Kent Lineback Books

Are you the boss you need to be? As good as your firm expects you to be? Good enough to achieve your career aspirations? Being the Boss can help, no matter where you are on your journey. In it, Harvard Business School's Linda Hill and executive Kent Lineback combine six decades of research, teaching, practice, and observation to provide the insights and information you need to move forward. Some managers are content with just getting by. But most stop making progress because they don't understand how to become a great boss, what great bosses actually do, or where they currently stand in comparison with where they should be. In this book, the authors show you how to measure yourself against what's required. At the end, you will clearly understand your strengths, where you need to make progress, and how to move forward. Whether you're new or experienced, this book is your guide to becoming the great boss you need to be -- for your firm, your people, and yourself.

A book about how to make work pay and not just in cash, but in experience, satiafaction, and joy.

Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.

Before they can effectively manage others, managers have to be adept at managing themselves. That requires truly understanding their own passions, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses. This guide offers sage advice from business greats, including Peter F. Drucker and John P. Kotter, on how managers can improve personal performance and productivity and, in the process, become better managers of those they lead.