Leading With Purpose

Imagine every employee...galvanized around a common vision and a shared purpose, treating the company as if it were their own, clearly understanding their specific role, managing the day-to-day chaos, and staying focused on the goals that matter most. Now imagine being the transformational and visionary leader of this company. Leading with Purpose gives you the blueprint to make this happen. It steps you through the creation of a simple, but powerful "one-page" plan and then shows you how to use it to develop an engaged and empowered team that collectively drives success, solves problems, and manages change. The book’s one-page plan coordinates with the Leading with Purpose online platform (www.leadwithpurpose.com) to which all readers get a free trial.

An exploration of corporate purpose - a company's expressed overriding reason for existing - and its effect upon strategy, executive leadership, employees, and ultimately, on competitive performance. It argues that the path to financial success lies in a customer-focused corporate purpose.

Discover why purpose and passion is key in giving your organization a reason to believe in itself and it’s success. Internationally recognized speaker, executive coach, writer, and leader John Baldoni believes it’s up to those at the top to bring meaning to employees’ day-to-day work. In this encouraging guide, he’ll show you what it takes to build a company of committed employees from your current workforce--using nothing more than a toolkit of powerful leadership skills. Featuring illuminating stories, interviews, and profiles of leaders from a variety of fields, Lead with Purpose will help all leaders take their organizations to the next level. You’ll learn how to: instill your team with a sense of ownership; spotlight your organization’s mission; encourage resourcefulness and flexibility; harness creativity and the desire to succeed; transform a shared vision into real results; and develop the next generation of leaders. At successful organizations, people know what they do and why they do it. With these practical tips and applicable techniques, you’ll not only improve your leadership skills--you’ll bring a sense of purpose to your workplace that produces incredible outcomes.

Drawing on ten years of experience working with more than 10,000 executives from companies around the globe, Nick Craig takes you on a revelatory journey to understand your purpose, find clarity and focus, and lead with inspiration. When uncovered, purpose becomes our most fundamental guiding principle. Explaining where true purpose lies and demystifying where it doesn't, Craig offers the methods through which anyone can find their purpose. He identifies three pathways that will assess where you are with your purpose and where you should be going. Illustrated by case studies of leaders from all walks of life and industries, Craig shares their unique stories to show how top leaders are energized by their purpose, finding in it the confidence they need to properly evaluate high-stakes decisions and take the optimal action. The best leaders access their purpose especially when facing the unknown, drawing on the source of it to energize themselves. Purpose also redefines their relationships to stress, allowing them to thrive where others just survived, and to postpone momentary, fleeting rewards in favor of leaving a sustained, meaningful impact. Accessible, methodical, and eminently practical, Leading from Purpose offers the comprehensive toolbox with which everyone -- whether a c-suite executive of behind-the-scenes office worker -- can live out their purpose and achieve success on their own terms. If you find yourself in an organization that is struggling to live its purpose, Craig's insights on how to bring your purpose and the organization's purpose into the same room at the same time is game-changing and will redefine your life and career.

Profit doesn't drive purpose. Purpose drives profit. We made some incorrect assumptions about work and those assumptions are killing us. We allowed a narrative that is solely about earnings to replace what we know to be true about human motivation. Human beings are hardwired to seek purpose, but according to data, most people don't feel a sense of purpose in their work. Work has become a grind, an endless series of tasks that lack meaning. Building upon her bestseller Selling with Noble Purpose, leadership expert Lisa Earle McLeod tackles the employee engagement crisis by showing leaders how to put workplace meaning front and center. McLeod, whose clients include organizations like Google, Hootsuite, and Roche, asserts that many organizations are unconsciously squandering their greatest asset—their people's passion. By putting profit before purpose, organizations eroded the very thing that makes a business great. The narrative of profit, earnings, and bonuses was supposed to improve employee performance, but it had the opposite effect. It stripped the joy and meaning from work in ways that have a chilling effect on morale, performance, and ultimately profit. In this new book, McLeod shows leaders how to: Win the hearts and minds of employees, clients, and stakeholders through a Noble Sales Purpose Reframe your approach to metrics so that they accelerate performance Create a tribe of True Believers who drive revenue and do honorable work People want to make money and make a difference. Leading with Noble Purpose shows leaders how to do both.

