Leadership Without Excuses: How to Create Accountability and High-Performance (Instead of Just Talking About It)

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30 Years of Breakthrough Leadership Insights in One Extraordinary Book!

From The One Minute Manager® to Raving Fans, Ken Blanchard’s books have helped millions of people unleash their power and the potential of everyone around them. The Ken Blanchard Companies has helped thousands of organizations become more people oriented, customer centered, and performance driven.

Now, in this fully updated edition of Leading at a Higher Level, Blanchard and his colleagues bring together all they’ve learned about world-class leadership. You’ll discover how to create targets and visions based on the “triple bottom line” and make sure people know who you are, where you’re going, and the values that will guide your journey.

Leading at a Higher Level presents the definitive discussion about using Situational Leadership® II to lead yourself, individuals, teams, and entire organizations. More important, you’ll learn how to dig deep within, discover the personal “leadership point of view” all great leaders possess, and apply it throughout your entire life.

For everyone who wants to become a better leader...

...in any company, any organization, any area of life

Build an organization that “walks the walk” on values

Eliminate the gap between your company’s stated values and actual behavior

Serve your customers at a higher level

Deliver your ideal customer experience and create “raving fans”

Coach to bring out everyone’s best, from top to bottom

Create a coaching culture that boosts performance at every level

Given human nature, most managers, when faced with the harsh facts of substandard performance, tend to soften the truth with their direct reports, so as not to offend or upset them. They tend to avoid mentioning mistakes, missed dates, an incomplete project, unacceptable quality of work, and the like. Then, if the problem becomes egregious, the manager may suddenly overreact with a contentious confrontation that results in little long-term behavior change. Or else the manager will try to work around the substandard performance, shifting the workload to top performers on the team rather than addressing reality directly with the person concerned. Bodaken and Fritz provide a step-by-step approach for continuous improvement, in which managers deal with performance issues early on, to help employees face the truth without being made to feel denigrated, inept, or incompetent -- which would only defeat the desired goal of improvement. Moreover, this approach also greatly enhances the manager's own career success.

When managers understand and use this practice, they can produce more top performers and add from 25 to 40 percent more actual capacity to their organization. At Blue Shield of California, for example, more than one thousand managers have been trained in this approach, with impressive, measurable results, helping the company become one of the fastest-growing health care plans in the state. Other companies, all at the top of their industries, are now using MMOT with great success. As widely acclaimed author Peter Senge notes in his foreword, "This is not a book with just a bunch of 'good ideas.' It is a call to a simple but transformative practice, vital to building an organization truly worthy of people's highest achievement."

Learn the strategic rules of Sun Tzu and how to incorporate them into your management style.

• How to look for strategic turns to meet the competition
• How to attain strategic superiority and crush the competition
• How to plan surprise and stay ahead of the game
• And more timeless wisdom that will allow you to compete and win in the dynamic business environment!

Business managers around the world have tapped into this ancient wisdom; it is time to master The Art of War for Managers for the existence and growth of your business!

• See the ship through the eyes of the crew: By soliciting a sailor's suggestions, Abrashoff drastically reduced tedious chores that provided little additional value.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate: The more Abrashoff communicated the plan, the better the crew's performance. His crew would eventually call him "Megaphone Mike," since they heard from him so often.
• Create discipline by focusing on purpose: Discipline skyrocketed when Abrashoff's crew believed that what they were doing was important.
• Listen aggressively: After learning that many sailors wanted to use the GI Bill, Abrashoff brought a test official aboard the ship-and held the SATs forty miles off the Iraqi coast. From achieving amazing cost savings to winning the highest gunnery score in the Pacific Fleet, Captain Abrashoff's extraordinary campaign sent shock waves through the U.S. Navy. It can help you change the course of your ship, no matter where your business battles are fought.

The secret? A revolutionary approach to the traditional practice of yoga.

Study after study has shown that yoga offers a multitude of benefits for todays stressedout, busy woman, including a trimmer body, stronger immunity, lower blood pressure, improved mood, better sex, and more!

In this comprehensive manual, youll find more than 200 body-shaping and lifechanging yoga poses, meditations, breathing exercises, and unique 15-minute routines crafted by yoga superstar Tara Stiles.

In Slim Calm Sexy Yoga youll discover how just 15 minutes of yoga a day can help you:

- Sculpt a sexy silhouette

- Control diet-busting cravings

- Banish stress for good

- Amp up your sexual satisfaction

- Get smooth, glowing skin

- Sleep better, stay healthy, and have through-the- roof energy

Everything changes the night she catches her husband, Jake, "wielding his whisk" with Grappa's new Mâitress d'. Mira's fiery response earns her a court-ordered stint in anger management and the beginning of legal and personal predicaments as she battles to save her restaurant and pick up the pieces of her life.

Mira falls back on family and friends in Pittsburgh as she struggles to find a recipe for happiness. But the heat is really on when some surprising developments in New York present her with a high stakes opportunity to win back what she thought she had lost forever. For Mira, cooking isn't just about delicious flavors and textures, but about the pleasure found in filling others' needs. And the time has come to decide where her own fulfillment lieseven if the answers are unexpected.

Keenly observed and deeply satisfying, Aftertaste is a novel about rebuilding and rediscovery, about food passionately prepared and unapologetically savored, and about the singular contentment that comes with livingand lovingwith gusto.

"A delicious debut." --Jamie Cat Callan, author of French Women Don't Sleep Alone