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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 658
EAN num: 9780132347723
ISBN number: 0132347725
Label: FT Press
Manufacturer: FT Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 384
Printing Date: November 05, 2006
Publishing house: FT Press
Sale Popularity Level: 37823
Studio: FT Press
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The definitive Blanchard on Leadership'25 years of breakthrough leadership insights in one extraordinary book!From The One Minute Manager to Raving Fans, Ken Blanchard's books have helped millions of people unleash their power and the potential of everyone around them. The Ken Blanchard Companies has helped thousands of organizations become more people-oriented, customer-centered, and performance-driven.
In Leading at a Higher Level, Blanchard and his colleagues have brought together all they've learned about world-class leadership. You'll discover how to create targets and visions based on the 'triple bottom line'...and make sure people know who you are, where you're going, and the values that will guide your journey.
Blanchard extends his breakthrough work on delivering legendary customer service and creating 'raving fans.' You'll find the definitive discusion of the renowned Situational Leadership(r) II techniques for leading yourself, individuals, teams, and entire organizations. Most importantly, Leading at a Higher Level will help you dig deep within, discover the personal 'leadership point of view' all great leaders possess-and apply it throughout your entire life.
For everyone who wants to become a better leader...
...in any company, any organization, any area of life
Set the right targets, follow the right vision
Focus on the 'bottom lines' that really matter
Serve your customers at a higher level
Deliver your ideal customer experience, and create 'raving fans'
Beyond ego: the way of the servant leader
Listen, praise, support, guide, and help your people win
Lead at a higher level. Lead your people to greatness as you create high performing organizations that make life better for everyone. This book will guide you, inspire you, provoke you, and be your touchstone.
Ken Blanchard (coauthor of The One Minute Manager(r)) and his colleagues have spent more than 25 years helping good leaders and organizations become great, and stay great. Now, for the very first time, they've brought together everything they've learned about outstanding leadership.
Discover how to...
Go beyond the short term and zero in on the right target and vision
Deliver legendary, maniacal customer service, and earn raving fans
Truly empower your people and unleash their incredible potential
Ground your leadership in humility and focus on the greater good
For a long time, leaders have relied on Ken Blanchard's insight, wisdom, and practical techniques. Now, he and his colleagues have delivered the leadership classic for a new generation: Leading at a Higher Level.
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Rated by buyers -
Leading at a Higher Level is an excellent book that really "puts it all together" related to leadership and Blanchard's principles. I highly recommend it for a comprehensive book about leadership. I am using the book with our management/administrative team. Each person is reading the book and then facilitating the discusion of one chapter. The website resources are an added bonus. I am very excited about the individual and team development possibilities. Thank you!
Rated by buyers -
Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager, and his colleagues at The Ken Blanchard Companies have spent more than 25 years helping good leaders and organizations become great and stay great. In this book, they describe how leaders can empower people and unleash their incredible potential. This book must be required reading for everyone who wants to become a better leader.
A better definition of leadership, according to the author, is the capacity to influence others by unleashing the power and potential of people and organizations for the greater good. Leadership should not be done purely for personal gain or goal accomplishment: It should have a much higher purpose than that. Leadership can be defined as the process of achieving worthwhile results while acting with respect, care and fairness for the well-being of all involved. When that occurs, self-serving leadership is not possible. It's only when you realize that it's not about you that you begin to lead at a higher level.
Being a successful leader is not only about leading your organization, but your customers as well. According to the author, to keep your customers, you can't be content just to satisfy them; you have to create raving fans. Raving fans are customers who are so excited about the way you treat them that they want to tell everyone about you. A good example of how this works is Domo Gas, a full-service gasoline chain in Western Canada, cofounded by Sheldon Bowles. Back in the 1970s, when everybody was going to self-service gasoline stations, Bowles knew that if people had a choice, they would never go to a gas station. But people have to get gas, and they want to get in and out as quickly as possible. The customer service vision that Bowles and his co-founders imagined was an Indianapolis 500 pit stop. They dressed all their attendants in blue jumpsuits. When a customer drove into one of Bowles' stations, two or three people ran out of the hut and raced toward the car. As quickly as possible, they looked under the hood, cleaned the windshield and pumped the gas (p. 42).
