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What Happens Now?: Reinvent Yourself as a Leader Before Your Business Outruns You
Few leaders will admit it, but again and again the growth of their organizations outruns their skills. If you're one of those leaders, you know the result: as the job grows bigger than you are, you get disoriented by a world of unfamiliar challenges. You then hit a wall of ineffectiveness, a stall point. Why won't doubling down on the managerial and technical building blocks that have worked before help you out of a stall? Because you invariably neglect the new political, personal, strategic, and interpersonal skills needed to manage yourself and others. Predictable and inevitable, your stall then escalates into a crisis. And the crisis escalates faster the higher you go, since challenges of sophistication dwarf those of complexity at higher organizational levels. What Happens Now?: Reinvent Yourself as a Leader Before Your Business Outruns You, helps you to embrace this reality. It shows how sophistication requires you do things you've never done before –inspire people, nurture relationships, energize teams, groom successors, influence stakeholders. What Happens Now? doesn't dwell on leadership theory and philosophy. As troubleshooters for leaders of all kinds, authors John Hillen and Mark Nevins focus on the most menacing issue they see in organizations every day: leaders who try to solve challenges solely by engineering solutions to more complexity--process mapping, data analytics, information systems, instant reports. The result? Organizational wreckage. Will this be your fate? Can you instead turn game-stopping stalls into personal growth and organization success? Can you struggle through the realization that you're the cause and launch the next phase of your lifelong leadership journey? Can you reinvent yourself? Hillen and Nevins show you how. If the dozens of leaders they profile can overcome these stalls, so can you.
1 pages, Hardcover
Published May 15, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 27, 2020
What Happens Now? By John Hillen and Mark Nevins is an exceptionally well-written book and it turned out to be a lot more than what I had expected. The authors address what is probably the most difficult question for most people to ask: how must we change in order to thrive, grow, and continue to reach new heights? The authors argue, very persuasively, that the answer to this question, in an ever-evolving world, is not in getting better at the skills we already possess, but in acquiring new patterns of behavior and mindsets which are suitable for the new era. Seldom have I read a book that brings together the fundamental messages of many other great books in such harmony, and manages to offer even more! Think of Daniel Goleman’s “Focus, Social Intelligence, and the New Leaders,” of Collins and Hansen’s “Great by Choice,” and of Mihaly Mihalyi’s “The Evolving Self.” “What Happens Now?” is about evolving yourself. It’s about developing empathy. It’s about caring for people and leading them to become better leaders. It’s about changing one’s self in order to thrive despite all odds. And above all, the authors offer solutions, recommendations, and techniques to deal with the seven most important causes of career stalls: situations and circumstances which render your old self irrelevant and call for you to reinvent yourself.
The book asks you to do something very difficult: to change your mindset and behavior. It teaches you how to change from within in order to implement the change you require in the world around you. The book isn’t only for business leaders and corporate executives; instead, it’s for everyone and anyone who finds themselves unable to move forward and accomplish bigger goals in their lives. Here are two paragraphs from the book which sum up what the authors want you to think about:
“If you’re a new leader, we have some specific advice: Don’t just focus on adopting new skills or capabilities. You will also need to abandon-or downplay- old ones. Almost everyone is tempted to stay loyal to their initial trade. You think of yourself as an engineer, or a factory manager, or a financial whiz, or an operations guru, or a marketer, or a scientist. But as you move up, you must reshape your sense of who you are and what you project to others.”
“If you’re like most leaders, you find it easier to embrace complex challenges: you can document them, measure them, and subject them to analysis and data crunching. You can document and capture them in spreadsheets and on organization charts. But you may find it more difficult to discover solutions for problems not easily measured or explained by the “hard” data.”
The book asks you to do something very difficult: to change your mindset and behavior. It teaches you how to change from within in order to implement the change you require in the world around you. The book isn’t only for business leaders and corporate executives; instead, it’s for everyone and anyone who finds themselves unable to move forward and accomplish bigger goals in their lives. Here are two paragraphs from the book which sum up what the authors want you to think about:
“If you’re a new leader, we have some specific advice: Don’t just focus on adopting new skills or capabilities. You will also need to abandon-or downplay- old ones. Almost everyone is tempted to stay loyal to their initial trade. You think of yourself as an engineer, or a factory manager, or a financial whiz, or an operations guru, or a marketer, or a scientist. But as you move up, you must reshape your sense of who you are and what you project to others.”
