Recommended Resources for Executive Career Management
Category:Career Advancement Strategies
MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It and How to Get It Back When You Lose It Hyperion<< Order Now >>
We have all heard the term “Mojo”
and have even felt it at times.
Keeping one’s Mojo going as long as
possible is the goal of everyone who has
been touched by it. In his newest book,
MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It
and How to Get It Back When You Lose It,
Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, a world authority
in helping successful leaders get even
better, unlocks the secrets of Mojo.
Goldsmith describes Mojo as a
“positive spirit toward what we are doing
that starts from the inside and radiates
to the outside.” He has divided his concept
for finding and keeping one’s Mojo
into 14 steps; these steps apply to both
one’s personal and professional Mojo
alike.
Market Your Potential, Not Your Past: How to Build a Career that Works for Your Regardless of What Happens to You AuthorHouse<< Order Now >>
Do you feel stuck in your career? Are you taking interviews for jobs that are below your experience level? Do you feel like you are compromising in your career to get a pay check? In this book, Karen Armon — founder of MarketOne Executive — shows you how to fish in today’s job market streams by finding strategies and tactics that work and realizing success by going where others will not go.
Armon’s book is packed full of worksheets, tips and techniques that are exclusive to the MarketOne Executive™ philosophy. Market Your Potential, Not Your Past shows you how to attract new contacts and recruiters, generate multiple leads and opportunities, and use proven methods to quickly and easily get you moving.
Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace With Today's Nontraditional Workforce Harvard Business School Press<< Order Now >>
What do you get when you combine a shrinking pool of skilled labor; non-traditional family structures; an increasing number of women in the workforce; the changing expectations of men; the evolving needs of Generations X and Y; and the increasing impact of technology? You get an antiquated workplace model that can't sustain itself.
As a result, Deloitte has pioneered the concept of Mass Career Customization, which tackled the question, "If you can customize products and services, why not your career?"
In their book, co-authors Cathleen Benko, Deloitte's vice chairman and chief talent officer, and Anne Weisberg, senior advisor to Deloitte's Women's Initiative, take open-minded organizations through the rationale and steps toward creating work/life and retention solutions that reflect the needs of a new workforce.
What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful Hyperion<< Order Now >>
"Get out your personal notepad. Instead of your usual 'To Do' list, start your 'To Stop' list. By the end of this book, your list may grow," warns Marshall Goldsmith in What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful.
Marshall synthesizes the 21 "bad habits" that hold leaders back from achieving even further success, including making destructive comments, speaking when angry, negativity, failing to give proper recognition, playing favorites, and not listening.
Winners Never Cheat Wharton School Publishing<< Order Now >>
If your business trip is only taking you as far as New York to Washington, DC and back, you’ll have almost enough time to complete this refreshing book on ethical leadership by Jon M. Huntsman – and by the time you reach your destination, you’ll feel inspired to fully follow the author’s model. The book combines examples from Huntsman’s experience as business leader, self-made billionaire, philanthropist and political strategist with family stories and philosophies that helped guide him to professional and personal success.
Winners Never Cheat: Everyday Values We Learned as Children (But May Have Forgotten), proves that nice guys don’t finish last, and Huntsman convincingly conveys his moralistic business view without preaching. Using an internal barometer that distinguishes between what he feels is right and wrong, he attempts to simplify increasingly complex organizational rules. “We are not always required by law to do what is right and proper,” Huntsman writes. “Decency and generosity, for instance, carry no legal mandate. Pure ethics are optional.”
Huntsman uses Sarbanes-Oxley as an illustration of how Congress attempted to bring credibility back to the marketplace, but ultimately, he says, “respect, civility and integrity will return only upon the individual-by-individual return of values.”
The book’s title is exemplified in a short anecdote Huntsman relates about a business negotiation, whereby his company, Huntsman Chemical, attempted to acquire Sweetheart Plastics for $800 million. Sweetheart’s investment bank representatives pressed for $100 million more, saying that the high bid would then be ensured.