What enables some talented people to rise to the top and live their full ambitions at work and in life, while others stop short? In 2007, Joanna Barsh led a team at McKinsey & Company to answer that very question. In the process, they uncovered what distinguishes leaders who are successful from those who achieve true greatness, developing an approach called Centered Leadership. They drew on research from across the academic fields of leadership, organization behavior, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and positive psychology. In addition, Barsh interviewed over 160 leaders from many fields – including business, government and the arts – and from many countries. With quantitative research, the team learned that these leaders have mastered practices to find their balance in the midst of chaos and lead from their most resourceful selves, unleashing the potential of others. In 2009, Johanne Lavoie joined to lead development of programs that help executives build these capabilities. Their research and development work continues as more and more leaders experience Centered Leadership. In the business bestseller, How Remarkable Women Lead, Barsh described Centered Leadership’s five capabilities and the research that underpins it. Here, with colleague Johanne Lavoie, Barsh provides a practical, actionable field guide for implementation. In Centered Leadership, Barsh and Lavoie will guide you through the Centered Leadership program. You’ll find the interactive tools, exercises, and practices that have helped the men and women participants in Centered Leadership programs gain the skills, courage and confidence to lead. And, along the way, you’ll read inspiring stories of remarkable men and women leaders who demonstrate the power of these skills in action. Those early in their careers will learn how to use these skills to explore their passions and accelerate their professional development. Those forming families will be able to use them to reconcile manage work and life to get the most out of both. And those who have already achieved success will be able use these practices to reach their next leadership horizon. No matter what stage you are currently at in your career, or what level of leadership you aspire to, this book will equip you with the tools to unlock your own Centered Leader and achieve more positive impact at work and outside it.

“We are at a crossroads: either we can try to prop up the old, broken marketing model, or we can create a new model, one that is fit for the unique challenges of today.” —From Good Is the New Cool Marketing has an image problem. Media-savvy millennials, and their younger Gen Z counterparts, no longer trust advertising, and they demand increased social responsibility from their brands—while still insisting on cutting-edge products with on-trend design. As always, brands need to be cool—but now they need to be good, too. It’s a tall order, and with new technology empowering consumers to bypass advertisements altogether, it won’t be long before the old, advertising-based marketing model goes the way of the major label. If only there was a new model, one that allowed companies to address environmental, civic, and economic issues in a way that grew their brand and business, while giving back to society, and re-branding branding as a powerful force for good. Enter Good is The New Cool, a bold new manifesto from marketing experts Afdhel Aziz and Bobby Jones. In provocative, whip-smart, and streetwise style, they take aim at conventional marketing, posing the questions few have had the vision and courage to ask: If the system is broken, how can we fix it? Rather than sinking money into advertising, why not create a new model, in which great marketing optimizes life? With seven revolutionary new principles—from “Treat People as Citizens, Not Consumers,” to “Lead with the Cool”—and insights and interviews from a new generation of marketers, social entrepreneurs, and leaders of such brands as Zappos, Citibank, The Honest Company, as well as the culture creators working with artists like Lady Gaga, Pharrell, and Justin Bieber, this rule-breaking book is the new business model for the twenty-first century, and a call to action for anyone committed to building a better tomorrow. This visionary book won’t just change your business—it will change the world.

Just as the Wright Brothers combined science and practice to finally realize the dream of flight, Ryan and Robert Quinn combine research and personal experience to demonstrate how to reach a psychological state that elevates us and those around us to greater heights of achievement, integrity, openness, and empathy. It's the psychological equivalent of aerodynamic lift, and it is the fundamental state of leadership. This book draws on recent advances in positive psychology and organizational science to describe four questions that, when asked in any situation, will help us experience the fundamental state of leadership. Engaging personal stories illustrate how the Quinns and others have applied these concepts at work, at home, and in the community. --