Leadership And Management Connecting The Dots

Silicon Valley visionary John Chambers shares the lessons that transformed a dyslexic kid from West Virginia into one of the world's best business leaders and turned a simple router company into a global tech titan. When Chambers joined Cisco in 1991, it was a company with 400 employees, a single product, and about $70 million in revenue. When he stepped down as CEO in 2015, he left a $47 billion tech giant that was the backbone of the internet and a leader in areas from cybersecurity to data center convergence. Along the way, he had acquired 180 companies and turned more than 10,000 employees into millionaires. Widely recognized as an innovator, an industry leader, and one of the world's best CEOs, Chambers has outlasted and outmaneuvered practically every rival that ever tried to take Cisco on--Nortel, Lucent, Alcatel, IBM, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, to name a few. Now Chambers is sharing his unique strategies for winning in a digital world. From his early lessons and struggles with dyslexia in West Virginia to his bold bets and battles with some of the biggest names in tech, Chambers gives readers a playbook on how to act before the market shifts, tap customers for strategy, partner for growth, build teams, and disrupt themselves. He also adapted those lessons to transform government, helping global leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to create new models for growth. As CEO of JC2 Ventures, he's now investing in a new generation of game-changing startups by helping founders become great leaders and scale their companies. Connecting the Dots is destined to become a business classic, providing hard-won insights and critical tools to thrive during the accelerating disruption of the digital age.

The topic of leadership is, undeniably, anything but simple given its multitudinous strategies, styles, and nuances. This book is designed to be a resource guide for readers interested in adopting proven strategies to achieve quality results. Its encyclopedic layout serves to make these complex topics easier to navigate and absorb. It is an exploration of a diverse variety of successful approaches to leadership spanning across business, government, and nonprofit sectors. This guide surveys effective strategies that have been around for decades, while integrating more current constructs based on new and cutting-edge research. Subject-matter experts who provide further and concise viewpoints are cited throughout.

CONNECT THE DOTS "What-So What-Now What" Connect The Dots helps ambitious individuals understand how significant life events impact their lives, leadership style, and competitive performance. Whether you are seeking to improve your life, or attempting to better understand how human behavior determines business behavior, this book provides a conceptual rationale and practical applications for a winning performance. When you Connect the Dots, you are better able to improve competitive performance and build closer interpersonal relationships by understanding how significant life events impact mindset, attitudes and behavior.

This book is an essential guide or foundational toolkit for anyone who is involved in the process of developing, offering or selling any type of product or service. Based on how to surf on the waves of innovation and the principle of “form follows function” (System Architecture), it introduces and connects concepts like Market Understanding, Design Thinking, Design to Value, Modularization and Agility. It introduces readers to the essence of these main frameworks and provides a toolkit that explains both theoretically and practically when and how to utilize which one. The methods and processes described in this book have all been successfully tested in many industries. They apply in today’s market context of high uncertainty, complexity and turbulence, where innovation and disruption are essential. Readers will find answers to two fundamental questions: How can we implement an innovation process and environment that are conducive to successful product design? And, if our products fail to appeal to customers, how can we achieve a major turn-around with regard to product development? A wealth of examples and case studies help readers to benefit from the authors’ broad professional experience. Further, lessons learned and conceptual summaries provide valuable shortcuts to the methods and tools discussed. For today’s CEOs, enabling innovation is one of THE most complex leadership tasks. But innovation is not about theory and nice buzzwords. It’s about succeeding in the real world. This ‘hands-on’ book connects the dots and introduces the reader to some of the most relevant ideas and pragmatic concepts fitting today’s business reality. Dr. Robert Neuhauser, Executive VP and Global Head People and Leadership Development, Siemens At the most fundamental level this book brings order to chaos. It sets different and highly relevant design approaches into a complementary picture, rather than presenting them as competing ways of solving the same problem. Product designers, managers, consultants, scholars and students will surely have this valuable book within reach on a daily basis. Olivier L. de Weck, Ph.D – MIT Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems, Editor-in-Chief Systems Engineering

