Peer-To-Peer Leadership
Why the Network is the Leader
By Mila N. Baker

Why Read It? Mila Baker believes that most of today’s leadership theories are old wines in new skins and still rely on the leader-follower hierarchy. Yet hierarchy is breaking down everywhere in society, from politics to religion to social relationships — and most particularly in computers and networking.

Baker’s inspiration is the peer-to-peer model of computing, which is also mirrored in social networking technologies where a network with “equipotent” nodes of power — think peer leaders — is infinitely more powerful than a “client-server” (i.e., leader-follower) network. By creating organizations with leaders at all levels, architects of peer-to-peer organizations can build flexibility, resiliency, and accountability.

Read an excerpt here and buy the book for 30% off here.

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Practicing Positive Leadership
Tools and Techniques That Create Extraordinary Results
By Kim Cameron

Why Read It? Over a decade ago, Kim Cameron and his colleagues decided that rather than analyze what went terribly wrong with organizations and how to prevent it, they would look at what went extraordinarily right and how to replicate it. This research was the birth of positive organizational scholarship, a new field that focused on what they called “positive deviance” — outcomes that far exceeded normal success.

In his previous book Positive Leadership, Cameron outlined four leadership strategies — Positive Climate, Positive Relationships, Positive Communications, and Positive Meaning — that characterize exceptionally high-performing organizations. Here he takes these strategies further by laying out tactics for implementing them.
Read an excerpt here and buy the book for 30% off.