Read about our pricing and services
List Price:
| Price | Quantity |
| $14.00 | 1-24 |
| $12.25 | 25-99 |
| $11.38 | 100-499 |
| $11.03 | 500+ |
Bulk discounts are non-returnable. | |
Customize It
Tweet
Posted Sept. 9, 2010 10:24 a.m. by dylan
When you look at the greatest business thinkers from the second half of the last century, Warren Bennis would have to be in the conversation. When you focus on the field of leadership, he would have to be on the top of that list. In the past fifty-plus years, Bennis has written some of the seminal books on leadership. We included On Becoming a Leader in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time because, as we said in the book, “Bennis treats leadership with a certain gravitas that is perspective changing.”
Now, after writing twenty-seven books on business thought, he tells us his leadership story. It begins when, as a 19-year-old second lieutenant, he commanded a platoon during the final days of the Second World War in Europe and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. It was his first real lesson in leadership:
I had been changed and enriched by the advance course in leadership the war had thrust on me. It is no accident that the war produced so many authentic leaders in the second half of the 20th century. Nobody who has to make choices that result in the deaths of others takes leadership lightly.
He then used the G.I. Bill to go to college at Antioch, a small “free-thinking institution that championed both learning and social justice” in Ohio where he met Douglas McGregor, who would become his early mentor. He went on to do his graduate work at MIT. These two experiences in higher education would transform his life:
One of the first and most critical things those two institutions did for me was radically alter my definition of work. … Work—paid work at that—could be the activity of an engaged mind or a group of minds collaborating to solve a worthy problem.
So inspired, he has spent the rest of his life in higher learning. As he recounts his journey, we meet an incredible group of people—like Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelsson, counter-culture guru Werner Erhard and writer Norman Mailer. We also find out how Bennis developed his beliefs surrounding team-focused leadership instead of the hierarchical leadership model. All of this along with the tale of a life well lived. There are no new theories here, just great stories. But, like all of Warren Bennis’s books, it finds the heart of leadership.
Jack Covert Selects - Bury My Heart at Conference Room B
Posted Aug. 13, 2010 4:01 a.m. by dylan
In 2010, 800-CEO-READ moved to our newly remodeled “world headquarters” and with all this new space, we had walls that needed filling. Lots of pictures of me, of course, but I’ve got to keep my ego in check. What to put on the rest of the walls? As you can imagine, we get lots of books through our door, so there are plenty of sources of inspirations for quotes to put on those walls.
In Bury my Heart in Conference Room B, we found the following quote, which will soon adorn the wall of our new conference room: “The irreducible essence of leadership is that leaders are people who live their deepest personal values without compromise, and they use those values to make life better for others—this is why people become leaders and why people follow leaders.”
In this one quote, I could tell that Stan Slap had penned one of the smartest and most compelling books on leadership I have been lucky enough to read. On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis has been my totem of the genre, though even in that excellent book, this amorphous subject remains slippery.
That is why this book is special: Slap uses his research with over 10,000 managers from seventy countries to point out dichotomies that encapsulate the problems the modern business manager faces. For example:
The personal values that an overwhelming number of managers in every position in every country reported as being most important to them:
1. Family 2. Integrity.
The personal values that those same managers reported as being the most under pressure to compromise in order to do their jobs successfully:
1. Family 2. Integrity
Bury my Heart in Conference Room B will help managers become better leaders and, on the way, become committed managers. Slap’s methodology is to help managers become committed first to themselves, to live their personal values at work which, as the quote in the first paragraph states, is why people become leaders in the first place, and why people follow them.