A successful leader must also have a workable vision, and be able to clearly communicate and share this vision with his organization. When Louis Gerstner Jr. took the helm of IBM in 1993-- amid turmoil and instability as the company's annual net losses reached a record $8 billion -- he was quoted as saying, "The last thing IBM needs is a vision." In an article in The New York Times two years later, Gerstner conceded that IBM had lost the war for the desktop operating system, acknowledging that the acquisition of Lotus signified that the company had failed to plan properly for its future. He admitted that he and his management team now "spent a lot of time thinking ahead." Once Gerstner understood the importance of vision, an incredible turnaround occurred. In 1995, delivering the keynote address at the computer industry trade show, Gerstner articulated IBM's new vision -- that network computing would drive the subsequent phase of industry growth and would be the company's overarching strategy. That year, IBM began a series of acquisitions that positioned it to become the fastest-growing company in its segment, with growth at more than 20 percent per year. This extraordinary turnaround demonstrated that the most important thing IBM needed was a vision (p. 24-25).
Leaders must also know how to lead their workforce. Giving people too much or too little direction has a negative impact on people's development. Situational leadership is based on the belief that people can and want to develop, and there is no best leadership style to encourage that development. You should tailour leadership style to the situation. This is pretty much common sense. But leaders should also train their people in self leadership. For example, Bandag Manufacturing experienced the value of self leadership after a major equipment breakdown. Rather than laying off the affected work force, the company opted to train them in leadership. The company began holding their managers accountable and asking them to demonstrate their leadership capabilities. They were asking managers for direction and support and urging them to clarify goals and expectations. Suddenly, managers were studying up on rusty skills and working harder. When the plant's ramp-up time was compared to the company's other eight plants that had experienced similar breakdowns in the past, the California plant reached pre-breakdown production levels faster than any in history. The determining factor in the plant's successful rebound was primarily the proactive behavior of the workers, who were fully engaged and armed with the skill of self leadership (p. 104-105).
Leaders must also encourage team work, and be part of the team themselves. Teams provide a sense of worth, connection and meaning to the people involved in them. A study of 12,000 male Swedish workers over a 14-year period ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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Dramatic changes have altered the workplace over the course of the past 25 years, but many executives stick to outdated scripts even as corporate directions shift. Fortunately, The One Minute Manager guru Ken Blanchard offers insightful coaching exercises that give leaders new ways to proceed. Using straightforward language, Blanchard provides templates, examples and guidelines for employee education, performance reviews and promotions. The reader may become impatient with the repetition of key points and with Blanchard's slightly jarring habit of referring to himself in the third person, but despite these minor annoyances, this book is an excellent primer about modern leadership roles. In fact, Blanchard says that it "pulls together the thinking from the Ken Blanchard Companies for the past 25 years." We recommend this leadership overview to managers, board members, team leaders and every employee in a cubicle who aspires to reach higher levels.
Rated by buyers -
Management expert Ken Blanchard has spent more than 25 years helping individuals and organizations become and stay great. Known for his co-authorship of The One Minute Manager, for the very first time Blanchard combines his collective wisdom to show managers and leaders zero in on the right target and vision.
Blanchard argues that in high performing organizations everyone's energy is focused on three issues:
1. Being the provider of choice. To keep your customers, you must go beyond satisfying them, you have to turn them into raving fans.
2. Being the employer of choice. Workers seek opportunities where they feel their contributions are valued and rewarded.
3. Being the investment of choice. Money flows to organizations that provide viability, visibility and performance over time.
