The Leadership Challenge
By James Kouzes and Barry Posner

Based on extensive research on leaders around the world, Kouzes and Posner offer five practices that mark the type of leader people admire. Leaders who evidence these five practices are capable of mobilizing others to get "extraordinary things done in organizations." For leaders who want to know how to motivate others, this is a good read, as well as one that complements Senge's Fifth Discipline by fleshing out the idea of building a shared vision. The five practices are: modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act, and encouraging the heart. Their thesis is that leadership is a learned skill; these practices provide the direction for effective skill building. A lengthy read, therefore I recommend that a leader read each section on the five practices over time while trying to increase skill in that particular area.

Leadership On the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading
By Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky

This book outlines the challenge for leaders who find themselves in the midst of leading complex organizations, and offers a framework for tackling their work. Behind the framework offered is insight into human systems that helps keep a leader from missing the real dynamics at work. For instance, the authors claim that people don't resist change, they resist the loss they fear change will bring.

Their thesis is that leadership is about framing the issues and giving the work back to the people who need to be doing it, rather than dropping visions from on high, or promising quick fixes. Most helpful in the book is helping a leader see when a situation calls for a technical fix (i.e. there is expertise that can be brought to bear on the situation) or an adaptive challenge (i.e. there is no known expertise; people need to learn new skills, behavior and attitudes in order to tackle the situation.) Lastly, they get to the heart of leadership through the last section on managing one's own issues and behaviors as a leader.

Leading Change
By John Kotter

Considered the classic on change management, Harvard Business School professor John Kotter outlines how to effectively lead change. His eight-stage process includes: establishing a sense of urgency, creating a guiding coalition, developing a vision and strategy, communicating the change vision, empowering broad-based action, generating short-term wins, consolidating gains, and anchoring the new approaches in the culture of the organization. These steps are explained with clarity, charts/graphs/visuals and vivid examples and stories, all woven within a short and concise book. This is a must read for any leader in these times of discontinuous change.

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
By Peter Senge

This classic book of the "learning organization" movement outlines five disciplines which enable a leader to see their organization as a dynamic system with key leverage points rather than as a one dimensional, cause and effect chain reaction. The five disciplines are: engaging in systems thinking, examining mental models through inquiry and dialogue, encouraging team learning, building shared vision which inspires commitment, and developing the personal mastery of all organizational members in the first four disciplines.

According to Senge, these are the conditions needed to create a learning organization, defined as one where people continually learn together, think more expansively, and therefore are able to create the results they desire through productive change. Particularly helpful in this book is his explanation of systems thinking, through using a case study business people can relate to.

Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems
By Barry Johnson

According to Johnson, a polarity looks like a problem to solve, but is actually an interdependent opposite. It's like inhaling and exhaling. They look like opposite activities, but both are needed. Should a leader be clear or flexible? Yes. Should a company be market driven or product driven? Yes. Both. The goal is to experience the positive aspects of both, rather than the negative. Johnson gives tools for maintaining an active tension between the two sides of any polarity, and tools for how to reestablish the tension when an organization has become stuck in one side. Particularly helpful are his ideas about helping people on opposite sides of any stuck polarity to communicate more effectively with each other. Johnson's own assessment is correct, polarity management is not the totality of leadership skills, but is a very good tool for framing complicated issues. Therefore, I call it the "Swiss army knife" of a leader's tool kit, because it's helpful in a variety of situations.

The Leadership Machine
By Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger

Based on research from the Center for Creative Leadership and Lominger International, this book summarizes findings which are helpful to anyone working in the area of leadership succession. The book is geared toward human resource, organizational development or other practitioners who work with succession planning, and is designed to be used in concert with Lominger tools such as their 360° survey. That said, their system of 67 competencies and 19 "career-stallers" (in-competencies) is thorough and provides a useful tool for anyone doing job analysis, hiring, promoting, and developing employees across all levels, including top executives.

Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business
By Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner

Designed for international companies and those doing business across national boundaries, this clear summary of the authors' research would also benefit those working with different cultures within one company. The authors have identified seven seemingly opposite dimensions of cross cultural interactions: five which explain relationships between people, one which deals with attitudes toward time, and the last which deals with attitudes toward the external world. These dimensions are clearly explained and illustrated, and the use of an extended case study throughout the book helps tie all the concepts together. Concrete applications are provided, so that any business person could understand the ramifications of these seven dimensions for their work. Extremely useful is the bullet form summary at the end of each chapter, showing how each side could approach the other for greater effectiveness in working together.

According to the authors, reconciling these opposites provides people with an avenue---to not just "make the sale"--- but move toward a win/win situation consisting of more synergy than any culture can attain by itself. The authors model the way in this respect, by writing about different cultures with great tact, such that the reader is one step closer to appreciating and not deprecating differences.