Book Summary: Master Your New Job from Day One

September 17, 2023September 12, 2023 by don.tebbe

The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan: Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Deliver Better Results Faster

“The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan” is a comprehensive guide for newly appointed leaders, whether they are succeeding an incumbent in an existing position or taking on a newly created role. The book offers an in-depth exploration of the new leader’s journey and presents a practical, detailed roadmap for assuming full leadership in the new role. First-time leaders will find the step-by-step recommendations particularly helpful.

Book Summary: Accelerate your success in your new role.

August 9, 2023August 8, 2023 by don.tebbe

The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter

The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins helps leaders to transition smoothly and make a positive impact early in their new job. The book focuses on the first 90 days because actions during the first few months in a new role determine if a leader succeeds or fails.

Whether you’ve been promoted to a new position within the same organization or you’re joining a different organization, this book covers how to get to the “breakeven point” faster and ultimately be more successful in your new role. (Breakeven is when you start to contribute more to the organization than you consume through learning and integration.) Watkins says this book’s principles can shorten the time to breakeven by 40%.

What to Do When Your Executive Director Decides to Leave

May 25, 2023May 25, 2023 by don.tebbe

Nearly every nonprofit faces the challenge of hiring a new chief executive at some point. And every board seems to remember the terse line in their bylaws when it comes to managing the transition. The one that reads, “The board is responsible for hiring and supervising the chief executive.” Unfortunately, that directive doesn’t come close to addressing the board’s responsibility for managing executive turnover.

Book Summary: A master class in making better decisions.

May 16, 2023 by don.tebbe

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts

by Annie Duke

Thinking with Bets promises to help us make better decisions in an uncertain and challenging world.

Written by poker champion and decision strategist Annie Duke, the book’s premise is that poker is a good metaphor for life. Decisions in life are bets on hoped-for outcomes. Like poker bets, these decisions can have significant consequences. And they are made under conditions of uncertainty, with incomplete information, and at least some luck is involved.

Book Summary: How trust and purpose unleash performance.

May 2, 2023 by don.tebbe

Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies

by Paul J. Zak

Stewarding the organization’s culture and operating environment are among the most important leadership functions. And trust is one of the most crucial factors in that environment. Trust profoundly influences everything from employee retention to the organization’s ability to achieve its most crucial goals.

In the Trust Factor, neuroscientist Paul Zak uses his original research to reveal insights for building high-trust organizations. He explains how brain chemicals affect people’s behavior, how trust is undermined, and how you can stimulate it.

Book Summary: Turn goals into accomplishments – systematically.

April 18, 2023 by don.tebbe

The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Jim Huling, Scott Thele, and Beverly Walker

The premise of this book is that defining a strategy is easy, but executing it is difficult. And execution is made especially hard by what the authors call the “whirlwind” of daily activities necessary to keep the organization running. As always, urgency trumps importance. We need to elevate the importance of what the book calls “WIGs.” The one or two overarching, “wildly important goals” that would make all the difference in the world to your organization’s future and get your departments and teams to develop and focus on supporting WIGs.

Book Summary: Amazon’s ideas can make your organization smarter.

April 4, 2023 by don.tebbe

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr

Whatever you think about Amazon, it’s impossible to ignore the impact that it’s had on so many aspects of the business landscape, from retailing to publishing to entertainment and even cloud data services. Working Backwards, written by two early and senior executives, describes some of the notable business practices behind Amazon’s growth and impact. Mostly these are ideas that organizations of any type or size can use or adapt.

Book Summary: Make better decisions.

March 21, 2023 by don.tebbe

Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking

by Jennifer Riel and Roger L. Martin

Conventional wisdom says that trade-offs are inevitable when making hard choices. But settling for the least bad option is a lousy way to make a big decision. This book proposes a “third and better way” to make important choices using proven, repeatable processes to create better answers to problems, sidestep our built-in biases, and avoid trading off one stakeholder group’s needs for another.

Book Summary: Three keys to unlock your influence.

March 7, 2023 by don.tebbe

Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change

by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler

The premise of this book is that leaders are agents of change. Whether they’re heading an organization, leading a social change movement, or parenting, genuine leaders are always trying to create something better and more impactful. And to do that, influence is the most critical tool in the leader’s tool belt.

BHAGs – The missing link between vision and accomplishment

February 28, 2023 by don.tebbe

We’ve all seen them, read them, and maybe even written some of them – lofty vision statements that are meant to inspire our teams and spur forward action. But do they? More often than not, there’s a missing link between vision and action: concrete goals and a plan for fulfillment. A plan that reaches beyond the annual or three-year strategic plan and provides a bridge to a future where that vision is realized.

A BHAG can provide that critical link.