To achieve these goals, Blanchard argues, your organization must become a HPO - a high performing organization. The author employs the acronym SCORES to illustrate the six elements found in every HPO:
1. Shared Information and Communication.
2. Compelling Vision.
3. Ongoing Learning.
4. Relentless Focus on Customer Results.
5. Energizing Systems and Structures.
6. Shared Power and High Involvement.
In an HPO, Blanchard writes, every thing starts and ends with the customer. Each organization member is passionate about developing sophisticated knowledge of customers and sharing the information throughout the organization. This is accomplished three ways:
1. Decide. If you want raving fans, you do not announce it. You plan for it.
2. Discover. After you decide, it's critical to ask your customers' for suggestions to improve their experience with your organization.
3. Deliver + 1 per cent. Excite your people to deliver this experience, plus.
Enablement is the key to beating your competition day-after day. Allowing your people to pit their brains and allowing them to use their knowledge, experience and motivation is critical. To guide this transition to an enablement culture, leaders must use three keys:
1. Share Information.
2. Declare the Boundaries
3. Replace old Hierarchies with Self-Directed Individuals and Teams.
This requires a special leader: the servant leader. Leadership has two parts: vision and implementation. They need to find out what their people need to be successful and they make a difference in the lives of their people and in the process, their organization.
Rated by buyers -
I've been reading Dr. Ken Blanchard since The One Minute Manager came out. Perhaps you have been, too. While I haven't read all of his collaborations, I've usually read the books where the title seemed relevant to my interests.
More than once, I've wondered how I should fit all the pieces of his views on leadership into one finished jigsaw puzzle. Clearly, the views are humanistic, idealistic and inspiring. But how do we combine them all? My confusion was eliminated by reading Leading at a Higher Level which does an excellent job of integrating three decades worth of writing into one coherent set of ideas and directions for implementation.
If you tried to boil down this book into one idea, it's that of having the right target . . . what Dr. Blanchard and his partners and associates call the triple bottom line -- being the provider of choice for customers, the employer of choice for employees, and the investment of choice for investors. I'm not inclined to quibble, but in the rest of the book it's clear that other stakeholders are supposed to be considered (people who use the offerings, partners, the community, suppliers, and those affected by the company). I wonder if the triple bottom line doesn't need to be expanded to have more bottom lines.
Here's how the book is organized:
I. Set Your Sights on the Right Target and Vision
1. Measuring leadership performance -- the HPO SCORES model which is:
a. Shared information and open communications
b. Compelling vision
c. Ongoing learning
d. Relentless focus on customer results
e. Energizing systems and structures (ways of getting things done that fit with the vision)
f. Shared power and high involvement
As you can see, this is a highly participative concept of leadership where everyone has a role.
2. The Power of Vision
II. Treat Your Customers Right (Raving Fans created by Gung Ho people)
III. Treat Your People Right (Direct, Coach, Support, or Delegate depending on how prepared your people are for the task, and use one minute praisings and redirections and apologies)
IV. Have the Right Kind of Leadership (Servant leadership and diagnosing your own leadership perspective and style)
The bulk of the book is focused on the third topic, treat your people right, which is Dr. Blanchard's key operating philosophy.
The most interesting aspect of the book for me, however, was Dr. Blanchard's occasional revision of his philosophy. For instance, I could never understand why Dr. Johnson and he emphasized one-minute reprimands as much as one-minute praisings in The One Minute Manager. Dr. Blanchard makes a long-needed shift in that view to point out that one-minute redirections and one-minute apologies are needed much more often than one-minute reprimands.
Who will gain the most from this book? Someone who wants to see a process spelled out that can be used for being a humanistic leader and who hasn't read many books on the subject. If you've already read everything that's ever been written and feel comfortable with how Dr. Blanchard's many books fit together in application, you probably won't gain much additional knowledge from this book. But if you would like a friendly review of books you've enjoyed, you'll find the reading to be a pleasant experience. I enjoyed learning more about Dr. Blanchard's various colleagues.
If you haven't read anything by Ken Blanchard, just buy and read this book. It tells you everything you need to know about the other books. You could then expand your appreciation selectively by reading the fables that go with those books where you want to have a deeper understanding . . . by adding a story to go with the leadership lessons.
Be the leader you would like to have! That's the advice of Norman Schwarzkopf. I'm sure he would approve of this book.
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