The Secret of Charisma

The Leadership Challenge is a field guide for becoming the kind of leader that other people want to follow. International bestselling authors and longtime research partners James Kouzes and Barry Posner have compiled thousands of case studies and millions of responses to surveys over decades, and have used them to distill leadership into five overall principles supported by 10 concrete guidelines. These principles are based on two primary understandings: first, that leadership is a relationship, and second, that leadership is a skill—one that can be learned, practiced, and mastered by anyone willing to put in the effort.

Do you want to make a difference in the lives of others? Do you want to change the world? To do anything meaningful, you’re going to have to work with people. And if you’re working with people, you need to know how to lead them.

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership is a guide to the major principles of leadership. Learn how to connect with and influence people. Learn how to empower others and build an all-star leadership team. And learn how to create a succession plan and leave a legacy.

A third to a half of Americans are introverts, according to author Susan Cain, but they’re often marginalized. In Quiet, Cain contends that Western society is designed around an “extrovert ideal” that celebrates those who are bold and charismatic. However, unbridled extroversion can lead to disasters, such as the fall of Enron and the 2008 financial crisis.

By overvaluing extroverts and treating introverts as misfits, society loses out on introverts’ unique strengths—for instance, they’re highly creative, astute observers, and adept at solving complex problems. Cain argues for a balance in society, school, and work that lets introverts be true to themselves and where the two personality types complement each other.

Most of us assume that charisma is something you’re born with: an indefinable “star quality” that makes some people irresistibly charming. This is a myth—charisma is nothing more than a set of habits and behaviors that anyone can learn. In The Charisma Myth, Olivia Fox Cabane offers specific skills and tactics you can use to become a magnetic presence wherever you go.

In this guide, we’ll break down the mysterious quality of “charisma” into three simple components and explain how to integrate each one into your personal relationships. Along the way, we’ll explore how influences such as Buddhist mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy inspire Cabane’s vision of charisma.

In The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene asserts that whether you like it or not, you’re part of a never-ending game of power. You’re either striving for and wielding power, or you’re a pawn being played by someone more powerful than you. You choose your role.

This book is for those who prefer to be players rather than pawns. To turn you from an amateur into a master player, Greene has codified 48 laws of power based on historical examples of people who’ve excelled or failed at wielding power, with glorious or bloody results (or both). Some key principles you’ll learn: use your enemies, keep others dependent on you, say as little as possible, take credit for others’ work, and don’t get your hands dirty. You can choose to apply or dismiss these rules - but you can’t escape them.

Do you feel like you go unnoticed or underappreciated in your personal or professional life? According to Vanessa Van Edwards in Cues, this could be because you lack charisma—the quality that makes others pay attention to you. Without charisma, you can’t communicate or connect with others efficiently, which can hold you back in life. The good news is that even if charisma doesn’t come naturally to you, you can learn to convey charisma by adopting charismatic cues.

In our guide, we’ll explore Van Edwards’s definition of charisma and explain how verbal and nonverbal cues reinforce or undermine your charisma. Then, we’ll discuss which cues you should adopt or avoid to project a charismatic image. In our commentary, we’ll explain why head tilts are cuter in dogs than in humans and why steepling your fingers can make you seem like a diabolical mastermind. We’ll also explore social and scientific perspectives on charisma and discuss how marginalized people, people with communication disorders, and actors can use cues to their professional advantage.

What’s the secret to being a great leader? Whether you’re in a warzone or on the front lines of a corporate battle, Extreme Ownership argues that the best leaders take full responsibility for everything in their world: not only their actions, decisions, and failures, but also those of everyone on their team. By practicing Extreme Ownership, great leaders achieve victory by prioritizing the team above all else and focusing on constant improvement—and in this guide, we’ll show how you can, too.

Authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin are former US Navy SEAL officers who served in one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They honed the principles of Extreme Ownership on the battlefield, then applied the same tenets to the corporate world as business consultants. In this guide, we’ll add broader context from other leadership books such as Built to Last and Team of Teams to better illustrate how to apply Willink and Babin’s leadership principles to your life.

In Good to Great, former Stanford business professor Jim Collins offers a primer on turning the average into the exceptional. Through detailed case studies of 11 companies that went from tracking the market to exceeding it by at least 3x, Collins presents the key factors that separate merely good organizations from great ones—from rare leadership to disciplined thinking to the dogged pursuit of a core mission.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a manager, or just an individual looking to improve, the concepts in Good to Great provide food for thought—and spurs to action. You’ll learn what it takes to be a “Level 5” leader, why assembling the right team is more important than having the right idea, why you should be more like a hedgehog than a fox, and why “stop doing” lists are as important as “to do” lists. We’ll also revisit the companies that Collins included in his research and compare his ideas to those of other business and leadership experts.

Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet tells how a captain turned the US Navy’s worst-performing nuclear submarine crew into one of the best. Marquet transformed the demoralized crew into an empowered, motivated fighting force by replacing the traditional “leader-follower” structure with a “leader-leader” model that gave crew members control over their work and taught them to think and act proactively. Marquet argues that most organizations would benefit from a similar change, especially those that still operate on outdated models designed for coordinating physical labor, not the knowledge work that defines modern jobs.

Marquet’s model distributes decision-making authority throughout the organization. In this guide, we’ll explore how you can apply Marquet’s principles for giving people control, building their competence, and creating clarity around shared goals. We’ll also connect his ideas to research on leadership and motivation, trace how traditional management emerged from industrial thinking, and examine how to adapt his military-tested approach to different workplaces.

Most of us assume that charisma is something you’re born with: an indefinable “star quality” that makes some people irresistibly charming. This is a myth—charisma is nothing more than a set of habits and behaviors that anyone can learn. In The Charisma Myth, Olivia Fox Cabane offers specific skills and tactics you can use to become a magnetic presence wherever you go.

In this guide, we’ll break down the mysterious quality of “charisma” into three simple components and explain how to integrate each one into your personal relationships. Along the way, we’ll explore how influences such as Buddhist mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy inspire Cabane’s vision of charisma.

In the age of science, we’ve turned our backs on the myths our ancestors believed in. However, could it be that in giving up those stories, we’ve lost a crucial part of the human experience? In Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson argues that mythology provides a psychological tool that helps us create meaning in a chaotic world. Beneath their fanciful trappings, creation stories and heroic quests give us the moral foundations of society and the tools for adapting to life’s challenges. Perhaps even more importantly, myths teach us to recognize our individual capacity for good and evil.

In this guide, we’ll examine Peterson’s arguments on how myth affects the mind, mythology’s fundamental archetypes and stories, and how to apply the lessons of myth to live a more well-rounded life. We’ll also look at alternative interpretations of mythological stories, what science says about the intersection of myth and cognitive development, as well as how the symbols of myth have taken new form in the stories of today.

The Hero With a Thousand Faces explores the common themes and story elements that define the world’s mythologies—the hero’s journey. Through the cycle of initiation, separation, and return, the hero undergoes great trials and tribulations, experiences death and rebirth, and gains new powers that enable mankind’s ultimate redemption.

Far from being obsolete relics from long-extinguished civilizations, the myths of the ancients have profound lessons for today’s reader. By studying the struggles, transformations, and redemptions of the great heroes, we come closer to discovering the universal truths of the human condition and unlocking the divine potential that lies inside us all.

Every modern business is in the technology game in some way. In Empowered, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones explain how technology and product development are the fundamental drivers of every successful business. Therefore, to thrive in the modern business world, companies must empower their product development teams to use technology to meet customer needs and drive business growth.

Cagan and Jones have a wealth of experience in product leadership, having worked at multiple high-profile technology businesses. In this guide, we’ll discuss the roles of product leaders and their technology teams, as well as how they measure their collective success. We’ll describe how to empower product teams to work with autonomy and enhance innovation. In addition, we’ll explain the authors’ key concepts, show how other writers expand on their ideas, and explore how some experts arrive at similar conclusions using slightly different approaches.

Most of us assume that charisma is something you’re born with: an indefinable “star quality” that makes some people irresistibly charming. This is a myth—charisma is nothing more than a set of habits and behaviors that anyone can learn. In The Charisma Myth, Olivia Fox Cabane offers specific skills and tactics you can use to become a magnetic presence wherever you go.

In this guide, we’ll break down the mysterious quality of “charisma” into three simple components and explain how to integrate each one into your personal relationships. Along the way, we’ll explore how influences such as Buddhist mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy inspire Cabane’s vision of charisma.

In today’s world, workers must collaborate effectively and provide quality service and knowledge for organizations to thrive—as a leader, this requires you to maximize employees’ productivity and creativity. However, you can’t achieve this with traditional leadership styles that rely on carrot-and-stick methods of motivation. Instead, you must evolve as a leader—you must inspire employees to maximize their work quality by trusting and encouraging them to achieve their full potential. In Trust and Inspire, Stephen M.R. Covey explains how and why you should step up from traditional to inspirational leadership to succeed in all areas of your organization and life.

In this guide, you’ll learn why modern work requires inspirational leaders, the five doctrines inspirational leaders believe in, and the three commitments you must adopt to become an inspirational leader. Our commentary will compare Covey’s ideas to other popular approaches to leadership, such as those discussed in Complexity Leadership Theory, First Things First by Stephen R. Covey, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni.