What makes great leaders like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk extraordinary? All In shows leaders and aspiring leaders how obsession can fuel the most incredible success, but also take a toll on a leader, his or her family and work colleagues.
Groundbreaking leaders share a passionate commitment to achieving their vision that borders and sometimes crosses the line into obsession. All In shows how obsession, if properly focused and managed, is both necessary and productive. Advances in any endeavor almost always depend on a small group of individuals who are completely consumed by the goal they're pursuing. When these leaders and their teams are successful, everyone benefits from their singular focus and relentless drive.
All In explores the three obsessions underlying the achievements of great leaders:
- Delighting customers
- Building great products
- Creating an enduring company
By taking you inside the success stories of iconic leaders, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Elon Musk of Tesla, and Steve Jobs of Apple, author Robert Bruce Shaw shows the upside of obsession and the practices that support it. Shaw also provides insight into the dark side of obsession and its destructive potential - as illustrated in his case study of Uber during the final years of Travis Kalanick's leadership tenure. Appealing to any reader of entrepreneurial biographies, All In shows individuals and organizations how to manage obsession's downsides while realizing the benefits of striving to create something that truly matters.
Managers want great teams, but most build them around decades-old ideas and practices made popular by companies that have lost their edge. Extreme Teams looks at the new generation of teams driving growth in today's most innovative firms. They do this by doing things differently: hiring the right person instead of the best person; focusing on one priority while leaving room to explore new ideas; creating an environment where people are comfortable dealing with the uncomfortable; and maximizing profit by not making profit what matters most.
The book takes you inside top companies and examines the teamwork experiments powering their results, including how: Pixar's teams use constant feedback and debate to transform initially flawed films into billion-dollar hits - A culture of radical 'freedom and responsibility' helps Netflix execute on the next big thing - Whole Food's super-autonomous teams embrace hard metrics and friendly competition to drive performance - Zappos fuels the weirdness and fun that sustains its successTimes change, and so must teams. Designing and managing high-performance teams requires upgrading outdated beliefs and behaviors, and spurring a level of intensity and collaboration that lets them face down any challenge.
