HBR Top 10 Must Reads

Go from being a good manager to an extraordinary leader.

If you read nothing else on leadership, read these 10 articles (featuring “What Makes an Effective Executive,” by Peter F. Drucker). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles on leadership and selected the most important ones to help you maximize your own and your organization's performance.

HBR's 10 Must Reads On Leadership will inspire you to:

• Motivate others to excel

• Build your team's self-confidence in others

• Provoke positive change

• Set direction

• Encourage smart risk-taking

• Manage with tough empathy

• Credit others for your success

• Increase self-awareness

• Draw strength from adversity

This collection of best-selling articles includes: featured article "What Makes an Effective Executive" by Peter F. Drucker, "What Makes a Leader?" "What Leaders Really Do," "The Work of Leadership," "Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?" "Crucibles of Leadership," "Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve," "Seven Transformations of Leadership," "Discovering Your Authentic Leadership," and "In Praise of the Incomplete Leader."

Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

In Case Interview Secrets, you'll discover step-by-step instructions on how to dominate what many consider to be the most complex, most difficult, and most intimidating corporate job interview in the world—the infamous case interview. Victor Cheng, a former McKinsey management consultant, reveals his proven, insider's method for acing the case interview. Having personally secured job offers from McKinsey, Bain & Company, Monitor, L.E.K, Oliver Wyman, and A.T. Kearney, he has also been a McKinsey case interviewer—providing you with a hands-on, real-world perspective on what it really takes to land job offers.

Cheng’s protégées work in all the major strategy management consulting firms, including McKinsey, The Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, Monitor Company, A.T. Kearny, Oliver Wyman, L.E.K, Roland Berger, Accenture, and Deloitte, as well as in the strategic planning departments of numerous Fortune 500 companies. Whether you’re an undergraduate, MBA, PhD, or experienced-hire applicant candidate, you’ll discover:

• What case interviewers really say about you behind closed doors but wouldn’t dare tell you—until now

• The subtle yet specific performance differences that separate those who get management consulting offers from those who don’t

• The 10 biggest mistakes candidates make in case interviews (and how to avoid them)

• The 3 specific things interviewers expect in the first 5 minutes of a case that often decide the outcome on the spot

• An insider’s take on what interviewers really look for and why—and how to give them what they want

The Consultant With Pink Hair

The Consultant with Pink Hair is the story of Andrew Braun and Lou Di Angelo, partners in a fictional management consulting practice struggling with the real life challenges of being just another consulting firm in a crowded marketplace. They battle low margins, late nights responding to crazy RFPs, confusing branding advice, and the pressure of too much revenue coming from one big client--and the disaster when that client walks away.

Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used

This Third Edition to Peter Block's Flawless Consulting addresses business changes and new challenges since the second edition was written ten years ago. It tackles the challenges next generation consultants face, including more guidance on how to ask better questions, dealing with difficult clients, working in an increasingly virtual world, how to cope with complexities in international consulting, case studies, and guidelines on implementation. Also included are illustrative examples and exercises to help you cement the guides offered.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

This life-changing manifesto shows how you have the potential to make a huge difference wherever you are. 
 
Few authors have had the kind of lasting impact and global reach that Seth Godin has had. In a series of now-classic books that have been translated into 36 languages and reached millions of readers around the world, he has taught generations of readers how to make remarkable products and spread powerful ideas. In Linchpin, he turns his attention to the individual, and explains how anyone can make a significant impact within their organization.
 
There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there's a third team, the linchpins. These people figure out what to do when there's no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art. 
 
Have you ever found a shortcut that others missed? Seen a new way to resolve a conflict? Made a connection with someone others couldn't reach? Even once? Then you have what it takes to become indispensable, by overcoming the resistance that holds people back. Linchpin will show you how to join the likes of... 
 
· Keith Johnson, who scours flea markets across the country to fill Anthropologie stores with unique pieces. 
· Jason Zimdars, a graphic designer who got his dream job at 37signals without a résumé. 
· David, who works at Dean and Deluca coffee shop in New York. He sees every customer interaction as a chance to give a gift and is cherished in return. 
 
As Godin writes, "Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must."

Boomerang

The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.

Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.

Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.

The New New Thing

In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis set out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world’s most important technology entrepreneur. He found this in Jim Clark, a man whose achievements include the founding of three separate billion-dollar companies. Lewis also found much more, and the result―the best-selling book The New New Thing―is an ingeniously conceived history of the Internet revolution.

The Smartest Guys In The Room

The Enron scandal brought down one of the most admired companies of the 1990s. Countless books and articles were written about it, but only The Smartest Guys in the Room holds up a decade later as the definitive narrative. For this tenth anniversary edition, McLean and Elkind have revisited the fall of Enron and its aftermath, in a new chapter that asks why Enron still matters. They also reveal the fates of the key players in the scandal.

The World Is Flat

"One mark of a great book is that it makes you see things in a new way, and Mr. Friedman certainly succeeds in that goal," the Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote in The New York Times reviewing The World Is Flat in 2005. In this new edition, Thomas L. Friedman includes fresh stories and insights to help us understand the flattening of the world. Weaving new information into his overall thesis, and answering the questions he has been most frequently asked by parents across the country, this third edition also includes two new chapters--on how to be a political activist and social entrepreneur in a flat world; and on the more troubling question of how to manage our reputations and privacy in a world where we are all becoming publishers and public figures.

The World Is Flat 3.0 is an essential update on globalization, its opportunities for individual empowerment, its achievements at lifting millions out of poverty, and its drawbacks--environmental, social, and political, powerfully illuminated by the Pulitzer Prize--winning author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

Case In Point

The Wall Street Journal calls Case in Point the MBA Bible! Cosentino demystifies the consulting case interview. He takes you inside a typical interview by exploring the various types of case questions, and he shares with you the acclaimed Ivy Case System. It will give you the confidence to answer even the most sophisticated cases. The book includes dozens of strategy cases, with case starts exercises, 21 ways to cut costs -- plus a special section on Federal and nonprofit cases.!