Gridiron Leadership

Book excerpt: With its use of football stories, Gridiron Leadership provides a fresh, new approach to capturing and understanding the concepts and practice of leadership, strategy, and execution. Gridiron Leadership: Winning Strategies and Breakthrough Tactics uses real moments from the worlds of professional and college football, as well as a wide range of evocative football metaphors, to dissect the craft of leadership and communicate essential management lessons. With so many leadership and strategy books sending the same messages in the same ways, this fresh approach is truly groundbreaking, using a familiar frame of reference to capture and understand the concepts and practice of leadership, strategy, and execution. The language of sports is already common vernacular among today's successful leaders. Gridiron Leadership uses the accessible, recognizable terminology of sports in a thoughtful, systematic way, making the connection between the culture of football and the kinds of organizational and leadership situations encountered everyday. It covers the full range of modern organizational issues, including human resources, crisis leadership, ethical leadership, strategic decision making, and organizational change. With topics covering everything from building a winning team to analyzing the needs of stakeholders, this is the playbook today's leaders have been waiting for.