BUY HERE!

Performance Without Compromise: How Emerson Consistently Achieves Winning Results - by Charles F. Knight From book cover: In today’s volatile marketplace, it’s rare for firms to last—much less consistently increase earnings—for more than four decades. That’s what makes the story of 115-year-old global manufacturing and technology leader Emerson so remarkable, and so valuable, for today’s managers. How does Emerson do it? And what can other companies learn from its success? Celebrated business leader Charles F. Knight—who was CEO of Emerson for 27 of its 43 consecutive years of increased profits—says the secret behind Emerson’s long-term competitiveness is a dynamic management process carried out with unrelenting discipline. In Performance Without Compromise, Knight breaks down the key components of the Emerson management process in detail for the first time, and shows how this core process enables Emerson to address and overcome major challenges ranging from technological discontinuities to intense global competition. BUY HERE!

Truck Stop Politics: Understanding the Emerging Force of Working Class America - by Tom Millikin From Amazon.com. Nearly 4 million manufacturing jobs have been lost in the United States since 1998. This book examines the key voting block in America that keeps resurfacing with different names - Roosevelt Democrats, Hardhats, and Red-state Republicans - and looks at how the working class is coming to terms with the 21st century realities of globalization. Neither "protectionists" nor "economic nationalists," America's workers are eager to take on the challenges that accompany a global marketplace, and want leaders in D.C. who will be champions for a level playing field on which American workers can compete. They want a chance to show that the age-old American values of hard work, ingenuity, and dedication can still allow us to outcompete anyone in the world. Until one of America's parties steps up to enforce fairness and compliance from our trading "partners" with our existing trade agreements, Washington will continue to see the incumbent party - Republicans or Democrats - turned out, as voters search for a government of the people. BUY HERE!

Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution - by Geoffrey A. Moore From Amazon.com. Deregulation, globalization, and e-commerce are exerting unprecedented pressures on company profits. In this new economic ecosystem, companies must dramatically differentiate from their direct competitors—or risk declining performance and eventual extinction. But how do companies choose the right innovation strategy? Or overcome internal inertia that resists the kind of radical commitments needed to truly set the company’s offers apart? Illustrating his arguments with more than one hundred examples and a full-length case study based on his unprecedented access to Cisco Systems, Moore shows businesses how to meet today’s Darwinian challenges, whether they’re producing commodity products or customized services. For companies whose competitive differentiation to the marketplace is still effective, he demonstrates how innovations in execution can help boost productivity, whether a company is competing in a growth market, a mature market, or even a declining market. For companies in danger of succumbing to competitive pressures, he shows how to overcome inertia by engaging the entire corporate community in an unceasing commitment to innovate and evolve. BUY HERE!

The President, The Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World - by John O'Sullivan Ronald Reagan was too old to be president and too conservative anyway. Margaret Thatcher was not only too conservative she was a woman, and not on anyone's short list to lead Britain's Conservative Party. And the idea of a Polish pope that was truly absurd, especially when the cardinal in question was a strong anti-Communist and defender of orthodoxy when many in the Church and throughout the world believed the future belonged to détente with the Soviets and social liberalism in the West. Not only did Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Karol Wojtyla (the future John Paul II) rise to the top, but all three of them also survived assassination attempts, collaborated in the miraculous peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet Communism, and reinvigorated their respective countries and the West. They were beacons of optimism cutting through the malaise and despair that afflicted 1970s America, strike-ridden and economically moribund post-imperial Britain, and a Catholic Church rocked by social and sexual revolutions. Today, as we face a new and perhaps even deadlier enemy than Soviet Communism, we need to revisit the powerful lessons taught by these three great leaders who revived the faith, prosperity, and freedom of the West. BUY HERE!

The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business is a Stage - by B. Joseph Pine, II & James H. Gilmore Future economic growth lies in the value of experiences and transformations--good and services are no longer enough. We are on the threshold, say authors Pine and Gilmore, of the Experience Economy, a new economic era in which all businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers. The Experience Economy offers a creative, highly original, and yet eminently practical strategy for companies to script and stage the experiences that will transform the value of what they produce. From America Online to Walt Disney, the authors draw from a rich and varied mix of examples that showcase businesses in the midst of creating personal experiences for both consumers and businesses. The authors urge managers to look beyond traditional pricing factors like time and cost, and consider charging for the value of the transformation that an experience offers. Goods and services, say Pine and Gilmore, are no longer enough. Experiences and transformations are the basis for future economic growth, and The Experience Economy is the script from which managers can begin to direct their own transformations. BUY HERE!

The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth - by Fred Reichheld The Ultimate Question, offers the missing link of the metrics that hold employees accountable to generate loyal customers. The key: elevating customer metrics to the same level of rigor and importance as financial metrics like revenue growth or return on equity. The best way to accomplish that? Using one simple question— How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague? From fredreichheld.com BUY HERE!

The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American Living Standards - by Alan Tonelson With the 1990s economic boom over, The Race to the Bottom deftly explores how the United States has entered a no-win global competition in which the countries with the lowest wages, weakest workplace safety laws, and toughest repression of unions win investment from the U.S. and Europe. Tonelson analyzes how the entry of such population giants as China, India, and Mexico into the global market have accelerated the erosion of wages and labor standards around the world. He describes how an ever larger share of this low-wage competition is hitting not just sectors such as apparel and toys, but many of America's highest wage industries such as aerospace and software. Tonelson explains why the reeducation and retraining programs touted by many political leaders offer only false hopes to most U.S. workers, and outlines the real decisions Washington needs to make to ensure long-term prosperity for America and the rest of the world. Updated with a new prologue from the author. From alibris.com. BUY HERE!