“If you’re like most leaders, you find it easier to embrace complex challenges: you can document them, measure them, and subject them to analysis and data crunching. You can document and capture them in spreadsheets and on organization charts. But you may find it more difficult to discover solutions for problems not easily measured or explained by the “hard” data.”
November 12, 2021
I want to be clear to my future self, this book is the bridge between being a basic leader and being an outstanding leader. This one is VERY heavily focused on the business world, and I wish they took examples from more than the two or three companies they did. But, it still is a great book to get the ideas rolling of what sets lower management apart from upper, senior, and C-level executives.
To be honest, it isn't very likely someone will read this for the intention the authors put forward. I doubt someone would discover this during a stall in leadership. But, it definitely will help those who are open to learning lessons early so that when stalls occur they can catch them. I guess senior management have these experiences since all the examples are from senior leaders, but I would think that most the lessons are discerned over the years.
To be honest, by the end I was getting a little bored with the book. I flop between a 4-star and a 5-star review on this. What it comes down to is that an amazing leader needs to be self-aware, listening, learning, and adapting accordingly. That's what this book is ultimately saying. The book has tons of practical advice for the numerous ways leadership stalls happen, but if you are constantly aware and adapting you should naturally learn to work through them on your own. Regardless I should read it again to get the nuggets out of it.
To be honest, it isn't very likely someone will read this for the intention the authors put forward. I doubt someone would discover this during a stall in leadership. But, it definitely will help those who are open to learning lessons early so that when stalls occur they can catch them. I guess senior management have these experiences since all the examples are from senior leaders, but I would think that most the lessons are discerned over the years.
To be honest, by the end I was getting a little bored with the book. I flop between a 4-star and a 5-star review on this. What it comes down to is that an amazing leader needs to be self-aware, listening, learning, and adapting accordingly. That's what this book is ultimately saying. The book has tons of practical advice for the numerous ways leadership stalls happen, but if you are constantly aware and adapting you should naturally learn to work through them on your own. Regardless I should read it again to get the nuggets out of it.
July 16, 2020
In dealing with senior leaders I noticed a common thread; leaders invest 99% of the time growing the company and just 1% of their efforts into growing their own personal development. Most leaders want to evolve their leadership skills - they just don’t have the time or insights. “What Happens Now” gives them both time and insights in an engaging, thought-provoking read that offers tools that can be applied quickly. More importantly, it provides a process that leaders can test first and adapt to what works.
My two favorite reads were the" 7 Questions To Ask When Leadership Stalls (and it will) and a great case history on dealing with “When People Don’t Just Get It” (it’s often you who doesn’t get it). Leadership skills like company growth must evolve. This book helps in both ways.
My two favorite reads were the" 7 Questions To Ask When Leadership Stalls (and it will) and a great case history on dealing with “When People Don’t Just Get It” (it’s often you who doesn’t get it). Leadership skills like company growth must evolve. This book helps in both ways.
April 27, 2021
What Happens Now
By John Hillen and Mark Nevins is an amazing read.
Re-reading the book allowed me some deep thoughts:
1. Key part of any business strategy application roadmap or product features is to articulate differences between sophistication and complexity
2. Building team’s leadership for each member up to their potential is key to any organization’s success.
3. Acquiring new skills, patterns of behaviors and reinventing yourself by truly caring for others.
Totally would recommend this book to anyone working towards being a true leader and vested in enabling success for the company they represent.
By John Hillen and Mark Nevins is an amazing read.
Re-reading the book allowed me some deep thoughts:
1. Key part of any business strategy application roadmap or product features is to articulate differences between sophistication and complexity
2. Building team’s leadership for each member up to their potential is key to any organization’s success.
3. Acquiring new skills, patterns of behaviors and reinventing yourself by truly caring for others.
Totally would recommend this book to anyone working towards being a true leader and vested in enabling success for the company they represent.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews