Recommended Resource – Positive Intelligence

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Positive Intelligence: Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve Their True Potential and How You Can Achieve Yours

by Shirzad Chamine

About the Reference

Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine reveals the ten personality Saboteurs limiting individual performance and the three Sage strategies to combat these limiters. Through his book, Shirzad provides a step-by-step method for unleashing potential by:

  • Identifying and conquering your top Saboteurs
  • Determining your initial Positive Intelligence (PQ) score
  • Developing new brain ‘muscles’ and significantly increasing your PQ score
  • Applying PQ tools and techniques to increase your personal performance and fulfillment

Benefits of Using This Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors like Positive Intelligence for its well-structured approach to identifying and overcoming one’s performance limiters. We found the book, its assessments, and recommended actions to be easy to follow and implement. Shirzad’s assessments accurately identified our Saboteur traits and the inner struggle – the thoughts, feelings, justification lies, and impact on self and others – these cause. It further revealed our personal motivation and style; leading to an understanding of the performance barriers improvement efforts should target. Positive Intelligence concluded with three Sage strategies, supported by insightful and thought provoking ‘inquiries,’ that were helpful in addressing our unique Saboteurs.

Understanding the intellectual and emotional barriers limiting one’s actions is a first critical step to improving performance. While a dry read at times, Positive Intelligence helps readers precisely identify their personality limiters and provides sound, actionable advise on how to overcome them. Shirzad’s book goes beyond the academic; providing real world examples and solutions. It’s this sound, implementable insight that makes Positive Intelligence a StrategyDriven recommended read.

Decision-Making Best Practice 15 – Identify the Unintended Consequences

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StrategyDriven Decision-Making ArticleDecision makers select from an array of choices the course of action their organization will take; voiding several other possible alternatives. Since there is seldom a perfect solution option to resolve any particular issue, some aspects of the problem will remain unaddressed and/or some excessive action taken. Furthermore, it is impossible to consider all circumstantial variables when making any decision. These decision-making process limitations often lead to unintended consequences, some of which may so adversely impact the decision’s outcomes as to render it a failure or significantly diminish its return on investment.

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Leadership Inspirations – Communicating Clearly

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“The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.”

Galen of Pergamon
(129 – 199)

Prominent Roman physician, surgeon and philosopher

The Transformative CEO

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The Transformative CEO: Impact Lessons from Industry Game Changes

by Jeffrey J. Fox and Robert Reiss

About the Reference

The Transformative CEO by Jeffrey J. Fox and Robert Reiss identifies a number of common personal qualities and approaches taken by celebrity CEOs in building or turning around their companies. Jeffrey and Robert then breakdown these items into supporting subparts and provides a series of quotes from notable CEOs in support of each subpart.

Specific topics covered by The Transformative CEO include:

  • Turning around a company
  • Building superior customer service
  • Thinking big and going global
  • Performing while transforming
  • Having a higher purpose
  • Innovating and making everything better

Why You Should Not Buy This Book

StrategyDriven Contributors found The Transformative CEO to be shallow and largely uninsightful. While the book does provide some overarching characteristics and approaches of successful chief executives, we found many of these items to be common sense truisms, philosophies most junior managers and graduate level business students would stipulate. That renown CEOs agree with these premises serves to give them credibility but does little to suggest how the reader should implement the recommended approaches.

The book suggests actions to improve the management decision-making process. Surprisingly, these actions – the most valuable and explicit points made in the book – are largely unsupported by CEO comments.

Alternative Recommendation

StrategyDriven Contributors believe there are certain qualities, characteristics, and approaches common among successful CEOs. Furthermore, we believe CEOs set the tone and tenor of the organization over which they preside and so embodying these traits is important.

We recommend The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker as a superior resource for learning about the admirable qualities of an executive. Through his book, Dr. Drucker provides readers with the specific actionable steps necessary to become more effective as leaders through improved decision-making and action.

Click here to read our review of The Effective Executive.

Evaluation and Control Program Best Practice 4 – Show It Visually

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“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Fred R. Barnard

Individuals at all levels of an organization are under increasing pressure to do more and more in less time. Concurrently, they are bombarded with rapidly growing amounts of data that must be synthesized and processes into usable information and applied to their everyday decisions and actions. Consequently, methods of presenting information in a more rapidly digestible fashion greatly benefits the receiver and increases the likelihood that the conveyance will be recognized, understood, and acted upon.[/wcm_restrict]

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Additional Information

Additional information on the creation of high quality graphs, including their construction and the types of graphs to use for differing situations can be found in the StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures whitepapers Construction and Types.