HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership Lessons from Sports (featuring interviews with Sir Alex Ferguson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Andre Agassi)
HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership Lessons from Sports (featuring interviews with Sir Alex Ferguson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Andre Agassi)

Author: Harvard Business Review

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2018-01-16

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1633694356

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Leadership and management lessons from the sports world. The world's elite athletes and coaches achieve high performance through inspiring leadership, mental toughness, and direction-setting strategic choices. Harvard Business Review has talked to many of these high performers throughout the years to learn how their success translates to the world of business. If you read nothing else on management lessons from the world of sports, read these 10 articles by athletes, coaches, and leadership experts. We've combed through our archive and selected the articles that will best help you drive performance. This book will inspire you to: Improve on your weaknesses, not just your strengths Take care of your body for sustained mental performance Increase your confidence and manage your energy before an important event Turn a struggling team around Understand the limits of performance metrics Focus on long-term goals to overcome setbacks Understand where the analogy of sports and business doesn't work This collection of articles includes "Ferguson's Formula," by Anita Elberse with Sir Alex Ferguson; "Life's Work: An Interview with Greg Louganis"; "The Making of a Corporate Athlete," by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz; "The Tough Work of Turning a Team Around," by Bill Parcells; "How an Olympic Gold Medalist Learned to Perform Under Pressure: An Interview with Alex Gregory"; "Mental Preparation Secrets of Top Athletes, Entertainers, and Surgeons," an interview with Daniel McGinn by Sarah Green Carmichael; "SoulCycle's CEO on Sustaining Growth in a Faddish Industry," by Melanie Whelan; "Life's Work: An Interview with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar"; "Major League Innovation," by Scott D. Anthony; "Looking Past Performance in Your Star Talent," by Mark de Rond, Adrian Moorhouse, and Matt Rogan; "Life's Work: An Interview with Mikhail Baryshnikov"; "How the Best of the Best Get Better and Better," by Graham Jones; "Life's Work: An Interview with Joe Girardi"; "Why There Is an I in Team," by Mark de Rond; "Life's Work: An Interview with Andre Agassi"; and "Why Sports Are a Terrible Metaphor for Business," by Bill Taylor.

League of Denial
League of Denial

Author: Mark Fainaru-Wada

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2014-08-26

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0770437567

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The story of how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, denied and sought to cover up mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage “League of Denial may turn out to be the most influential sports-related book of our time.”—The Boston Globe “Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.” So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: a chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players—including some of the all-time greats—to madness. In League of Denial, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of a public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields of our twenty-first-century pastime. Everyone knows that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn’t know—and what the league sought to shield from them—is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football, that the very essence of the game could be exposing these players to brain damage. In a fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America’s research labs, and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of Denial examines how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research—a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives, and former San Diego Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of an unseemly scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents, and private emails, this is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it—questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens football, from the highest levels all the way down to Pop Warner.

Working
Working

Author: Robert A. Caro

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0525656359

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“One of the great reporters of our time and probably the greatest biographer.” —The Sunday Times (London) From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson: an unprecedented gathering of vivid, candid, deeply moving recollections about his experiences researching and writing his acclaimed books. Now in paperback, Robert Caro gives us a glimpse into his own life and work in these evocatively written, personal pieces. He describes what it was like to interview the mighty Robert Moses and to begin discovering the extent of the political power Moses wielded; the combination of discouragement and exhilaration he felt confronting the vast holdings of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; his encounters with witnesses, including longtime residents wrenchingly displaced by the construction of Moses' Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lady Bird Johnson acknowledging the beauty and influence of one of LBJ's mistresses. He gratefully remembers how, after years of working in solitude, he found a writers' community at the New York Public Library, and details the ways he goes about planning and composing his books. Caro recalls the moments at which he came to understand that he wanted to write not just about the men who wielded power but about the people and the politics that were shaped by that power. And he talks about the importance to him of the writing itself, of how he tries to infuse it with a sense of place and mood to bring characters and situations to life on the page. Taken together, these reminiscences—some previously published, some written expressly for this book—bring into focus the passion, the wry self-deprecation, and the integrity with which this brilliant historian has always approached his work. To understand more about Robert Caro's research, see the Sony Pictures Classic documentary “Turn Every Page.”

