Who are your idea-mentors in HR, leadership, organization, or talent?
By | Dave Ulrich | Speaker, Author, Professor, Thought Partner on HR, Leadership, and Organization
Who are your idea-mentors?
I have incredible lifetime, personal mentors who continually guide me, and I have remarkable, lifetime colleagues who support and teach me. In addition, I have been blessed to have dozens (if not hundreds) of creative and thoughtful professional colleagues who model excellence.
But I also have idea-mentors who are colleagues I personally know who perform thoughtful, forward-looking, research-based, and relevant work. They each have a track record of fresh ideas that expand as their ideas evolve. This means more than one message, story, experience, post, or book; it means a stream of innovative ideas, generally related in personal conversations and captured in books that immortalize and perpetuate their ideas.
I am asked from time to time whose work (or what book) I would recommend. The following list of authors (listed alphabetically) are some of the works of my idea-mentors whose ideas have shown up in book form and in personal conversations. Obviously, so many others’ ideas show up in LinkedIn posts, TED talks, and other forums.
I am so indebted to my lifetime mentors, personal colleagues, and professional relationships, but these idea-mentors have shaped my thinking and action. Their work is institutionalized in their books but even more through personal conversations where they have taught me by word and by deed. I hope I give due credit for how much their work has shaped my work and sufficient gratitude for their past and future contributions to me and to others.
Who are your idea-mentors?
.………
Michael Beer
- Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Company’s Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy
- High Commitment High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage
- Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value
John Boudreau
- Achieving Excellence in Human Resources Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Functions
- Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital
- Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work
- Retooling HR: Using Proven Business Tools to Make Better Decisions About Talent
- Transformative HR: How Great Companies Use Evidence-Based Change for Sustainable Advantage
Wayne Brockbank
- HR Competencies: Mastery at the Intersection of People and Business
- HR from the Outside In: Six Competencies for the Future of Human Resources
- HR Transformation: Building Human Resources From the Outside In
- The HR Value Proposition
- Victory Through Organization: Why the War for Talent is Failing Your Company and What You Can Do About It
Peter Cappelli
- The India Way: How India’s Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management
- Managing the Older Worker: How to Prepare for the New Organizational Order
- The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce
- Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty
Ram Charan
- The Amazon Management System: The Ultimate Digital Business Engine That Creates Extraordinary Value for Both Customers and Shareholders
- The High-Potential Leader: How to Grow Fast, Take on New Responsibilities, and Make an Impact
- The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company
- The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers
- What the CEO Wants You To Know, Expanded and Updated: How Your Company Really Works
Chester Elton (and Adrian Gostick)
- All In: How the Best Managers Create a Culture of Belief and Drive Big Results
- Anxiety at Work: Eight Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done
- The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their People, Retain Talent, and Accelerate Performance
- Leading with Gratitude: Eight Leadership Practices for Extraordinary Business Results
Marshall Goldsmith
- Lessons from Leaders Volume 1: Practical Lessons for a Lifetime of Leadership
- Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back If You Lose It
- Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts–Becoming the Person You Want to Be
- What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
Lynda Gratton
- Glow: How You Can Radiate Energy, Innovation, and Success
- Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces, and Organizations Buzz with Energy—and Others Don’t
- The Key: How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest Problems
- Living Strategy: Putting People at the Heart of Corporate Purpose
- The New Long Life: A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World
Gary Hamel (and C.K. Prahalad)
- Competing for the Future
- The Future of Management
- Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them
- Strategic Intent
- What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation
Mark Huselid and Dick Beatty
- The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance
- The Workforce Scorecard: Managing Human Capital to Execute Strategy
Edward Lawler
- Assessing Organization Agility: Creating Diagnostic Profiles to Guide Transformation
- Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness
- Reinventing Talent Management: Principles and Practices for the New World of Work
- Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage
- Treat People Right!: How Organizations and Individuals Can Propel Each Other into a Virtuous Spiral of Success
Jeffrey Pfeffer
- Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It
- The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action
- Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time
- Managing With Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations
- Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t
Norm Smallwood
- Agile Talent: How to Source and Manage Outside Experts
- Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value
- The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead
- Leadership Sustainability: Seven Disciplines to Achieve the Changes Great Leaders Know They Must Make
- Results-Based Leadership
Wendy Ulrich (wife)
- Forgiving Ourselves
- Habits of Happiness
- Let God Love You: Why We Don’t; How We Can
- Weakness Is Not Sin: The Liberating Distinction That Awakens Our Strengths
- The Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win
Patrick Wright
- The Chief HR Officer: Defining the New Role of Human Resource Leaders
- Human Resource Management
- Strategic Human Resource Management: A Research Overview
Arthur Yeung
- The Globalization of Chinese Companies: Strategies for Conquering International Markets
- Organization Learning Capability: Generating and Generalizing Ideas with Impact
- Reinventing the Organization: How Companies Can Deliver Greater Value in Rapidly Changing Markets
Republished with permission and originally published at Dave Ulrich’s LinkedIn