Stanford Executive Briefings: Leadership

How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People

Dr. Charles O'Reilly argues that the source of sustained competitive advantage already exists within every organization. O'Reilly's prescription for an overheated labor market: abandon the obsession with hiring high-priced stars, instead motivating ordinary people to build a great company and achieve extraordinary results.

The Mastery of Speaking as a Leader

Terry Pearce demonstrates ways in which a leader can elevate a speech into a more powerful and ultimately productive experience for both speaker and listener. Pearce explains three rules that set the stage for consistently engaging presentations: speak on topics you care about, incorporate personal experiences, and structure your speech as a story.

Executive Leadership

Strong leadership is critical to the success of any enterprise, and the most powerful value-based leadership styles are powerful. Effective leaders frequently use everyday actions to model the traits that reflect the values of their organizations. This 10-DVD set presents invaluable skills and leadership techniques from some of the brightest thought leaders in modern business.

A Leader's Legacy

Based on 25 years of research, Jim Kouzes explores the tough and often ambiguous issues that today's leaders must grapple with, including how you can't take trust for granted, why failure should always be an option, and how to liberate the leader in everyone.

Leveraging the Spotlight of Leadership

Managers and executives sit in a natural spotlight because of their leadership role. The best leaders harness the spotlight as a powerful tool to get things done – influencing the behavior and decision-making of their staff, even when they are not present.

How to Manage People Through Continuous Change

Change is now business as usual. But employees are increasingly skeptical about committing to business strategies that are constantly being redefined. Carol Kinsey Goman presents specific methods for communicating to employees both the WIIFM benefits of your plan and the negative consequences for the viability of your team if they don't get on board.

X-Teams

Deborah Ancona challenges the dominant wisdom that effective teams focus internally on the roles, synergies, and collaboration of team members to produce results. Building on twenty-five years of research, she shows that the most successful teams instead focus externally—on customers, competition, and the marketplace—tapping into an expanded knowledge base and skills set to move forward quickly.