Friday Is for Freebies: Three Top Business Books
In Monday’s post, I wrote about three business books I regularly recommend to pastors. Today, I’m giving away a set of those three books.
First is The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. The measure of the executive, Drucker reminds readers, is the ability to “get the right things done.” This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results.
Drucker identifies five practices essential to business effectiveness that can, and must, be learned:
Managing time
Choosing what to contribute to the organization
Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for best effect
Setting the right priorities
Knitting all of them together with effective decision-making
Ranging widely through the annals of business and government, Drucker demonstrates the distinctive skill of the executive and offers fresh insights into old and seemingly obvious business situations.
Also included is Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.
The final book included is Leading Change by John P. Kotter. Kotter’s now-legendary eight-step process for managing change with positive results has become the foundation for leaders and organizations across the globe. By outlining the process every organization must go through to achieve its goals, and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work. Leading Change is widely recognized as his seminal work and is an important precursor to his newer ideas on acceleration published in Harvard Business Review.
To be eligible to win, answer the following question:
In your opinion, who is the best leader alive today??
The deadline to enter is midnight CDT this Saturday. We will draw one winner from the entries on Monday morning.
By entering, you acknowledge and accept the terms of the promotion.