Bell Oaks Executive Search - Recommended Reading

We challenge ourselves to continually learn. To seek the insights and opinions of reputable sources. To be true business consultants with a deep understanding of how today’s companies are led.

Below are some of the many books in the Bell Oaks library. We have found these titles to be among the most informative, inspiring and useful. We hope they provide a benefit to you as well.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Once again using an astutely written fictional tale to unambiguously but painlessly deliver some hard truths about critical business procedures, Patrick Lencioni targets group behavior in the final entry of his trilogy of corporate fables. And like those preceding it, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is an entertaining, quick read filled with useful information that will prove easy to digest and implement. This time, Lencioni weaves his lessons around the story of a troubled Silicon Valley firm and its unexpected choice for a new CEO: an old-school manager who had retired from a traditional manufacturing company two years earlier at age 55. Showing exactly how existing personnel failed to function as a unit, and precisely how the new boss worked to reestablish that essential conduct, the book's first part colorfully illustrates the ways that teamwork can elude even the most dedicated individuals – and be restored by an insightful leader. A second part offers details on Lencioni's "five dysfunctions" (absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results), along with a questionnaire for readers to use in evaluating their own teams and specifics to help them understand and overcome these common shortcomings.

Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose

It's a fact: People are increasingly searching for higher meaning in their lives, not just more possessions. This trend is transforming the marketplace, the workplace, and the very soul of capitalism. Increasingly, today's most successful companies are those who've brought love, joy, authenticity, empathy, and soulfulness into their businesses: companies that deliver emotional, experiential, and social value, not just profits. Firms of Endearment illuminates this: the most fundamental transformation in capitalism since Adam Smith. It's not a book about corporate social responsibility: it's about building companies that can sustain success in a radically new era. It's about great companies like IDEO and IKEA, Commerce Bank and Costco, Wegmans and Whole Foods: how they've earned powerful loyalty and affection from all their stakeholders, while achieving stock performance that is truly breathtaking. It's about gaining "share of heart," not just share of wallet. It's about aligning the interests of all your stakeholders, not just juggling them. It's about understanding how the "new rules of capitalism" mirror the self-actualization focus of our aging society. It's about building companies that leave the world a better place. Most of all, it's about why you must do all this, or risk being left in the dust... and how to get there from wherever you are now.

The Trusted Advisor

In today's fast-paced networked economy, professionals must work harder than ever to maintain and improve their business skills and knowledge. But technical mastery of your discipline is not enough, assert world-renowned professional advisors David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford. The key to professional success, they argue, is the ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients. The creation of trust is what earns the right to influence clients; trust is also at the root of client satisfaction and loyalty. The workings of trust are even more critical in the new economy than in the old.

Maister, Green, and Galford enrich our understanding of trust -- yet they have also written a deeply practical book. Using their model of "The Trust Equation," they dissect the rational and emotional components of trustworthiness. With precision and clarity, they detail five distinct steps you must take to create a trust-based relationship. Each step -- engage, listen, frame, envision, and commit -- is richly described in distinct chapters. The book is peppered with pragmatic "top ten" lists aimed at improving advisors' effectiveness that can be put to use instantly. It also includes a trust self-diagnostic in the appendix.

This immensely readable book will be welcomed by the inexperienced advisor and the most seasoned expert alike. The authors use anecdotes, experiences, and examples -- successes and mistakes, their own and others' -- to great effect. Though they use the professional services advisor/client paradigm throughout the book, their prescriptions have resonance for other trust-reliant situations -- selling, customer relationship management, and internal staff functions like HR and information technology.

The result is a tour de force -- brilliant, penetrating, unique. It is essential reading for anyone who must advise, negotiate, or manage complex relationships with others.

Good to Great
Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11 – including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo – and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider.

Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell, a New Yorker staff writer, offers an incisive and piquant theory of social dynamics that is bound to provoke a paradigm shift in our understanding of mass behavioral change. Defining such dramatic turnarounds as the abrupt drop in crime on New York's subways, or the unexpected popularity of a novel, as epidemics, Gladwell searches for catalysts that precipitate the "tipping point," or critical mass, that generates those events. What he finds, after analyzing a number of fascinating psychological studies, is that tipping points are attributable to minor alterations in the environment, such as the eradication of graffiti, and the actions of a surprisingly small number of people, who fit the profiles of personality types that he terms connectors, mavens, and salesmen. As he applies his strikingly counterintuitive hypotheses to everything from the "stickiness," or popularity, of certain children's television shows to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, Gladwell reveals that our cherished belief in the autonomy of the self is based in great part on wishful thinking.

Topgrading
Great companies don't just depend on strategies-they depend on people. The more great people on your team, the more successful your organization will be. But that's easier said than done. Statistically, half of all employment decisions result in a mishire: The wrong person winds up in the wrong job. But companies that have followed Bradford Smart's advice in Topgrading have boosted their successful hiring rate to 90 percent or better, giving them an unbeatable competitive advantage.

Now Smart has fully revised his 1999 management classic to reintroduce the topgrading concept, which works for companies large and small in any industry. The author spells out his practical approach to finding and managing A-level talent-as well as coaching B players to turn them into A players. He provides intriguing case studies drawn from more than four thousand in-depth interviews.

As Smart writes in his introduction, "All organizations, all businesses live or die mostly on their talent, and any manager who fails to topgrade is nuts, or a C player. . . . Those who, way deep down, would sooner see an organization die than nudge an incompetent person out of a job should not read this book... Topgrading is for A players and all those aspiring to be A players."

True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership
"Just as a compass points toward a magnetic field, your True North pulls you toward the purpose of your internal compass, your leadership will be authentic, and people will naturally want to associate with you. Although others may guide or influence you, your truth is derived from your life story and only you can determine what it should be." – From the Introduction

True North shows how anyone who follows their internal compass can become an authentic leader. This leadership tour de force is based on research and first-person interviews with 125 of today's top leaders-with some surprising results. In this important audio book, acclaimed former Medtronic CEO Bill George and coauthor Peter Sims share the wisdom of these outstanding leaders and describe how the listener can develop as an authentic leader. True North presents a concrete and comprehensive program for leadership success and shows the listener how to create his own. Personal Leadership Development Plan centered on five key areas:

Knowing your authentic self.
Defining your values and leadership principles.
Understanding your motivations.
Building your support team.
Staying grounded by integrating all aspects of your life.

TrueNorth offers an opportunity for anyone to transform their leadership path and become the authentic leader they were born to be.

Clients for Life
An Innovative Blueprint for Enduring Client Relationships

More than 15 million people in this country earn their livings by serving clients, and their numbers are growing every day. Unfortunately, far too few develop the skills and strategies needed to rise to the top ina world where clients have almost unlimited access to information and expertise. Supported by more than one hundred case studies and wisdom gleaned from interviews with dozens of leading CEOs and prominent business advisors, Clients for Life identifies what clients really want and lays out the core qualities that distinguish the client advisor – an irreplaceable resource – from the expert for hire – a tradable commodity.

Experts are specialists; advisors become deep generalists who have broad perspective.
Experts are for hire; advisors have selfless independence, balancing client devotion with objectivity and detachment.
Experts have professional credibility; advisors develop deep personal trust.
Experts analyze; advisors synthesize and bring big-picture thinking to the table.
Experts supply expertise and information; advisors are educators who provide insight and wisdom.

Portraits of history's most famously successful advisors, including Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, and J. P. Morgan, underscore these timeless qualities that modern professionals need to develop to excel in today's competitive environment.

Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World
Leadership is crucial to building organizations with staying power. In Heroic Leadership, author Chris Lowney examines organizational principles derived from the history and teachings of the Jesuits and applies them to modern corporate culture. Based on the four Jesuit pillars of success: self-awareness (reflection), ingenuity (embracing change), love (positive attitudes toward others) and heroism (energizing ambitions). Despite the emphasis on the four pillars, this is no formulaic "12-steps-to-success" tome. Rather than focusing on what leaders do, Lowney shows how the Jesuit approach focuses on who leaders are. His conversational voice draws the reader in as he unfolds leadership lessons from some unlikely Jesuit role models, including explorer Benedetto de Goes, linguist Matteo Ricci and mathematician and astronomer Christopher Clavius. Lowney's passion for history is appealing, and he is careful not to sugarcoat his historical role models. Professionals looking for a One-Minute type of business book won't find it here, but more reflective businesspeople of faith will find Lowney's insights a breath of fresh air . A Jesuit seminarian turned investment banker, Lowney recognized a tremendous lack of able leaders throughout his seventeen years of multinational management experience. By modeling the Jesuits' success, Lowney shares methods for molding innovative, ambitious leaders in the modern corporate environment.

