When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

The first Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company looks back at her life and her career at Xerox, sharing unique insights on American business and corporate life, the workers she has always valued, racial and economic justice, how greed is threatening democracy, and the obstacles she’s conquered being Black and a woman.

For a dozen years as one of the world’s most admired CEOs, Indra Nooyi redefined what it means to be an exceptional leader. The first woman of color and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company - and one of the foremost strategic thinkers of our time - she transformed PepsiCo with a unique vision, a vigorous pursuit of excellence, and a deep sense of purpose. Now, in a rich memoir brimming with grace, grit, and good humor, My Life in Full offers a firsthand view of Nooyi’s legendary career and the sacrifices it so often demanded.

We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well. After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely.

Being a CEO at any of the world’s largest companies is among the most challenging roles in business. Billions, and even trillions, are at stake—and the fates of tens of thousands of employees often hang in the balance. Yet, even when “can’t miss” high-achievers win the top job, very few excel. For those who shoulder the burden of being the one on whom everyone counts, a manual for excellence is sorely needed. To identify the 21st century’s best CEOs, the authors of CEO Excellence started with a pool of over 2,400 public company CEOs.

Sally Susman, the renowned head of corporate affairs at global biopharmaceutical giant Pfizer, tells the fascinating story of how the multinational managed the massive communications challenge that came with COVID and the race to produce an effective vaccine. Just as crucial as creating the vaccine itself was the task of winning people's hearts and minds, and Susman highlights the principles that enabled her to break through, connect, and help move people forward, not only at Pfizer but over a stellar career.

Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005, during a difficult time. Competition was more intense than ever, and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company’s history. His vision came down to three clear ideas: Recommit to the concept that quality matters, embrace technology instead of fighting it, and think bigger - think global - and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets.

Businesses, organizations and society-at-large are all subject to unforeseeable events and incidents that often have a dramatic impact upon prosperity and profit. Due to their unpredictable nature, business leaders and executive teams are unable to prepare for these specific events. But, through innovation, strategizing and an open-minded approach, they can restructure their organization and practices in order to mitigate (or even take advantage of) the impact of such events.

In Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Venture in China, Weijian Shan delivers a compelling account of one of the most significant deals in private equity history: the first and only foreign acquisition of control of a Chinese national bank. Money Machine is the fascinating inside story of the transaction as told by the man who led it, from the intrigues of dealmaking to the complex and uncharted process of securing control by a foreign investor of a Chinese nationwide financial institution, a feat that had never before been attempted, nor has it been repeated.

In their eagerly awaited book, Kim and Spear bring to light a new theory of high-achieving organizations. They examine how companies solve the most important problems better, faster, and easier than their competitors by quickly and regularly closing the gap between aspirations and real-world success. This book teaches companies that are struggling to perform how to achieve the continual greatness seen in the best of the best.

Microsoft's CEO tells the inside story of the company's continuing transformation, tracing his own personal journey from a childhood in India to leading some of the most significant technological changes in the digital era. As much a humanist as engineer and executive, Nadella concludes with his vision for the coming wave of intelligent technologies and a distinct call to action for leaders everywhere.

Goldsmith implores listeners to avoid the Great Western Disease of “I’ll be happy when. . . .” He offers practical advice and exercises aimed at helping us shed the obstacles, especially the failures of imagination, that prevent us from creating our own fulfilling lives. With this book as their guide, listeners can close the gap between what they plan to achieve and what they actually get done—and avoid the trap of existential regret, the kind that reroutes destinies and persecutes our memories.

CEOs. Leaders without titles. Startups. Corporations. For-profits. Nonprofits. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do - you want to become the best. You want to win, every time. Horst Schulze knows how to win. In Excellence Wins, Schulze, in his absolute no-nonsense approach, shares the visionary and disruptive principles that have produced immense global successes over the course of his still-prolific 50-year career.

Grant Golliher is what some would call a “horse whisperer”, able to get a wild horse to calmly accept a saddle and a rider in just hours without the use of force. Through training thousands of horses, many traumatized or abused, Golliher was able to learn essential lessons about communication, boundaries, fairness, trust, and respect to foster more fulfilled relationships, and in turn, create a richer life.

In Culture Is the Way: How Leaders at Every Level Build an Organization for Speed, Impact, and Excellence, former NFL pro, world-renowned keynote speaker, and management consultant Matt Mayberry delivers an incisive and hands-on blueprint to employee engagement and peak productivity. In the book, you'll explore how leaders, at every level, can build a workplace culture that drives organizational excellence and unleashes the full potential of every employee.

