Potato LEAF Leadership Resource Library

Jim Collins (2001). The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders, The Hedgehog Concept, A Culture of Discipline and The Flywheel and the Doom Loop. 

Jim Collins & Morten T. Hansen (2011). Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins’s prior work by its focus on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today. The new findings: (1) The best leaders were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid. (2) Following the belief that leading in a “fast world” always requires “fast decisions” and “fast action” is a good way to get killed. (3) The great companies changed less in reaction to a radically changing world than the comparison companies. 

Rich Horwath (2012). Using the foundational principles of business strategy, Horwath lays out the five steps you can take to create a more fulfilling and successful life: Discover: Uncover your purpose through insight; Differentiate: Identify your unique strengths; Decide: Allocate your resources; Design: Develop your action plan; and, Drive: Execute your plan. The book gives you the opportunity to maximize your true potential at work and at home. Are you ready to build a bridge to the life you want? 

Tim Brown (2021). Change by Design explains design thinking, the collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs, not only with what is technically feasible, but what is viable to the bottom line. Design thinking converts need into demand. It’s a human-centered approach to problem solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and more creative.

Josh Linkner (2011). We live in an era when business cycles are measured in months, not years. The only way to sustain long term innovation and growth is through creativity-at all levels of an organization. Disciplined Dreaming shows you how to create profitable new ideas, empower all your employees to be creative, and sustain your competitive advantage over the long term. Linkner distills his years of experience in business and jazz -- as well as hundreds of interviews with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and artists -- into a 5-step process that will make creativity easy for you and your organization. The methodology is simple, backed by proven results. 

John & Miriam Carver (2006).  this best-selling Policy Governance operating manual, John Carver and Miriam Carver make this exciting approach to effective governance even more accessible and user-friendly, gleaning lessons learned in years of practice to help readers understand and use this invaluable model.

Carver’s groundbreaking Policy Governance model is the best-known, respected, and talked about governance model in the world and has fundamentally influenced the way organizations are governed. Reinventing Your Board, second edition, is a hands-on, step-by-step guide that puts the model to work in the meeting-to-meeting lives of board members. It includes new policy samples and a new chapter on monitoring performance, as well as other practical “put-the-model-in-motion” advice. This popular and highly successful companion to Boards That Make a Difference contains the nuts-and-bolts materials needed for implementing Policy Governance. The authors illustrate effective board decision making, show how to craft useful policies, and offer practical advice on such matters as setting the agenda, monitoring CEO performance, defining the board role, and more. Step-by-step instructions and sample policies make this a must-have resource for boards in the public and nonprofit sectors aiming to govern their organizations with excellence.

John Carver (2006).  Carver continues to debunk the entrenched beliefs and habits that hobble boards and to replace them with his innovative approach to effective governance. This proven model offers an empowering and fundamental redesign of the board role and emphasizes values, vision, empowerment of both the board and staff, and strategic ability to lead leaders. Policy Governance gives board members and staff a new approach to board job design, board-staff relationships, the role of the chief executive, performance monitoring, and virtually every aspect of the board-management relationship. This latest edition has been updated and expanded to include explanatory diagrams that have been used by thousands of Carver's seminar participants. It also contains illustrative examples of Policy Governance model policies that have been created by real-world organizations. In addition, this third edition of Boards That Make a Difference includes a new chapter on model criticisms and the challenges of governance research.