leadership

It was only this week I finished watching the first season of Ted Lasso. I'm arriving late to the show, but am loving it as much as expected--from both all the praise it's received and the little I knew about its premise. One of the areas it's exceeded my expectations is Ted's approach to coaching. In case you don't know, Ted is a top American football coach who takes a job as a British football (soccer) coach. He knows nothing about the game or culture he's jumped into, but he's completely confident in his ability to succeed because he knows something even more important: what motivates

This is an absolutely fascinating book.

Walker starts with a question: What makes great sports teams great? He came up with a criteria and looked at the history of athletic teams--national and international, men's and women's, all varieties, so long as they were a cooperative venture--and identified the most dominant dynasties of their eras. He found 122 teams that met the basic criteria, then identified 16 that stood out as the best of the best. He dubbed the 16 as Tier One and the remaining 106 as Tier Two.

Then he looked at the 16 teams to see if he could identify anything they had in common as a shared secret of their success. He noticed that the span of success for one team coincided with the membership of a particular player. Then he looked at the others. [They] weren't the only team whose Tier One performance corresponded in some way to the arrival and departure of one particular player. In fact, they all did. And with an eerie regularity that person was, or would eventually become, the captain. The more he looked, the more he found similarities between all of those figures, until he eventually had to conclude that the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Edwin E. Catmull  is a book about creativity but also about leadership from Catmull's perspective. He is the president of Disney Studios and the co-founder and president of Pixar Animation Studios.  Catmull's leadership philosophy is that everyone has the potential to be creative and to encourage that development is a noble pursuit for any manager.  He also outlines the blocks to creativity and how to overcome them. 

I first heard about this book while I was reading Rising Strong by Brene Brown.  Brown

In his book, Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson provides a fascinating fly-on-the-wall view of many of the defining moments in Steve Jobs life.  The author thoroughly researched his subject, conducting 40 in-depth interviews with Jobs and interviewing over a hundred people who were associated with Jobs – family, friends, colleagues, and peers.  From these many pieces of information, Isaacson has masterfully woven a detailed account of a person who was highly successful and deeply flawed.   The book, with Notes and Index is 630 pages long; the CD audio book consists of 20 disks.

Isaacson brings Jobs