Huntsman was not swayed by the bluff and walked away from the deal. Sweetheart eventually sold for much less than Huntsman’s offer – $660 million – and the greedy financial institution was sued for unethical behavior.
Similar to Robert Fulgham’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things, Huntsman looks toward youth for the lessons that can shape a fulfilled life, and says that corporate leaders need a “booster shot of commonly held moral principles from the playgrounds”:
Be fair
Don’t cheat
Play nicely
Share and share alike
Tell the truth
“Children observe their elders so they know how to act. Employees watch supervisors,” Huntsman says, adding that there are no moral shortcuts in business or life. “There are, basically, three kinds of people: the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful, and those who become and remain successful. The difference is character.”
Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths Harvard Business School Press<< Order Now >>
GETTING UNSTUCK: How Dead Ends Become New Paths, by Timothy Butler, Senior Fellow and Director of Career Development Programs at Harvard Business School and psychologist, psychotherapist, and career counselor, offers hope and help to those stuck in career ruts and to people stuck in a way of living their life or in a relationship. Butler looks at ruts as a wake-up call – an arrival at a new frontier. He shows readers the way forward through this frontier toward more meaning and deeper engagement. For Butler psychological impasse becomes the very material for a new vision.
Butler’s book is practical and meant to be used with each chapter leading the reader in a sequence through a six phase cycle of impasse and vision. GETTING UNSTUCK helps readers recognize their impasse and use it as the starting point for real change in the way life and work choices are made. Readers participate in exercises that activate, evoke, and deepen images that will shape new vision and life; and they learn how to recognize enduring patterns of meaning that point to activities, rewards, types of people, work cultures, and communities that are most likely to satisfy.
GETTING UNSTUCK provides practical and authoritative guidance that will get you back in the flow by helping you define a meaningful way forward.
U R a Brand! How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success Davies-Black Publishing<< Order Now >>
Hard work and luck alone aren’t enough to create success. To rise out of the generic talent pool, you need to differentiate yourself. You need a recognizable, positive, and relevant personal brand.
That’s the position brand consultant Catherine Kaputa addresses in a new book called U R a Brand! How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success. Kaputa makes the case that personal branding is the key to success whether you are a first time job seeker or a C-level executive.
U R a Brand! is loaded with advice and tools that will help you develop your personal brand. Kaputa offers tips, tools, exercises, principles, and an array of real-life examples to enable you to realize your potential and increase your potential for success. You will learn how to create “brand you”; how to package yourself; how to find a winnable position that sets your brand apart; how your name identifies and defines you and how to boost business success through networking.
Career Intensity: Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs Ogman Press<< Order Now >>
Is your dream to have a fantastic, engaging, productive, and financially rewarding career that fits with your life goals? Do you admire others who have achieved this kind of success and wondered what it is that separates the best from the rest? How can you join this group of achievers?
If you aspire to a rewarding career blessed with success you need “career intensity” according to David V. Lorenzo a former business executive and entrepreneur who currently advises organizations to implement innovative performance improvement solutions. In his new book, Career Intensity: Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs, Lorenzo defines Career Intensity as “the drive for continuous individual improvement that is the hallmark of successful entrepreneurs and top corporate executives.
Super achievers are highly self-aware, know their strengths and weaknesses, and recognize and aggressively pursue business opportunities. People with Career Intensity engage in strategic thinking and planning, create and market their personal brand, and consistently create exceptional value for their “customer” – whether the customer is the company for which they work or their client.
Career Intensity isn’t a genetic trait; it’s a strategy that you can learn and employ in order to find your way to achieving your career potential and realizing the success that is your true ambition.
Career Intensity: Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs is a guide that will help you with the framework to begin a lifelong process of continuous improvement and growth.
The Laws of Lifetime Growth: Always Make Your Future Bigger Than Your Past Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.<< Order Now >>
Authors Dan Sullivan and Catherine Nomura, in their new book, The Laws of Lifetime Growth, Always Make Your Future Bigger Than Your Past, write, “What matters most is not whether you achieve the goal, but that the goal gets you striving, because striving leads to growth.”
Sullivan, co-founder and president of The Strategic Coach, Inc., has spent more than twenty-five years coaching successful entrepreneurs to help them achieve higher levels of success and fulfillment. Based on this experience Sullivan and Catherine Nomura have written a guide that anyone from new graduate to CEO can use to cultivate the habits and attitudes of successful entrepreneurs for maximum professional growth.
“Growth is at the root of everything that gives us a feeling of accomplishment, satisfaction, meaning, and progress,” according to Sullivan and Nomura. The Laws of Lifetime Growth present ten simple laws with vivid real-life stories to show you how with a slight shift of thinking you can put the laws into action in your life.
Here is one “law” and the success story presented in The Laws of Lifetime Growth:
Always Make Your Confidence Greater Than Your Comfort: A successful entrepreneur decided to challenge himself with five intense tests of physical endurance leading up to his fiftieth birthday. Succeeding beyond anyone’s expectations, he proved to himself and his team that the seemingly impossible can be attainted when we BUILD CONFIDENCE by pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone.
Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants: Breakthrough Tactics for Winning Profitable Clients John Wiley & Sons<< Order Now >>
Expanding on the popular series, Jay
Conrad Levinson brings Michael
W. McLaughlin on board to lend his consulting
expertise to the guerrilla format.
McLaughlin is certainly qualified as an
expert, amassing more than twenty years
of consulting experience and $300 million
in deliverables. McLaughlin is also a
principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP
and the publisher of Management
Consulting News (management
consultingnews.com) and The Guerrilla
Consultant (guerrillaconsulting.com).
Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants
outlines how consultants need cutting
edge knowledge of their particular specification,
and they must also possess the
salesmanship and marketing skills to cultivate
clientele. It is not only important to
be the best at what you do, but to get as
many paying customers to recognize your
expertise too.
The book guides consultants of all
types through marketing plans, branding
techniques and ways to get noticed
among potential customers. Levinson and
McLaughlin suggest speechmaking, article-
writing and book publishing as methods
for increasing exposure, generating
publicity and stimulating business.
In addition to the suggested methods
consultants can use to gain attention,
Levinson and McLaughlin build a complete
operating plan for consultants, with
recommendations for handling clients,
building relationships, selecting projects,
creating proposals, closing deals and setting
fee structures.
Author Carol L. McClelland, PhD has written a very useful guide that will help career change candidates determine what career will best suit their interests, talents and skills in a satisfying way.
In Your Dream Career For Dummies, McClelland describes a good career as being one in which you can be yourself at work, live your life fully, and feel engaged by the work you do. As a career consultant of over 14 years, she guides people to create careers based on their unique dreams of how they want to live.
Whether you want to make a change in the next couple of months or map out a plan for the next few years the information, worksheets and examples in this book will help you do the following:
Define what you need in your work environment
Transform your passion and interests into viable career options
Blend your ideal career with the realities of your life
Explore numerous career ideas
If you are a candidate for a career change, check out Your Dream Career for Dummies -– it just might be a smart career move for you!
Second Acts: Creating the Life You Really Want, Building the Career You Truly Desire Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine<< Order Now >>
In Second Acts, author Stephen Pollan and his longtime coauthor, Mark Levine, posit a very simple, yet very radical idea: short of some physical or skill-based weakness, we can do whatever we want in life. Unlike the sky-is-the-limit outlook that a young person might take, however, the authors presuppose that we have moved along a certain path in our lives already, and have now arrived at a point where we realize that we are not doing that which really excites or satisfies ourselves.
The "second act" then, is to take the steps necessary to move our lives from that first one to another, more desirable one. "It doesn't matter if you're widowed, seventy years old and living on a fixed income. It doesn't matter if you've two kids in college and thousands of dollars in credit card debt. It doesn't matter if you're a workaholic professional, or an unemployed manager, or a burned out stockbroker, or a harried stay-at-home mom," says Pollan.