Having recently stepped down as chairman and CEO of Best Buy, Hubert Joly shares the leadership principles illustrated by multiple vivid and concrete stories that underpinned the remarkable resurgence of Best Buy and that he believes are at the heart of business: pursue a noble purpose, put people at the center, embrace all stakeholders, and treat profit as an outcome.

A global pandemic, Depression-level unemployment, civil and political unrest - it feels as if the world as we know it is faltering. Through it all, our spirit is being tested. Now more than ever, it's imperative for leaders to demonstrate compassion.

The Leap to Leader is your trusted playbook for making the biggest jump of your career. Foregrounded by compelling stories of those who've made the leap, this book describes what it takes to become a confident leader. Successful CEOs and other C-suite leaders share their strategies and tactics for building a loyal following, winning promotions without asking for them, developing a legacy by helping others make the leap to leader, and much more.

Daniel Goleman's international best seller Emotional Intelligence forever changed our concept of "being smart," showing how emotional intelligence (EI) - how we handle ourselves and our relationships - can determine life success more than IQ. Now Goleman and company apply that knowledge to leadership in a must-hear presentation.

Ron Shaich is a business visionary who has been part of building three iconic restaurant brands: Au Bon Pain, Panera Bread, and now Cava. Along the way, he developed "fast casual," a $100 billion-plus segment of the industry. Now he reveals what he learned about entrepreneurship, running large enterprises, business transformation, and life itself. He illustrates these lessons with his experiences turning a small cookie store into 2,400 restaurants with $5 billion in revenue, delivering annual investor returns of 25% over two decades, and outperforming both Starbucks and Chipotle.

Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, internationally recognized experts in the field of leadership and authors of the best-selling Leadership Challenge, explore the important notion of legacy and the critical questions any leader must ask him or herself in order to leave a lasting impact. In a series of 22 short essays, grouped into four parts (significance, relationships, aspirations, and courage), the authors explore the thorny and often ambiguous issues that today's leaders grapple with.

Throughout history, two perspectives on the world have dueled in our minds: the extrinsic—that of mechanism and physics—and the intrinsic—that of feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The intrinsic perspective allows us to tell stories about our lives, to chart our anger and our lust, to understand our psychologies. The extrinsic allows us to chart the physical world, to build upon it, and to travel across it. These perspectives have never been reconciled; they almost seem to exist on different planes of thought.

In this tender, funny, and sharp companion to her acclaimed memoir-in-essays Amateur Hour, Kimberly Harrington explores and confronts marriage, divorce, and the ways love, loss, and longing shape a life.

From an experienced organizational psychologist comes a unique guide to learning how to better read and understand people and make improved, more informed business decisions about them—including choosing the right employees, fostering relationships in the workplace, resolving conflicts more effectively, and optimizing your performance on the job—using the science of personality.

Get more of the management ideas you want, from the authors you trust. With insights from leading experts, this book will inspire you to identify areas for personal growth; assess your strengths, work preferences, values, and contributions; build your skill set and stay relevant; develop learning agility; map out a plan for where you'd like your career to go - both short and long term; find fulfillment in your work; and prepare for your next opportunity.

The hardest part of leadership is mastering the inevitable high-risk, high-stakes challenges you will face. Whether you're making a split-second decision when your business is knocked sideways or you're finding the best strategy to navigate business-critical long-term circumstances, how can you be in peak form in those most crucial moments? Leadership coaching legends David Noble and Carol Kauffman show you how with their innovative new framework—MOVE—which equips you with the tactics you need to slow down high-stakes situations before they speed you up.

To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. To be a privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was to be expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For young Drew Gilpin Faust, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial privilege proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become “well adjusted" and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was the necessary price of survival.

The critical leadership practices - the ones that will allow a leader to make the biggest impact over time - are well established. They're about how you create a vision and inspire others to follow it. In this comprehensive handbook, strategy and change experts Ron Ashkenas and Brook Manville distill proven ideas and frameworks about leadership from Harvard Business Review, interviews with senior executives, and their own experience in the field - all to help rising leaders stand out and have a big impact.

Leadership can - and indeed must - be learned. But first you've got to choose to lead. If you're going to make a difference, thinking of yourself as a leader will make it more likely that your legacy - not your fantasy, but the real impact of your life, today and in the long run - is the one you really want.