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Visit the NEW Book Club each month for best-selling business books of special interest to executive women. You’ll get great insights and great savings—and a portion of each sale will support NEW’s education and networking programs.
Edge!
A Leadership Story
by Bea Fields, Corey Blake and Eva Silva Travers
Writer’s of the Round Table Press, 249 pages, 2008, soft cover, $19.95
Edge! offers a novel approach to business books. Written like -- you guessed it -- a novel, Edge! follows the fictional foibles of Global Trade Management Corporation and its hotshot CEO, Mitchell James, as James and the company lose their luster and key executives start to jump ship.
The hero of the tale is executive coach Kate Nelson, a “diminutive dynamo” who helps James attack his leadership weaknesses and organizational problems through a deliberate step-by-step approach. The CEO’s new leadership skills are put to the test when crisis strikes the firm.
Written in 22 lightning-fast chapters, Edge offers a compelling lessons that deal with basic human issues like “unrest,” “rejection,” “fear,” “authenticity” and “doubt.” At the end of each chapter, real-life leadership coach Bea Fields provides her insight with thought-provoking questions and a summary to engage readers in finding their own edge.
Lessons of a Lipstick Queen
Finding and Developing the Great Idea that Can Change Your Life
by Poppy King
Atria Books, 358 pages, 2008, hardcover, $23
When Australian cosmetics entrepreneur Poppy King couldn’t find the matte lipstick she wanted, she decided to take matters in her own hands. She was 18.
One year later King was president of her own million-dollar cosmetics firm, Poppy Industries. How this self-described mediocre student went from concept to conquest is the subject of this book.
King reveals how she managed to launch her business, “extracting valuable lessons from the experience as she goes along.” These lessons a broken down in chapters on idea development, financing, brand marketing, media relations and common pitfalls.
The style is breezy and the approach is personal. And if the information is often basic, Lessons of a Lipstick Queen is always entertaining and often profound. Like a lot of good ideas, the beauty of King’s ideas is their simplicity.
Through the Labyrinth
The Truth about How Women Become Leaders
by Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli
Harvard Business School Press, 308 pages, 2008, hardcover, $29.95
Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership is the book-long version of A Harvard Business Review article that placed second in this year’s Annual McKinsey Awards for excellence in management thinking.
The authors maintain that the “glass ceiling metaphor has outlived its usefulness.” There’s still a problem -- only 2 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women -- but the glass ceiling metaphor fails to address the root causes.
It asks -- and answers -- such essential questions as: “Are men simply better, more natural leaders? Are women’s careers compromised by their responsibilities at home? Does discrimination against women still exist in the workplace? Do organizational traditions and practices create obstacles to women’s leadership? And do women have leadership styles that work for or against them?”
Eagly and Carli, professors of psychology at Northwestern University and Wellesley College, respectively, base their answers in scientific research taken from psychology, sociology, and management, “steadfastly resisting the temptation to provide simplistic, boilerplate assessments and advice.”
The book argues that women face a complex series of challenges throughout their careers. These barriers include resistance to their leadership styles, the demands of family life and vestiges of prejudice on all levels.
Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership is one of the best-researched and most important books written on the subject in years, but it is easily accessible to non-academic readers. It points a way through the maze of barriers holding women -- and American business -- from achieving their full potential.
The Connected and Committed Leader
Lessons from Home. Results at Work.
by Laura Lopez
Living Leadership Press, 162 pages, 2008, hardcover, $25.95
Can the lessons you learned raising your kids help you become a better manager? Laura Lopez, a workshop leader at the 2007 NEW Leadership Summit, says yes.
“Command and control leading won’t work in the new millennium,” the former Coca-Cola executive writes. Human connection with employees, clients and consumers is critical in a new environment marked by global competition, shifting hierarchies and a breakdown in old loyalties.
Lopez became a mother later in life and learned that “parenting wasn’t much different than guiding and leading people at work.” The epiphany produced this book and the seven insights that form its core. These essential insights focus on the “soft power” that great leadership requires -- curiosity, transparency, openness, humility, clarity and consistency.
Corporate culture and B-schools “applaud competition and self-centeredness,” Lopez writes. “Great parenting and leadership requires we give up our self-centeredness.”
The Connected and Committed Leader is a leadership guide for people who understand that they need to bring their heart to work, not just their minds. It is designed to help everyone from struggling entrepreneurs to aspiring corporate business executives.
Suggest a selection for the NEW Book Club. Email NetworkNews at editor@newnewsletter.org
© Copyright 2008 by the Network of Executive Women. All rights reserved.