To achieve this second act, Pollan suggests a method involving the compilation of a notebook of thoughts and ideas, advice and constructive criticism from friends, plans for overcoming obstacles, and the composition of a "lifescript" for actually carrying out the new lifestyle. (Readers of a series of "Lifescripts" books by Pollan will be familiar with this; the books are preplanned dialogs to have in addressing employers, friends and others.)
In Second Acts, Pollan takes on most of the obstacles hindering one's dreams and vanquishes them.
ISBN: 0060514876
What Next? The Complete Guide To Taking Control of Your Working Life DK Publishing<< Order Now >>
What Next? The Complete Guide To Taking Control of Your Working Life by Barbara Moses provides worksheets, deft questioning and real-world examples to help readers use reflective time to conduct a candid self assessment to discover, or possibly rediscover, the underlying career themes in their professional life.
Moses recommends assessing yourself against eight key motivators to determine your major and minor motivational types — examples include sociability seeker or a people person, career builders, or personal developers who feel a higher calling to make a meaningful difference. Moses also walks readers through an examination of each type to help you learn what are your key motivators.
This brisk, enthusiastic but realistic book can be just the catalyst you need to clear your desk and your mind to think deeply about where you really want to do in your career.
Play to Win! Choosing Growth Over Fear in Work and Life Bard Press<< Order Now >>
In their classic book, Play to Win! Choosing Growth Over Fear in Work and Life, Larry and Hersch Wilson help you to quit old, unproductive behavior patterns and discover what you really want.
Companies have to constantly reinvent themselves to survive, and in the same way, people need to continually reinvent themselves to continue to be successful. Whether you are an executive or an entrepreneur, you must use all of your creativity, intellectual ability and courage to reach your full potential. In this paradoxical time of great opportunity and no job security, those who understand and grasp this will have a shot at being successful and fulfilled.
Play to Win! is about going as far as you can using everything you have, while learning, having fun and thriving. The ideas are simply presented, easy to use, and can make a profound difference in your life and work. If you want to achieve high performance and fulfillment in these turbulent times, Play to Win! is a book for you.
Career Warfare: 10 Rules For Building A Successful Personal Brand And Fighting To Keep It McGraw-Hill<< Order Now >>
Career Warfare: 10 Rules For Building A Successful Personal Brand And Fighting To Keep It
By David F. D’Alessandro
You are a brand, and you are the only one you’ve got. Building, expanding and protecting your personal brand is one of the most important actions you can do to take control of your career path at every stage of your journey. David F. D’Alessandro, CEO of John Hancock, knows a thing or two about the value of personal brands, and he shares his best ideas in this excellent book. Drawing on his own impressive corporate climb, D’Alessandro backs up his useful concepts with real-world examples of do’s and don’ts as you make your way up the ladder.
For example, most of us appreciate how essential good manners are to a positive personal brand. It sounds like an obvious statement, along the line of don’t chew your food with your mouth open if you have lunch with the CEO! But even for those who believe they understand the criticality of manners, D’Alessandro nicely illustrates how devastating the consequences can be when you don’t get it right: Lee Iacocca’s predecessor at Ford was ultimately fired by Chairman Henry Ford because he used to walk into his office without knocking. “I wish I could say that Bunkie got fired because he ruined the Mustang or because his ideas were all wrong,” Iacocca says. Instead, bad manners sunk his predecessor.
The book provides ten valuable rules to live and thrive by as you establish, grow and nurture your personal brand. For executives on the rise, or already at or near the top, it is perhaps Rule Number Nine that bears the most attention: The Higher You Fly, The More You Will Be Shot At. “Once you reach a certain level of prominence in any field, bad press comes with the territory,” D’Alessandro writes. He counsels successful executives both to accept the inevitably of attacks in the press and elsewhere, and to be proactive in communicating their own message cleanly and quickly in order to minimize any damage as the attacks begin to fly. As a man who was savaged by headlines including, “Hancock Chief Takes Home $21.7 Million in a Bad Year,” D’Alessandro’s insights have the feel of a man who has been on the front lines – and survived to tell his tale.
