Leadership Lessons for enduring business and personal success from renowned motivational speaker, consultant, and CEO of Addison Leadership Group, John A. Addison. Addison, the former Co-CEO of Primerica (America's largest financial services company), shares an impactful bonus chapter to his best-selling flagship book. Real Leadership shares personal history with insights along the way from Addison, who is a masterful storyteller.

Too many organizations today play follow the leader: the commander articulates a “vision” and people uncritically go along with it. But this type of leadership—what Dean Williams calls "counterfeit leadership"—generates an unhealthy dependence on an authority figure and relies on dominance, control, and group seduction to get things done. By hampering people's ability to anticipate and react to changing circumstances, it creates a self-limiting cycle. And if the leader's vision is flawed, the entire organization suffers. The true task of a leader, Williams argues, is to get people to face the reality of any situation themselves and develop strategies to deal with problems or take advantage of opportunities. Real leaders don't dictate; they help people face their challenges and make adjustments in their values, habits, practices, and priorities to ensure the enterprise is given its best chance to succeed. Williams details how to apply this new approach to the challenges every organization or community faces. Throughout, he demonstrates the practical application of real leadership in the real world through examples from his own experiences working with organizations as diverse as the government of Singapore, Aetna Life and Casualty, and the nomadic Penan tribe in Borneo, as well as historical examples and the insights gleaned from his many interviews with presidents, prime ministers, and business leaders. At a time when so many “visionary” leaders have led their organizations to disaster, Real Leadership offers a needed, proven alternative.

This text explains why values-based spiritual leadership that coalesces employees into a harmonious group is the only way to successfully manage increasingly diverse workers in the 21st century. A person's values are the most powerful factor defining his or her actions; everyone has a value system or a spiritual component that triggers their behavior. Our personal values are a more powerful force upon individual action than corporate policy, procedures, tradition or peer pressure. Since the work environment is where the typical worker will spend the most time—more than at home with family, with friends, or at church—it is reasonable that workers will have spiritual demands as well as economic needs from their work lives. Unfortunately, this is a task managers are not prepared to meet. Real Leadership: How Spiritual Values Give Leadership Meaning argues that values-based—i.e., spiritual—leadership is the only way to do leadership in today's globalized, multi-differentiated world. The author traces the development of real leadership through five generations of theory, then builds a strong case for the values leadership strategy because of its ability to unify workers... and because it allows them to find personal meaning in the workplace task at hand.

"These are the questions at the heart of the stories in The Wounded Leader. In these stories leaders struggle to make sense of their wounding experiences. We meet a principal who felt undermined by a contentious staff, another whose early mistakes ignited rumors and discontent, a leader who felt shunned when she took a position at a failing school, and a superintendent at odds with the school board."--Jacket.

A powerful call-to-action for gender equity that offers 10 key lessons for women aspiring to a leadership role—be it in politics, business, law, or their local community. Featuring words of wisdom from female leaders like Hillary Clinton and Theresa May, this empowering study reads like a You Are a Badass volume on world leadership. Women make up fewer than 10% of national leaders worldwide. Behind this eye-opening statistic lies a pattern of unequal access to power. Through conversations with some of the world’s most powerful and interesting women—including Jacinda Ardern, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Christine Lagarde, Michelle Bachelet, and Theresa May—Women and Leadership explores gender bias and asks why there aren’t more women in leadership roles. Speaking honestly and freely, these women talk about having their ideas stolen by male colleagues, what it’s like to be called fat or a slut in the media, and what things they wish they had done differently. The stories they tell reveal vividly how gender and sexism affect perceptions of women as leaders. Using current research as a starting point, Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala—both political leaders in their own countries—analyze the lived experiences of these women leaders. The result is a rare insight into life as a leader and a powerful call to arms for women everywhere.

True North shows how anyone who follows their internal compass can become an authentic leader. This leadership tour de force is based on research and first-person interviews with 125 of today’s top leaders—with some surprising results. In this important book, acclaimed former Medtronic CEO Bill George and coauthor Peter Sims share the wisdom of these outstanding leaders and describe how you can develop as an authentic leader. True North presents a concrete and comprehensive program for leadership success and shows how to create your own Personal Leadership Development Plan centered on five key areas: Knowing your authentic self Defining your values and leadership principles Understanding your motivations Building your support team Staying grounded by integrating all aspects of your life True North offers an opportunity for anyone to transform their leadership path and become the authentic leader they were born to be. Personal, original, and illuminating stories from Warren Bennis, Sir Adrian Cadbury, George Shultz (former U.S. secretary of state), Charles Schwab, John Whitehead (Cochairman, Goldman Sachs), Anne Mulcahy (CEO, Xerox), Howard Schultz (CEO, Starbucks), Dan Vasella (CEO, Novartis), John Brennan (Chairman, Vanguard), Carol Tome (CFO, Home Depot), Donna Dubinsky (CEO/cofounder, Palm), Alan Horn (President, Warner Brothers), Ann Moore (CEO, Time, Inc.) and many others illustrate the transitions that shape the type of leaders who will thrive in the 21st century. Bill George (Cambridge, MA) has spent over 30 years in executive leadership positions at Litton, Honeywell, and Medtronic. As CEO of Medtronic, he built the company into the world’s leading medical technology company as its market capitalization increased from $1.1 billion to $60 billion. Since 2004, he has been a professor at the Harvard Business School. His 2004 book Authentic Leadership (0-7879-7528-1) was a BusinessWeek bestseller. Peter Sims (San Francisco, CA) established “Leadership Perspectives,” a course on leadership development at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and cofounded the London office of Summit Partners, a leading investment firm. Their Web site is www.truenorthleaders.com.

Leaders today are often unconscious and unaware of how their learned fears, egos, and personality flaws adversely affect their effectiveness in dealing with others. Their followers are not engaged, not motivated, and not performing at their best. Leaders need to be authentic, manage from their hearts, be consistent with their beliefs, emanate trust and transparency, and allow their followers to be free to create, share, and excel at what they do best.In REAL Leadership: Waking to Wisdom, Susan Robertson takes readers on a journey from being unconscious and blithely going through the motions of leadership-driven by harmful habits-to an awakening of inner truth, resiliency, engagement, authenticity, and leadership wisdom-REAL leadership.Referencing research and 30 years' worth of experience in leadership consulting and organizational and cultural transformation, Robertson shows why leaders fail, why fear prevents leaders from really fulfilling their potential, and how they can recover through techniques of self-awareness and self-management. She also illustrates the impact leadership has on high- versus low-performing cultures. While there are many books out there on how to manage better, there are few, if any, that talk about changing from within. Robertson addresses the transformative process that helps leaders change their self-image, reframe their minds, awake spiritually, find inner truth and honesty, and achieve a level of transcendence-all critical elements of leadership wisdom.For individual leaders, teams, and organizations, REAL Leadership: Waking to Wisdom is a valuable tool for learning how to change the very nature of our inner being, become conscious, healthy, and well-adjusted, and bring positive energy to everything we do in life. Based on principles such as mutual respect and caring, Robertson's philosophy is a welcome change in management doctrine. It's management for better organizational accomplishment as well as for the greater good of the individual and, by extension, society in general.