345: Solve Any Problem Faster, with Less Risk, and Lower Cost with Stephen Shapiro

Once in a while, when I sit down to devour a new book, it isn’t long before I realize it’s the kind of book I need to refer to my friends and colleagues because I can’t stop thinking about how much they could be helped by it.

The book I’m featuring in today’s episode is just such a book!

stephen shapiro

The author of this book is Stephen Shapiro. He’s written six previous books, including Best Practices Are Stupid.

He’s also a regular columnist for Inc., and is in the Speaker Hall of Fame.

Stephen’s latest book is called Invisible Solutions: 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems, and it’s a book I think every leader should read. And, it’s a book you should be encouraging your team to read as well.

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344: The Practice and Shipping Creative Work with Seth Godin

If I had to make the difficult choice of selecting just 20 books to access for the remainder of my life, I could do a lot worse than the 20 written so far by today’s special guest.

Seth Godin is special to me for a lot of reasons; not the least of which is he is almost singlehandedly responsible for helping rekindle my love of reading.

seth godin
Seth Godin image credit Darius Bashar and Archangel

In fact, you could go so far as to say that, without Seth Godin, there’s a real good chance the last seven-plus years of my life would have been spent doing something else.

But thanks to his book Purple Cow, I’m here instead. And the beauty of that is, so are you.

Seth’s latest book, released last week, is called The Practice: Shipping Creative Work, and I am thrilled to dive into it in this episode with Seth and with you.

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343: The Self-Evolved Leader with Dave McKeown

I must confess: sometimes I’m just late to the party.

You might say that’s the case for the book and author I’m featuring today.

dave mckeown

Okay, so the book is less than a year old, but I have to admit the publicist representing today’s guest first reached out to me last December! They’re a patient lot.

My guest today is Dave McKeown and he’s written an excellent book titled The Self-Evolved Leader: Elevate Your Focus and Develop Your People in a World That Refuses to Slow Down.

Dave’s book is a practical guide to help you as a C-suite executive and leader “resist the pull of the urgent” so you can focus on the direction of your team, your people, and your shared goals.

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342: Close the Gap Between Dreaming and Doing with Kary Oberbrunner

It is a rare moment when I’m able to present to you a guest who’s been on the show once before.

It’s even rarer when that guest has already been on the show twice before.

kary oberbrunner

That’s right! Today, I’m excited to welcome Kary Oberbrunner to Read to Lead for the third time. He has a brand new book out, released just this past Saturday.

It’s called Unhackable: The 30-Day Elixir for Creating Flawless Ideas, Leveraging Superhuman Focus, and Achieving Optimal Performance Thorugh Flow, and I consider it to be his best book yet.

The truth is, Kary says, you’re getting hacked every day, and you don’t even know it. First your productivity plummets, morale declines, and your dream gets sidelined and sabotaged – yet again.

Unless…you’re UNHACKABLE!

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341: When More Is Not Better with Author Roger L. Martin

Someone once said you can never have too much of a good thing. But then again, they weren’t very smart.

My guest today is very smart and he says you can indeed have too much of a good thing, even when it comes to efficiency.

roger l. martin

His name is Roger L. Martin and he’s writting 11 previous books. He is Professor Emeritus at Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and, in 2017, he was named world’s #1 management thinker!

His brand new book, and the one we’ll be diving into today, is called When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency.

For its first two hundred years, Roger says, the American economy exhibited truly impressive performance. The combination of democratically elected governments and a capitalist system worked, with ever-increasing levels of efficiency spurred by the division of labor, international trade, and scientific management of companies.

By the time of our bicentennial celebration in 1976, the American economy was the envy of the world.

But since then, outcomes have changed dramatically. Roger says, the growth in the economic prosperity of the average American family has slowed to a crawl, while the wealth of the richest Americans has skyrocketed. This imbalance threatens the American democratic capitalist system and our way of life.

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