HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself and Your Career 6-Volume Collection

Harvard Business Review

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781647822040
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business Skills

If you read nothing else on managing yourself and your career, read these definitive articles from Harvard Business Review.

As we live and work longer, we're reinventing ourselves, sometimes several times through the course of our career. How can we balance our work with our other interests and commitments? How can we continue to learn and grow and expand our skills? HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself and Your Career Collection features the best thinking from Harvard Business Review to help you build your emotional strength and resilience, keep your skills fresh, cultivate a learning mindset, make the right career moves, navigate setbacks, and achieve high performance.

Included in this six-book set are:

• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence
• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Mental Toughness
• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Career Resilience
• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Lifelong Learning
• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself
• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself, Vol. 2

The collection includes sixty articles selected by HBR's editors from renowned thought leaders including Clayton M. Christensen, Herminia Ibarra, Rob Cross, and Laura Morgan Roberts plus the indispensable article "What Makes a Leader" by Daniel Goleman. With HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself and Your Career Collection, you'll boost your professional and emotional skills—and your career success.

HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever?changing business environment.

On
Managing
Yourself
(Vol. 2)

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS

Boston, Massachusetts

HBR Press Quantity Sales Discounts

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Copyright 2021 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

First eBook Edition: Mar 2021

ISBN: 978-1-64782-080-0

eISBN: 978-1-64782-081-7

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

From Purpose to Impact

by Nick Craig and Scott A. Snook

Learning to Learn

by Erika Andersen

Making Yourself Indispensable

by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott K. Edinger

Make Time for the Work That Matters

by Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen

Collaboration Without Burnout

by Rob Cross, Scott Taylor, and Deb Zehner

Emotional Agility

by Susan David and Christina Congleton

How to Tackle Your Toughest Decisions

by Joseph L. Badaracco

How Dual-Career Couples Make It Work

by Jennifer Petriglieri

Cultivating Everyday Courage

by James R. Detert

BONUS ARTICLE
Be Your Own Best Advocate

by Deborah M. Kolb

Building an Ethical Career

by Maryam Kouchaki and Isaac H. Smith

BONUS DIGITAL ARTICLE
When and How to Respond to Microaggressions

by Ella F. Washington, Alison Hall Birch, and Laura Morgan Roberts

About the Contributors

Index

From Purpose to Impact

by Nick Craig and Scott Snook

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

—Mark Twain

OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS, there’s been an explosion of interest in purpose-driven leadership. Academics argue persuasively that an executive’s most important role is to be a steward of the organization’s purpose. Business experts make the case that purpose is a key to exceptional performance, while psychologists describe it as the pathway to greater well-being.

Doctors have even found that people with purpose in their lives are less prone to disease. Purpose is increasingly being touted as the key to navigating the complex, volatile, ambiguous world we face today, where strategy is ever changing and few decisions are obviously right or wrong.

Despite this growing understanding, however, a big challenge remains. In our work training thousands of managers at organizations from GE to the Girl Scouts, and teaching an equal number of executives and students at Harvard Business School, we’ve found that fewer than 20% of leaders have a strong sense of their own individual purpose. Even fewer can distill their purpose into a concrete statement. They may be able to clearly articulate their organization’s mission: Think of Google’s “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” or Charles Schwab’s “A relentless ally for the individual investor.” But when asked to describe their own purpose, they typically fall back on something generic and nebulous: “Help others excel.” “Ensure success.” “Empower my people.” Just as problematic, hardly any of them have a clear plan for translating purpose into action. As a result, they limit their aspirations and often fail to achieve their most ambitious professional and personal goals.

Our purpose is to change that—to help executives find and define their leadership purpose and put it to use. Building on the seminal work of our colleague Bill George, our programs initially covered a wide range of topics related to authentic leadership, but in recent years purpose has emerged as the cornerstone of our teaching and coaching. Executives tell us it is the key to accelerating their growth and deepening their impact, in both their professional and personal lives. Indeed, we believe that the process of articulating your purpose and finding the courage to live it—what we call purpose to impact—is the single most important developmental task you can undertake as a leader.

Consider Dolf van den Brink, the president and CEO of Heineken USA. Working with us, he identified a decidedly unique purpose statement—“To be the wuxia master who saves the kingdom”—which reflects his love of Chinese kung fu movies, the inspiration he takes from the wise, skillful warriors in them, and the realization that he, too, revels in high-risk situations that compel him to take action. With that impetus, he was able to create a plan for reviving a challenged legacy business during extremely difficult economic conditions. We’ve also watched a retail operations chief call on his newly clarified purpose—“Compelled to make things better, whomever, wherever, however”—to make the “hard, cage-rattling changes” needed to beat back a global competitor. And we’ve seen a factory director in Egypt use his purpose—“Create families that excel”—to persuade employees that they should honor the 2012 protest movement not by joining the marches but by maintaining their loyalties to one another and keeping th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself, Vol. 2
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Mental Toughness
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Career Resilience
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Lifelong Learning