Presentations That Persuade and Motivate (The Results-Driven Manager Series) Harvard Business School Press<< Order Now >>
Presentations That Persuade and Motivate guides you through every step of developing and delivering effective presentations, from overcoming stage fright and customizing your message to fielding tough questions and closing with power.
Change Without Pain: How Managers Can Overcome Initiative Overload, Organizational Chaos, and Employee Burnout Harvard Business School Press<< Order Now >>
Adamantly rejecting the long-time "no pain, no change" mantra he charges has been rife in other books on change management, Columbia Business School Professor of Management Eric Abrahamson believes instead that it is possible — and recommended — to avoid the destructive "repetitive-change syndrome" rampant in too many organizations across the country.
I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This, A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work Penguin USA<< Order Now >>
How can you break away from an unhappy work situation and find a more gratifying profession? Acclaimed career coach, Julie Jansen offers an invigorating and empowering primer for anyone who wants to have a rewarding job in her book, I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This, A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work. Jansen teaches you three specific steps for discovering who you are, what you are missing or need in your work, and how to identify work that will give you these things.
In I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This, A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work Jansen provides pragmatic, tactical, and focused tools for shifting, changing or transforming your work. If you are in job search, her advice and guidance can be very helpful in establishing yourself as the best candidate for the position you most want.
Linda Dominguez, founder and principal of Executive Coaching and Resource Network and ExecuNet Expert based in California is the author of How to Shine at Work. In Part 1 your typical workplace relationship challenges are presented from the tyrant boss to peer-level-office politics with advice and guidance to coach you through these challenges. Even if you don’t face a specific challenge at work, the chapter “Keys to Successful Workplace Relationships” provides wise advice for one and all.
Part 2 of How to Shine at Work advises the reader about how to get ahead – take charge and advance your career from your current position. Do you want to succeed and grow where you are? Dominguez offers valuable guidance for achieving this goal. Are you ready to move on – whether it is up, over or out? Dominguez challenges you to think about where you are and where you really want to be. Finally, she gets you going with advice about when and how to leave your job and move on to a new career.
Don’t Retire – Rewire! Jeri Sedlar, Rick Miners, Howard Fillit<< Order Now >>
Over 50 and thinking about retirement? Think again, advises executive search and transition coach Jeri Sedlar. According to Sedlar, retirement is a outmoded concept developed for workers who spent their lives in the fields or on the factory floor; it’s ill-suited for today’s midlife professional who is going strong and enjoying the challenges that work brings. Often, this group wants change, but doesn’t want to slow down. In her book, Don’t Retire, Rewire, Sedlar prepares readers for what she calls their “next act.” Co-authored by husband Rick Miners, Don’t Retire, Rewire says to look within to find personal sources of happiness. It offers steps toward finding “fulfilling work that fuels your passion, suits your personality or fills your pocket.”
The Power of Positive Thinking in Business By Scott W. Ventrella<< Order Now >>
In The Power of Positive Thinking in Business, Scott Ventrella adapts Norman Vincent Peale's dynamic principles of Positive Thinking to meet the business challenges of the twenty-first century. The book shows us how to set aside our self-limiting doubts and develop our inherent ability to reach our greatest human potential by offering tips and constructive actions to help the reader strip away negative programming and influences in order to rediscover and reactivate the 10 innate traits of a positive thinker that can produce powerful results. If you are wondering what is holding you back and wish you could unleash the power of positive thinking a good place to start is with this book. It's a valuable investment of your time to spend an evening with this book.
Do you think it is possible to truly enjoy your job? The author, Timothy Gallwey, famous for his "Inner Game" approach to excellence in sports, teaches you the difference between a rote performance and a rewarding one, how to stop working in the conformity mode and start working in the mobility mode, and it shows how having a great coach can make as much difference in the boardroom as on the basketball court. Gallwey also teaches you how to find that coach and equally important, how to become one. ISBN: 0-375-50007-3 Hardcover
