Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
Simon Sinek
- Simon Sinek believes the reason some people and organizations are more innovative, influential, and profitable than others is because they operate from what he calls “The Golden Circle.”
- The Golden Circle starts with WHY you do something, then moves to HOW, and finally ends with WHAT. Typically, we start in the opposite direction.
- Throughout the book, Sinek offers examples of leaders and businesses who have successfully led from a position of WHY and he offers guidance on how to adjust your approach.
“It is a false assumption that differentiation happens in HOW and WHAT you do. Simply offering a high-quality product with more features or better service or a better price does not create difference. Doing so guarantees no success. Differentiation happens in WHY and HOW you do it.”
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Cal Newport
- Cal clearly demonstrates the differences between deep work and shallow work and provides examples of leaders who have achieved long periods of deep work.
- He provides data to back up his claim that deep work is like a super power in today’s distracted world and identifies strategies and practices to help you achieve it.
“Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfilment that comes from craftmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep – spending their days instead in a frantic blur of email and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.”
The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
Gary Keller
- Gary Keller is the co-founder of Keller Williams Realty, the largest real estate company in the world.
- Keller focuses on how to reduce distractions, find more time in your day for what matters most, and increase your focused time.
- He looks at several ideas to increase focus, including time blocking, habit creation, accountability cycle, and purposeful approach.
“Everyone has the same amount of time, and hard work is simply hard work. As a result, what you do in the time you work determines what you achieve. And since what you do is determined by what you think, how big you think becomes the launching pad for how high you achieve.”
“The most productive people, the ones who experience extraordinary results, design their days around doing their ONE Thing. Their most important appointment each day is with themselves, and they never miss it.”
Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business
Gino Wickman & Mark Winters
- Gino Wickman is the founder of the incredibly successful Entrepreneurial Operating System.
- Every business should seek to have a Visionary and an Integrator involved in the day-to-day operations. The Visionary of the business has ground breaking ideas and the Integrator makes those ideas a reality.
- This book looks at the relationship between the two roles and offers advice on how they can work together and to each other’s strengths to grow a business most effectively.
- The book also offers counsel on how to find a Visionary or an Integrator, if your business does not have both roles currently.
“Imagine if there were two exact personalities. What gain would there be for the organization? It would simply have more of the same capacity. As with electricity, it’s actually the degree of difference that drives the opportunity for an even greater charge. In the case of business, polarity energizes creative tension. When harnessed, this leads to a bigger impact. When considering any problem, people who are similar will ask similar questions. Our Visionary/Integrator duo is likely to ask very different questions – because they see the problem from diverse vantage points. Varied lines of inquiry lead to better results.”