Feeling guilty about not networking enough? Stop! You can learn how to network effectively without attending networking events, collecting business cards, or getting a lot of LinkedIn followers. How? By learning how to Connect the Dots. Written by Inga Carboni, Ph.D., Connect the Dots is a fun, fast-paced, and fact-based book for working professionals seeking to take the next step in their careers. The truth is that networking is not about managing impressions or projecting your personal brand. Effective networkers build, nurture, and leverage relationships, real relationships built on genuine connection. When done correctly, networking isn’t sleazy or manipulative. Instead, it’s empowering — for you, for all the people you know, and for all the people they know. Connect the Dots: How to Build, Nurture, and Leverage Your Network to Achieve Your Personal and Professional Goals offers a combination of personal stories, business anecdotes, self-assessments, exercises, and concrete guidelines grounded in the latest scientific research. Connect the Dots focuses on developing your personal power and leadership skills by creating effective networks and networking effectively. This book is designed to benefit everyone, from young professionals to senior managers to human resource professionals to C-suite executives. Unleash the power of your network by learning how to connect the dots to make your network work for you. Praise for Connect the Dots: "In Connect the Dots, Inga Carboni has accomplished an exceptional blend of findings housed in research with pragmatic insights that can be put into action immediately. The richness of her stories and examples will resonate with all as she makes the book a delight to read. Whether approaching the topic from a senior executive perspective with a focus on what should be done in your organization or from an individual standpoint in terms of actions you could personally take, Connect the Dots is one for the ages." ~ Rob Cross Edward A Madden Professor, Global Leadership, Babson College

This book helps business leaders see how employees, companies, and missions all interact with each other, as well as with society at large, in systems and subsystems at various levels. It helps leaders learn how to connect the dots, becoming customer-centric in everything they do and then spreading the same goals down to their supply chains. The book discusses what is, and what is not, leadership, covering such topics as statistics-based management, process-improvement, and human resources. The author accomplishes this through a blend of Lean culture and managerial theory, as well as his military experience. In addition, the author contrasts many opposing subjects, such as efficiencies of scale versus efficiencies of build, automation versus process improvement, process innovation versus product innovation, technical versus tactical proficiency, and pull versus push production. With most books focused on Lean initiatives, there is a tremendous amount of benefit involved in creating customer value while reducing waste, but this book takes a holistic approach, blending in modern managerial theory, team leadership skills, and economics. The result is a book that changes how the reader approaches business. Essentially, the purpose of this book is to blend modern management theories with the culture of Lean (and perhaps a sprinkling of economics) to show current business leaders how to create organizations that are as customer-oriented and highly efficient in delivering value as possible. If one thinks of each role in an organization as a spot on an assembly line, where everything each person does creates output someone else uses, the question becomes whether or not each person’s activities maximize the effectiveness of others. Do we, as organizations, set ourselves up for success or for failure? Most companies, if they answer honestly, would say, "A little bit of both." This book is about helping those companies improve.

You are not perfect. Never have been, never will be. And no matter how much experience you gain, how long you contemplate a decision, or who you seek counsel from, you will still make the occasional management misstep--a few of them. Guaranteed. And if you stay in management long enough, you will undoubtedly ask yourself questions such as:• Why do I sometimes feel threatened by my best people? • How do I remain cool in hot situations? • How can I ensure people hear what I say? • How can I cope more effectively with change? • Why have I lost so many of my best employees to the competition?The question is, will you wait for these mistakes to happen and then stay awake at night dwelling on these questions, or will you address them proactively so that you may discover the right solutions to apply now? Clinical and business psychologist Nicole Lipkin knows the stresses leaders face. In What Keeps Leaders Up at Night, she examines the common mistakes leaders make with their people. Featuring illuminating examples and exercises, this sleep-friendly book shines a bright light into the dark corners where all leaders struggle with their own shortcomings and presents smart solutions to the problems that arise as a result.

This ground-breaking book comprehensively addresses an area of major and sustained concern: how to improve the use of research evidence and enhance educators’ research engagement as a route to the improvement of educational practice. It focuses on the topic of knowledge brokering and mobilization in education, and its role in fostering evidence-informed practice. Divided into three sections, each addressing a different role of knowledge mobilizers, the book is based in clear evidentiary grounding. The chapters: Explore payoffs and challenges of connecting research to practice Provide recommendations in relation to practice and decision-making Present organized and professionally-enhancing tools, strategies and insights Written by internationally-recognized leaders and expert contributors, The Role of Knowledge Brokers in Education brings together extensive and global perspectives in an accessible yet comprehensive volume. This book is an invaluable resource for educational leaders worldwide who are interested in using or generating research for school improvement, as well as researchers, academics, and students in schools of education.