The world is more overwhelming than ever before.  Our work is more demanding than ever.  Our businesses are more complicated and difficult to manage than ever. 

Our economy is more uncertain than ever.  Our resources are scarcer than ever.  There is endless choice and feature overkill in all but the best experiences. 

The simple life is a thing of the past.  Today, success requires that you do not more, but less.  In other words, the solution is subtraction.

In our summary of The Laws of Subtraction, by Matthew E. May, you’ll learn six simple rules for winning in the age of excess everything.

May is the author of three award-winning books: The Elegant Solution, In Pursuit of Elegance, and The Shibumi Strategy. A popular speaker, creativity coach, and close advisor on innovation to companies such as ADP, Edmunds, Intuit, and Toyota, he is the founder of Edit Innovation, an ideas agency based in Los Angeles.

As this summary illustrates, when you remove just the right things in just the right way, something very good happens.

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We’re all familiar with the “sacred cows” that are revered in the workplace – the conventional wisdom to try your best, work well with others, and produce excellent work.  But these cherished nuggets of advice, in practice, feature a dark side that can lead to career-limiting unintended consequences.

Our summary of Tipping Sacred Cows, by Jake Breeden,reveals what you need to do to overcome the dangerous behaviors that masquerade as virtues at work.

Breeden teaches on the faculty of Duke Corporate Education, the world’s top-rated provider of custom executive education.  He has taught leaders in some of the world’s leading companies, including Google, Starbucks, Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM.

Based on Breeden’s extensive coaching experience and on the latest research in behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology, this summary identifies the dark side of the seven most common sacred cows at work.  It offers proven, powerful strategies that will enable you to overcome their allure so you can achieve great results and realize your fullest potential.

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There’s no doubt that the concept of workplace mentoring is a hot-button issue facing management today.  With managers under extraordinary pressure to cut costs, streamline operations, and increase productivity, the role of mentors has become more critical than ever -- particularly since studies show leaders who mentor get promoted faster, and earn significantly more, than those who don’t.

But as with any growing workplace trend, questions remain about how to utilize mentoring to get tangible and profitable results.  Our summary of Becoming an Effective Mentoring Leader, by William J. Rothwell, PhD and Dr. Peter Chee, answers those questions.

Rothwell is Presi­dent of Rothwell and Associates, Inc., and professor of Human Resource Development at Pennsylvania State University.  He is a best­-selling and award-winning author with more than 80 books.  Chee is the President and CEO of ITD World, a global learning solutions ex­pert with over 26 years experience in devel­oping leaders from over 80 countries.  He is also the co-author of The Twelve Disciplines of Leadership Excellence with Brian Tracy.

This summary breaks down the essentials of mentoring, and shows you how to take advantage of this valuable new workplace dynamic.  As today’s biggest industry leaders continue to recognize the profound effect mentoring has on performance and profitability, there’s never been a better time to put this summary’s vital tools to work for you.

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Most people enjoy watching athletes and musicians perform in a competition or in a concert, when their talents are on full display.  But if we really wanted to see greatness in action, we would instead spend our time watching their practice sessions.

Our summary of Practice Perfect, by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi, puts the art of practice front and center.  It shows that anyone, in any field, can come to appreciate that practice makes champions.

Lemov is the author of the best-selling book Teach Like a Champion and helped found Uncommon Schools, a non-profit school management organization, where he directs their project on effective teaching practices.  Woolway is the chief academic officer for the Taxonomy of Effective Teaching Practices at Uncommon Schools.  Yezzi is the founding principal of Troy Prep Elementary School in New York. 

In this summary, they demonstrate that deliberately engineered and designed practice can revolutionize our most important activities.  The “how to” rules we will outline will make you better in virtually every area of your life and career.

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Every business strategy is based on a vision of the future.  But just how accurate is that vision?  Too often, business leaders become stuck in the “Permanent Present,” the natural and often disastrous bias for projecting current conditions into the future. 

In our summary of Think Like a Futurist:  Know What Changes, What Doesn’t, and What’s Next, by Cecily Sommers, you’ll learn how to engage in new thinking in order to connect today’s pressures with tomorrow’s realities.  Sommers is the founder and president of The Push Institute, a non-profit think tank that tracks significant global trends and their implications for business. 

Drawing from more than a decade of work with clients such as American Express, Best Buy, General Mills, Kraft, Motorola, Nestle Purina, Target, and Yahoo, Sommers shows how the skills and methodologies needed to think like a futurist can be taught to anyone, and how they follow a clear, replicable structure.

This summary reveals how the social, economic, and environmental crises of our time spring from just four constant and predictable forces.  Once you understand how they work together to drive change, you can stake out a territory that is yours to invent, and own.

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One of the most critical challenges that managers face every day is how to make themselves — and everyone who works for them — more productive.  Our summary of Get Productive!:  Boosting Your Productivity and Getting Things Done, by Magdalena Bak-Maier, will help you to make every minute count.  It will show you how to use common sense and proven techniques in combination with your own best thinking to create practical solutions to the demands you must meet. 

Bak-Maier is a world-renowned executive coach who relies on her training in neuroscience and developmental neurobiology to merge her expertise in how brains work with coaching theory.  For the past four years, she has focused on developing leadership capability and unleashing talent at Imperial College London as well as developing further coaching mastery by working as a personal coach to a diverse set of leaders, professionals, and change makers.

This summary will help you to overcome your time pressures, take control of your life, become more creative, develop the key thinking skills that are essential for productivity and success, and create results that are really worth the effort.

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The most important quality of successful organizations is effective leadership.  Whether on the battlefield or in the boardroom, great leaders inspire and motivate their people to achieve outstanding results.

But what exactly do these great leaders do?  And, more importantly, what lessons can we learn from their examples that you can use to strengthen your own leadership skills, and the skills of leaders throughout your organization?

In our summary of Creative Execution, Eric Beaudan unveils the “secret sauce” of uniquely successful leaders.  Through his focus on the world's great military strategists and business leaders, Beaudan offers an in-depth look at the audacious acts that led to their stunning victories.  From the exploits of Alexander the Great to the leadership that built Google and Toyota into global powerhouses, this summary delves into the unique formula that allows leaders to galvanize people and execute bold strategies.

Beaudan is global Leadership Practice Director and Partner at the Toronto office of Odgers Berndtson, one of the top executive search firms in the world.  He helps assess and develop the leadership potential of executives and top talent using the LeaderFit assessment method he developed for Odgers Berndtson.

This summary will present a model -- a synthesis of game-changing, inspired ideas -- that leaders have used to win against the odds.  Tap into the potential in your organization and overcome the odds that you are facing today -- by developing your own formula for Creative Execution.

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Today’s companies are besieged by an overwhelming volume of data from a variety of locations and sources.  Too many businesses don’t know where to start to make sense of all this data, while others don’t even see the value of analytics.

In our summary of Win with Advanced Business Analytics:  Creating Business Value from Your Data by Jean Paul Isson and Jesse S. Harriott, you’ll learn a new way of looking at integrating the multiple types of intelligence into your business practice.

The authors are experts in advanced business analytics, with 20 years of practical analytical leadership experience in more than 50 countries.  Isson is the global vice president of business intelligence and predictive analytics at Monster Worldwide, Inc.  Harriott is chief analytics officer at Constant Contact.

Whether you are a business leader who wants to learn more about how companies can use data effectively, or an analytics manager who wants to learn how to avoid the pitfalls that can lead to failure, this summary will show you how to use business analytics to affect your organization positively by unleashing the potential buried in your company’s data.

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As a businessperson, there are a lot of things beyond your control that may affect you.  You can’t control the economy.  You can’t control the stock market.  You may not have any real control over the cost of goods and labor. 

But customer service is the one thing that is 100 percent in your control at all times.  The variable in the customer sales equation that matters most of all is the one that you can control. 

And, as explained in our summary of Crafting the Customer Experience for People Not Like You, by Kelly McDonald, the customers who will increasingly drive your profits are customers who are not like you – people of different generations, races, ethnicities, and lifestyles.

McDonald is a nationally recognized expert on changing demographics, generational differences, multi-cultural marketing, and Hispanic marketing.  She is also the author of How to Market to People Not Like You, and is the president of McDonald Marketing, which Advertising Age has twice named as one of the top ad agencies in the United States.  Her agency’s clients include Toyota, Sherwin-Williams, MillerCoors, Harley-Davidson, and State Farm Insurance.

This summary will give you a simple, effective road map for increasing your revenues by taking care of the customers you have, appealing to the ones you don’t have, and delighting and engaging all of them. 

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It’s likely that you are a good, talented business leader and that your company, division, or department is running smoothly.  But are you exceptional?  In these difficult business times, true success requires nothing less.

Our summary of How to Be Exceptional, by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, Robert H. Sherwin, Jr., Barbara A. Steel, provides a revolutionary approach to business development.  Instead of focusing on your weaknesses and how to overcome them, it will help you to focus on your strengths and learn how to magnify them.

Zenger and Folkman are the co-founders of Zenger Folkman, one of the world’s premier providers of leadership research, assessment, development, and implementation programs.  They are also the best-selling co-authors of The Inspiring Leader and The Extraordinary Leader.  Sherwin is Chief Operating Officer and Steel is Senior Vice President of Leadership Effectiveness at Zenger Folkman.

When you apply the lessons you will learn from this summary to magnify your leadership competencies to the level of exceptional, your organization’s employee engagement will increase, its productivity will rise, and its profitability will soar.

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