Measure What Matters
Measure What Matters

Author: John Doerr

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-04-24

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 052553623X

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#1 New York Times Bestseller Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered. Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

Infinite Country
Infinite Country

Author: Patricia Engel

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1982159480

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A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK and INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE 2021 NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARD, LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL, A 2022 DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE FINALIST, AND A NATIONAL ENDOWMENT OF THE ARTS “BIG READS” SELECTION “A profound, beautiful novel.” —People * “Poignant.” —BuzzFeed * “A breathtaking story of the unimaginable prices paid for a better life.” —Esquire This “heartbreaking portrait of a family dealing with the realities of migration and separation” (Time) is “a sweeping love story and tragic drama [and] an authentic vision of what the American Dream looks like in a nationalistic country” (Elle). I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country. Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Colombia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the United States are waiting for her. If she misses her flight, she might also miss her chance to finally be reunited with her family. How this family came to occupy two different countries, two different worlds, comes into focus like twists of a kaleidoscope. We see Talia’s parents, Mauro and Elena, fall in love in a market stall as teenagers against a backdrop of civil war and social unrest. We see them leave Bogotá with their firstborn, Karina, in pursuit of safety and opportunity in the United States on a temporary visa, and we see the births of two more children, Nando and Talia, on American soil. We witness the decisions and indecisions that lead to Mauro’s deportation and the family’s splintering—the costs they’ve all been living with ever since. Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engel, herself a dual citizen and the daughter of Colombian immigrants, gives voice to all five family members as they navigate the particulars of their respective circumstances. Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality of the undocumented in America, Infinite Country “is as much an all-American story as it is a global one” (Booklist, starred review).

Repeal the 8th
Repeal the 8th

Author: Una Mullally

Publisher: Unbound Publishing

Published: 2018-04-05

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1783525177

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Abortion is illegal in almost every circumstance in Ireland, making it the only democracy in the western world to have such a constitutional ban. Between 1980 and 2015, at least 165,438 Irish women and girls accessed UK abortion services. In 2016, the figure was 3,265. Any woman or girl who procures an abortion, or anyone who assists a woman to procure an abortion in Ireland can be criminalised and imprisoned for up to fourteen years. A woman may not procure an abortion in Ireland if she is pregnant due to incest or rape, or to prevent inevitable miscarriage and fatal foetal abnormality. The movement to repeal the Eighth Amendment and make abortion legal in Ireland has grown massively over the last few years. This anthology shares the literature, personal stories, opinions, photography, art and design produced by the movement that catalysed 2018’s momentous referendum. Featuring prize-winning novelists, critically acclaimed poets, cutting-edge artists and journalists on the front line, this anthology will be the definitive collection of the art inspired by the most pressing debate in contemporary Ireland, and beyond. Contributors include: Lisa McInerney, Anne Enright, Louise O’Neill, Caitlin Moran, Tara Flynn, Aisling Bea, Sinead Gleeson, Emmet Kirwan.

The Trident
The Trident

Author: Jason Redman

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0062208330

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Navy SEAL and author of Overcome Jason Redman’s highly-charged account of his combat missions in Iraq and his miraculous recovery from wounds that might have killed him—if it were not for his grit and the devotion of his wife and family Decorated Navy SEAL Lieutenant Jason Redman served his country in Columbia, Peru, Afghanistan and Iraq, where he commanded mobility and assault forces. In western Iraq alone, he conducted over forty capture-kill missions with his men, successfully locating more than 120 Al Qaida insurgents. In September 2007, while leading a mission against a key senior Al Qaida commander, his team was ambushed and he was critically wounded by machine-gun fire at point blank range. During the intense recovery that followed—a years-long process that included 37 surgeries—Redman gained national media attention when he posted a sign on his door at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, warning all who entered not to “feel sorry for my wounds.” Redman’s sign became both a statement and a symbol for wounded warriors everywhere. The Trident is an unforgettable story of one man’s determination to overcome adversity. Redman recounts his story, from his grueling SEAL training to how he found the balance between arrogance and humility all while fighting America’s enemies on far flung battlefields. He speaks candidly of the grit that helped him carry on despite grievous wounds, and of the extraordinary love and devotion of his wife, Erica, and family, without whom he would not have survived. Vivid and powerful, emotionally resonant and illuminating, filled with sixteen pages of photos, The Trident traces the evolution of a modern warrior, husband, and father—a man who has come to embody the never-say-die spirit that defines America’s elite fighting force.

Just Give Me the Damn Ball!
Just Give Me the Damn Ball!

Author: Keyshawn Johnson

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2009-09-26

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0446565105

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"Well, son, I guess we have to go the to bank." That's what Leon Hess told me the day the Jets drafted me as the number-one player in the NFL draft. But that first day, the day of the draft, was one of the happiest days in my life, because I knew I was ready to make things happen in the league and help turn things around for the sorry-ass Jets. But what a nightmare! Week after week, loss after loss. The Jets went in with a loser reputation, and they were earning it all over again. We had no emotion, no energy, no hunger. The media tried to cover it all. Rich Kotite tried to explain the disasters away. But nobody outside the team knew the real truth of what really went on. This book is going to change all that.