Blue Ocean Strategy
In direct opposition to 'environmental determinism', the perspective that businesses must simply accept the realities and boundaries of their markets, the Blue Ocean Strategy offers an enticing alternative. Why not stretch the boundary or break it entirely by creating a value innovation that customers can use immediately? Examples of Blue Ocean companies are Starbucks, The Body Shop and Cirque du Soleil. They define their target market and function in a way that differentiates them so solidly from their competition as to leave them without much competition at all. There are six steps to the Blue Ocean Strategy: 1. Reconstruct market boundaries. Strategically examine your industry's key competitive drivers. 2. Focus on the big picture, not the numbers. Consider the competitive environment through your customer's eyes so that you stay focused on what matters to them. 3. Reach beyond existing demand. Don't just focus on your current customers. Look for your potential customers. 4. Get the strategic sequence right. Technological innovation does not guarantee market success. The technology must be made relevant to customers and provide value. 5. Overcome key organizational hurdles. 6. Build execution into strategy. Link engagement, explanation and expectation with the actual process of developing the strategy. Executing a blue ocean strategy will require trust among your team.

Back to Virtue
In the book, Kreeft explains how our civilization has rejected the idea of virtue and why we desparately need to recover this moral vision in order to know true blessedness inwardly and good relationships outwardly. As Thomas Merton wrote, "We are not peace with others because we are not peace with ourselves, and we are not peace with ourselves because we are not peace with God."

Kreeft argues that we need a clear roadmap concerning right and wrong – and that roadmap is clearly discovered in God's Word. "The most striking feature of God's roadmap is the stark fact of the Two Roads. There is the road that leads to Life, and there is the road that leads to Death. There is Good, and there is Evil. There is Right and there is Wrong" (11). We must regain the wisdom of those who have gone before us in order to meet the challenges of the present and the future. C. S. Lewis concisely presents the modern problem: "For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique." Kreeft argues that we must return to a historic understanding of virtue and vice in order to confront the moral turmoil that surrounds us. "In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left" (189).

With this historical backdrop in place, Kreeft introduces his readers to the four cardinal virtues of justice, wisdom, courage, and moderation. "Cardinal" comes from the Latin word for "hinge". All other virtues "hinge" on these four. He then considers the three theological virtues – faith, hope, and love. Finally, he considers the seven deadly sins and contrasts them with the Beautitudes.

In short, this book is well worth its weight in gold. It is a fine introduction to a subject that needs to be recovered in our society and – even more importantly – in our churches. We are to make every effort to add virtue to our faith (2 Peter 1:5).

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations

"No one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." —H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken was wrong.

In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.
This seemingly counterintuitive notion has endless and major ramifications for how businesses operate, how knowledge is advanced, how economies are (or should be) organized and how we live our daily lives. With seemingly boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, economic behaviorism, artificial intelligence, military history and political theory to show just how this principle operates in the real world.

Despite the sophistication of his arguments, Surowiecki presents them in a wonderfully entertaining manner. The examples he uses are all down-to-earth, surprising, and fun to ponder. Why is the line in which you’re standing always the longest? Why is it that you can buy a screw anywhere in the world and it will fit a bolt bought ten-thousand miles away? Why is network television so awful? If you had to meet someone in Paris on a specific day but had no way of contacting them, when and where would you meet? Why are there traffic jams? What’s the best way to win money on a game show?Why, when you walk into a convenience store at 2:00 A.M. to buy a quart of orange juice, is it there waiting for you? What do Hollywood mafia movies have to teach us about why corporations exist?

The Wisdom of Crowds is a brilliant but accessible biography of an idea, one with important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, conduct our business, and think about our world.