Ebook: Becoming a Strategic Leader: Your Role in Your Organization's Enduring Success (J-B CCL (Center for Creative Leadership))

This book contains a few good anecdotes about real companies that have survived--or failed to survive--because of competent/incompent leadership.

Unfortunately, those worthwhile real-world lessons are choking under a bubbly swamp of cliches, buzzwords, inane self-tests (Rate yourself on a scale of 1 - 5 Are you a good listener?), and general hooey about being "non-rational" vs "irrational."

On the whole, the book endlessly repeats small variations of the same advice--and that advice is nothing but ideas that ought to be common sense for any manager, such as:

-Figure out where your company is now, and where it wants to go! How do you get there? Make a plan!! Durr hurr!!! And maybe check your progress along the way!!!

-Plan for the short term AND the long term!!!

-Understand the forces that influence you--not just in your department, but in other departments, and even outside the company!!!

If you've somehow stumbled into a leadership position and you don't already know these "lessons," you're an idiot.

Seriously. If you need a book to remind you to "plan for the short term and the long term," then you have no business being in a position of authority.