Book Summary12 Habits of Valuable Employees, by Verne Harnish and Kevin Daum

What makes a good leader? Some say you’ll know one when you see one; others confuse being a leader with simply having a title. In The 5 Levels of Leadership, John C. Maxwell gives a shape and form to something seemingly indefinable and provides a roadmap to help you reach your full leadership potential.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to go from being a boss to a real leader, how to get people to follow you without using your rank, and how to use your leadership to build a legacy that stands the test of time. We’ll also explore Maxwell’s definition of leadership, expand his tips for maximizing each level, and compare his model to Good to Great author Jim Collins’s version of the five levels.

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.

Who Not How explains entrepreneur Dan Sullivan’s core philosophy: Don’t worry about how to solve a problem yourself; instead, find the right person to solve it for you. According to Sullivan, great success comes from consistently achieving excellent results—not from minimizing costs—and the best results always come from experts. This will probably require a mindset shift, but, according to Sullivan, it’s the quickest way to achieve stellar outcomes.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how investing in personnel gives you better results faster, allows you to reclaim your valuable time, and maximizes your income. We’ll also explore how leveraging the power of personnel in your private life as well as your professional life improves your relationships and expands your sense of purpose. Along the way, we’ll compare Sullivan’s advice on personnel management with recommendations from other entrepreneurs and authors, such as Paul Marciano of Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work and Andrew Grove of High Output Management.