Here’s a look at some of the best leadership books to be released in September.

  Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best … And Learn from the Worst by Robert I. Sutton

  Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t by Jeffrey Pfeffer

  Management? It’s Not What You Think! by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel

  Reality-Based Leadership: Ditch the Drama, Restore Sanity to the Workplace, and Turn Excuses into Results by Cy Wakeman

  Defy Gravity: Propel Your Business to High-Velocity Growth by Rebel Brown

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“An ordinary man can … surround himself with two thousand books … and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.”

Build your leadership library with these specials on over 160 titles. All titles are at least 40% off the list price and are available only in limited quantities.

Here are a selection of tweets from August 2010:

• How good is your boss? Take the Boss Reality Assessment Survey System (BRASS) to find out.
• @mjasmus: What servant leadership really means
• “Servant leadership requires strength; it is not for the faint of heart.” Check out @DrJackKing’s post on my blog!
• DDI: Defining Done
• @DrJackKing: Inspiring! By young emerging leader @MarkDMcKinney “How to Get Along With an Enemy“
• LeaderLab » Seven Things to Expect From Your Narcissistic Employee
• Jerry de Gier: Use It While You Have It! Communication
• @Jim_Kouzes: Honda has created some short commercial/educational videos. My favorite: Failure: The Secret to Success
• Professor Michael Roberto’s Blog: Does B-School Create Narcissists?
• @JohnBaldoni: How to crack the self-awareness paradigm.
• @mikemyatt: Can a leader be too smart?
• @LisaHaneberg: Six Thoughts About Middle Management
• @visionorg: Stop Lying. Your Children Need the Truth by @maurilio
• @TheEconomist: These days the growth race is more about who is slowing slowest rather than who is growing fastest
• Student’s want to upload their own thoughts. Schools insist on downloading info. This chasm has led to a disconnect -Tim Elmore
• @mikemyatt: Talent: Do you walk the talk or have you drank the talent Kool-Aid?
• 25 Ways to Reboot Brainpower & Add Innovation by @ellenfweber
• @visionorg: The Atlantic: This summer of corporate profits isn’t necessarily something to celebrate.
• Top 10 Ways Your Brain Is Sabotaging You (and How to Beat It)
• Strategy+Business: The Life’s Work of a Thought Leader: C.K. Prahalad
• @wallybock : I refuse to agree…that trust, respect for others, integrity & civility have no place in business today
• @keithferrazzi: Yet another reason to work on your relationships!
• Having a bad day? Take this fantastic advice from HBR blogger @johnbaldoni
• @RajSetty: Why MOST smart people are better at solving other people’s problems
• @BrieParaham: Great leadership article - CEO of Whole Foods
• @artpetty Stop Managing Reduced Expectations
• Mike Henry Sr: Growing Self-Leadership
• @KateNasser: Building Morale & How Nitpickers Kill It
• RE GOALS read @simonsinek http://bit.ly/bvvrOl and then http://bit.ly/cbRSoJ
• 6 Gut Check Questions to Test Your Leadership Intestinal Fortitude

Statistically, Amish businesses have a survival rate that is almost double other American businesses. Erik Wesner decided to find out why. After years of research and interviews, he has gathered together in Success Made Simple a number of transferable lessons on operating a business. I think it is a critical insight to their success that they don’t get the cart before the horse. Wesner writes, “Amish tend to keep in mind that business is first a means to realize core values, ones which don’t usually come to mind when thinking ‘business prosperity.’”

Jonas Lapp (not his real name) is an Amish home-builder. Wesner says that “Jonas loves what he does. But you can see that it’s less the actual construction of homes or the financial payoff that drive him. Instead, it’s the chance to be a father figure to an employee who never had one, to form a friendship with a ‘customer’ who in the end never even does business with him, to do his small part to strengthen ties in his community.”

In the beginning when he first started his business, Jonas struggled with fear; the fear of it not working out; of failure. The problem with fear Jonas told Wesner, is that when you are operating out of fear, “you’re not establishing relationships. You’re in it for what you can grab today. You’re after as much as you can get.”

Not surprisingly, what grounds Jonas is his faith, operating from the premise that God will take care of him. “Amish lean on faith,” writes Wesner. “It’s a seemingly bottomless source of strength and security. Faith helps them see hope when tragedy strikes. Faith fosters gratitude in the fortunate. It’s a basic element of Amish life and, by extension, their approach to business.” It changes his perception of his role in the business and how it all relates to his life in general.

Jonas neutralizes fear by shifting his focus. “If you’re a servant-leader, that means other people are gonna come first,” he explains. “People have to be very important to you. You’re not in it for the dollar anymore … you’re in it to help people. And the profits? They come.” Wesner adds, “He executes in the day-to-day, while the far-horizon focus frames each decision.”

A big part of Amish business thinking that come through in everything is their family oriented approach. “Amish business thinking reflects community….In Amish America, the familial aspect comes preinstalled.” Employees are often regarded as extended family. “The Amish remember that their employee is usually a spouse to someone, and often a parent to a hefty handful—before being a worker.” Jonas Lapp says:

If they’re married … or he has a fiancée or a girlfriend, if that fellow’s important in your business, let their helpmate know, that your husband is doing a wonderful job, and he’s very important in my business.

Humility is practiced and demonstrated in their respect for others. If your goals are important enough for you to pitch in on the unpleasant tasks, then perhaps those goals will be important to your employees too. Again Lapp says, “I think a good boss won’t just stand there and say, ‘Hey, your piece belongs over there’; he’ll say, ‘I’ll help you put it there.’ I think people learn faster if you help them with their part.”
Success Made Simple will help you rethink your approach toward business and people. It will encourage you to clarify your values and methodically apply them to everything you do.

Gratitude. Family focus. Looking out for the other guy. When it comes to business, the Amish haven’t reinvented the wheel. One thing Amish excel at is applying certain time-honored principles—hard work, treating people fairly, providing quality goods and services—consistently.

When talking about wisdom, bees often come up. Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius and Emerson all spoke about bees. And for good reason. They have a lot to teach us. Beekeeper, management consultant and professor, Michael O’Malley, has extracted 25 lessons for leaders in The Wisdom of Bees.

  Protect the Future. Bees don’t focus exclusively on the most productive flower patches at any given time, and for good reason. Conditions change rapidly for bees and they can ill afford wide swings in pollen and nectar intake….When a lucrative vein of nectar is discovered, the entire colony doesn’t rush off to mine it no matter how enriching the short-term benefits. The colony has internalized a very important natural rule: someday the nectar in that location will stop flowing and they need to be prepared to rapidly reallocate resources to other productive sites. The best way to ensure that there will be a short run is to focus on the long run….As the bees clearly advise through their behavior, overexploiting a rich patch just because it is there is a death trap.

  Distribute Authority. With many thousands of employed workers, the queen couldn’t possibly direct all of the actions in the field from her command post.…While the queen is the generic heart and soul of the hive, she is by no means the only leader….Those closest to the information should make the relevant decision. Decentralization is one of the hallmarks of the honeybee colony. Foraging decisions, for example, are made by the foragers. The information doesn’t travel up to the queen and back again. If you are thinking of shifting greater power away from the organizational core and into the field, however, consider these facts first: 1) bees have clear objectives; 2) they are excellent communicators and are able to quickly take in and consolidate information—and transform that information into coordinated action; and 3) they are reliable workers that are very good at what they do.

  Order and Innovate Through Fuzzy Constants. Much of the activity of bees is calibrated to constants that allow them to find their way home. When an organization adopts and fastens itself to a few immutable principles, the system as a whole becomes more reliable. A degree of error in the form of initiative, original thinking, and experimentation can then be tolerated. Constants do not drive out originality; they make it possible. …Where several solutions exist in shifting, complex settings, organizations require the intrusion of some variability—but never to the point of disorder.

  Keep Your Balance. One of the principle ways that bees moderate extreme behaviors is through genetic diversity….This genetic diversity produces bees within the same hives that are differentially sensitive to environmental conditions. For example, bees keep the temperature of the hive relatively constant at about ninety-three degrees Fahrenheit….The bees heat the hive by contracting two sets of flight muscles and cool the hive by flapping their wings. However they don’t do this all at the same time….Fortunately, the bees differ in their sensitivity to temperature and alter their behavior at different times in response to climatic conditions….Managers should strive to hire capable people who, as a group, provide the team with a range of perspectives and worldviews. Otherwise organizations can become closed societies, In addition to making conscious effort to hire in a fair-minded way, take time to select people who are naturally inquisitive and who have varies interests.

  Prepare For Leadership Changes. A colony headed by a high-quality queen has a more robust worker population and greater honey yield. It matters a great deal who is at the top. Consequently, it is not surprising that the workers in the hive pat close attention to the queen’s ability to propagate and are sensitive to declines in her performance. The queen’s ability to lead is determined ultimately by the minions, a truth unfortunately lost in many organizations. Leadership depends on the consent of the people to follow. In the instance of bees, the voice of workers is loud and clear….If the honeybee teaches us anything, it is that organizations cannot survive without a leader and, therefore, the colony prevents costly voids in leadership by planning for successors in advance of the obvious need. Colonies doe without their top bee; organizations become pathological sans leadership.

“As you look for ways to improve your organization,” says O’Malley, “it would not be outlandish to take a step back and ask yourself, What would a bee do?”

Warren Bennis wrote in Leader to Leader that “every exemplary leader that I have met has what seems to be an unwarranted degree of optimism—and that helps generate the energy and commitment necessary to achieve results.”

Optimism says Bennis, “the sense that things generally work out well, creates tremendous confidence in oneself and in those around one.” Optimism helps leaders to be more resilient as they tend to believe in their capacity for self control and the ability to overcome obstacles that come their way. In short, I would say, optimism is finding perspective.

In The Optimism Advantage, Terry Paulson offers fifty truths for cultivating optimism beginning with “Life is Difficult.” (Perhaps not what you would expect from a book on optimism.) He writes, “If you want to be a true optimist, start by being a realist. Accept that life is difficult, and then get busy learning as much as you can about the challenges you face. Why? Because you’ve overcome problems in the past, you have every reason to believe that you’ve got what it takes to overcome whatever problems life deals you.”

One important place to begin is with our negative thoughts and feelings. Optimists dispute catastrophic thoughts, those “feelings that everything is wrong and that nothing is going to change.” Paulson says that “means you have to be ready to argue with some of your negative beliefs.” Optimism is “about facing and taking advantage of reality—even unsettling reality. Expecting unrealistic results may actually increase your dissatisfaction….To an optimist, it’s all about resilience and maximizing your results.”

Start with understanding what it is you’re saying to yourself that is causing a bigger problem in your thinking. Clarify it and then take a critical look at your beliefs and dispute them. Are they valid? Is there another way to look at this? Seek alternate explanations. Optimists ask, “Is there any less destructive way to look at this or explain what happened?” Look for causes that you can overcome and focus on what can be changed and then take action.