Reinventing the Organization: How Companies Can Deliver Radically Greater Value in Fast-Changing Markets

Arthur Yeung and Dave Ulrich

Harvard Business Review Press, 336 pp., $32

The traditional hierarchical organization is no longer sufficient. So, what is the answer for your organization? How do you become responsive to such fast-changing markets? Yeung and Ulrich offer a blueprint for reinventing organizations. Based on their in-depth research at top firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, they explain how to build a new kind of “market-oriented ecosystem” that responds to changing market opportunities with speed and scale. Reinventing the Organization offers a practical, integrated, six-step framework and examines all the decisions leaders need to make—choosing the right strategies, capabilities, structure, culture, management tools, and leadership—to deliver greater value in fast-moving markets.

The Connector Manager: Why Some Leaders Build Exceptional Talent—and Others Don’t

Jaime Roca and Sari Wilde

Portfolio, 272 pp., $28

Based on a global study of more than 9,000 people, Gartner has classified all managers into four groups: teacher managers, cheerleader managers, always-on managers, and connector managers. Although those four types are relatively evenly distributed, the connector manager consistently outperforms the others by a significant margin. Roca and Wilde draw on their research, as well as in-depth case studies and interviews with managers and employees at such companies as IBM, Accenture, and eBay, to define connector managers and illustrate why they tend to build successful teams. The authors also show how other types of managers can incorporate behaviors of connector managers to be more effective at building teams.