What we’re reading

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

Do you have a grip on your business, or does your business have a grip on you?

All entrepreneurs and business leaders face similar frustrations—personnel conflict, profit woes, and inadequate growth. Decisions never seem to get made, or, once made, fail to be properly implemented. But there is a solution. It’s not complicated or theoretical.The Entrepreneurial Operating System® is a practical method for achieving the business success you have always envisioned. More than 80,000 companies have discovered what EOS can do.

In Traction, you’ll learn the secrets of strengthening the six key components of your business. You’ll discover simple yet powerful ways to run your company that will give you and your leadership team more focus, more growth, and more enjoyment. Successful companies are applying Traction every day to run profitable, frustration-free businesses—and you can too.

For an illustrative, real-world lesson on how to apply Traction to your business, check out its companion book, Get A Grip.

Rocket Fuel

Discover the vital relationship that will take your company from “What’s next?” to “We have liftoff!”

Visionaries have groundbreaking ideas. Integrators make those ideas a reality. This explosive combination is the key to getting everything you want out of your business. It worked for Disney. It worked for McDonald’s. It worked for Ford. It can work for you.

Get a Grip

It’s time to take your business to the next level.

Eileen Sharp and Vic Hightower were frustrated. After years of profitable, predictable growth, Swan Services was in a rut. Meetings were called and discussions held, but few decisions were made and even less got done. People were pointing fingers and assigning blame, but nothing happened to solve Swan’s mounting problems. It felt as though they were working harder than ever but with less impact. The company Eileen and Vic had founded and built for 10 years was a different place. It just wasn’t fun anymore.

How to Be a Great Boss

If your employees brought their “A-Game” to work every day, what would it mean for your company’s performance?

Studies have repeatedly shown that the majority of employees are disengaged at work. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Often, the difference between a group of indifferent employees and a fully engaged team comes down to one simple thing—a great boss.

What the Heck is EOS?

Has your company struggled to roll EOS out to all levels of your organization? Do your employees understand why EOS is important or even what it is?

What the Heck is EOS? is for the millions of employees in companies running their businesses on EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System).

Good to Great

The Challenge:
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

Great by Choice

Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns withanother groundbreaking work, this time to ask: why do some companies thrive inuncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research,buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins andhis colleague Morten Hansen enumerate the principles for building a truly greatenterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous and fast-moving times. This book isclassic Collins: contrarian, data-driven and uplifting.

The E-Myth

E-Myth \ ‘e-,’mith\ n 1: the entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs 2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical work.

The Checklist Manifesto

In his latest bestseller, Atul Gawande shows what the simple idea of the checklist reveals about the complexity of our lives and how we can deal with it.

Beyond Entrepreneurship

This work provides entrepreneurs with building blocks to help their companies sustain high performance, play a leadership role in their industries, and remain successful for generations. Readers will discover the five key elements involved in guiding a company to lasting success, a blueprint for managing a thriving company, and plenty of real-world examples.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.

The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive

In this stunning follow-up to his best-selling book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, Patrick Lencioni offers up another leadership fable that’s every bit as compelling and illuminating as its predecessor. This time, Lencioni’s focus is on a leader’s crucial role in building a healthy organization–an often overlooked but essential element of business life that is the linchpin of sustained success.

The Happiness Advantage

The happy secret to greater success and fulfillment in work and life—a must-read for everyone trying to flourish in a world of increasing stress and negativity

“Thoughtfully lays out the steps to increasing workplace positivity.”—Forbes

Earn It!: The Tools You Need to Earn the Money You Want

Every business owner has been faced with an employee asking, “Can I have a raise?” Whether their performance is good, adequate, or terrible, employees often lack clarity about how to connect their performance to the value they create for the company. Earn It! is a how-to manual to begin that conversation. Directed toward employees of growth-oriented companies, Earn It! is a step-by-step guide that creates awareness in the reader about how to contribute at a higher level and then builds an action plan for getting there.

Chasing Perfection

Become Unf**kwithable! Change your practices to change your life.

Are you a leader who struggles with self-doubt or a CEO who sometimes feels like a fraud? If so, you are not alone.

Rise: The Reincarnation of an Entrepreneur

When the housing market crashed in 2009, Michael Erath lost everything. Due to a combination of declining sales, betrayals from key staff, and his own blind spots, Michael went from owning two multimillion dollar businesses to almost destroying his marriage, losing his home and companies, and struggling to make ends meet. But he didn’t let failure keep him down. Instead, he learned from his mistakes and rose back to success.

The Patient Organization

Why does EOS work? Why does Traction work? Why does Scaling Up work? Why does Holocracy work? By extension, why do these systems not work, what makes them fail to deliver consistent results from company to company? Why is one company’s installation incredible when another’s just feels mechanical and dead?

Level-UP to Professional

Level-UP to Professional, is the fun and inspirational blueprint to help young professionals enjoy more success at business, work and life. This is a book that simultaneously guides, educates and motivates. Level-UP incorporates important recommendations, insights, tips and techniques. While the book is written to help young professionals – it can also be appreciated by older adults, as well.

Process Triage

Joseph (Rosey) Rosenberger, Founder of Process Triage ® and Chris White, a top-tier Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS ®) Implementer have teamed up to introduce how executive leaders can place and sustain their core business process in a state of continuous, self-healing improvement, lead by their own experts who work and live in the process today. It’s all about profoundly fast and effective issue processing called Process Triaging.

Optimize for Growth

As the CEO of a small business, you know what it means to hit the ceiling. Business leaders often struggle with four primary barriers to growth: people, profit, control, and traction. The heroic efforts you relied on to build your business from the ground up, aren’t adequate to take it to the next level. What you need are the three essential resources in the Optimize for Growth Model.

Achieve Your Vision

Many business owners feel challenged when trying to engage their employees to effectively gain traction on achieving their vision. They don’t take the critical steps to establish credibility and trust in their organization, nor understand the importance of teaching business acumen at all levels in their organization.

The Miracle Manager

Manage A Team That Will Follow You Anywhere!

In The Miracle Manager, Kevin G. Armstrong argues that placing true leaders in management positions has become an epidemic that is destroying businesses.

The Business Sergeant’s Field Manual

There’s a big difference between having a leadership title and being a confident, respected, and effective leader. Chris Hallberg’s Business Sergeant’s Field Manual is written for business owners and leaders who need a hand with the day to day rigors of operating a successful business. If you’re committed to leading, then this book will help you get where you want to go, and it will give you the tools you need to get there. The Field Manual is a crucial weapon in the arsenal of any small business leader whose spirit is willing.

X-Formation

Interim Executives are on-demand change artists who help companies attain world-class results. Interims are experts at stepping into unfamiliar situations, assessing the dynamics at work, and leading organizations through X-Formation(TM), the practice of organizational transformation.

Fierce Conversations

The master teacher of positive change through powerful communication, Susan Scott wants you to succeed. To do that, she explains, you must transform everyday conversations at work and at home with effective ways to get your message across—and get what you want.

The Humanized Leader

THE WORLD NEEDS YOUR LEADERSHIP
More importantly, the world needs your humanized leadership. You must create trust, clearly communicate, coach powerfully, and customize every step of the way to the various types of people you are privileged to lead. This leader is ever aware that other humans execute the processes which drive the profits – people are always at the center.

This book lays out in 12 engaging chapters, a proven path to developing yourself and your teams. You will gain the mindset and skillset to:

Show up in authentic and conscious leadership
Manage workplace emotions – yours and theirs
Communicate with clarity and connection
Guide performance to build a culture of accountability
Understand your own secret sauce of genius and appreciate it in others

Drawing from the signature system, Leadership Mastery, this guide to your own evolution has been practiced and perfected for 15 years with thousands of clients.

This is a call to action. HUMANIZE how you lead. Your time is now.

Radical Candor

Radical Candor is a simple idea: to be a good boss, you have to Care Personally at the same time that you Challenge Directly. When you challenge without caring it’s obnoxious aggression; when you care without challenging it’s ruinous empathy. When you do neither it’s manipulative insincerity.

In the Company of Women

Over 100 exceptional and influential women describe how they embraced their creative spirit, overcame adversity, and sparked a global movement of entrepreneurship. Media titans and ceramicists, hoteliers and tattoo artists, comedians and architects—taken together, these profiles paint a beautiful picture of what happens when we pursue our passions and dreams.

Girl Code

Women around the world have responded to Cara Alwill Leyba’s Girl Code with a resounding YES. Companies like Kate Spade and Macy’s have brought her in to teach “the Code.” Inc. magazine named Girl Code one of the “Top 9 Inspiring Books Every Female Entrepreneur Should Read” alongside Lean In, #Girlboss, and Thrive.

Secrets of Six-Figure Women

According to the Department of Labor, the average woman in 1998 was bringing home less than $25,000 a year. For every dollar that a man makes, a woman makes between 50 and 75 cents, and that is hardly news.

But what you may not know is that, quietly and steadily, the number of women making six figures or more is rapidly increasing. Currently, over fifteen million women make $100,000 or more, and the number continues to rise at a rate faster then for men.

The Art Of War

Conditioning Your Mind To Fuel Creativity

Creativity is the method of unleashing the mind to think in different ways and imagine new ideas. Its goes beyond drawing or painting pictures, building sculptures, or craft making. At its most basic level, creativity is a set of ideas which leads to something new. It spurs innovation and can be used to improve the way you think. Creativity is also the secret sauce to enhancing a company’s products, services, and processes.