This title offers innovative management practice from India's leading companies and what companies everywhere can learn from it. For much of the last century, the practice of management was dominated by Western, particularly U.S., models. Even economies emerging in the latter part of the century evolved toward the Western paradigm. But today, we see a distinct model of management developing in India and, so far, it has been remarkably successful. India's top companies are growing at staggering rates and doing so with an innovative and vibrant set of management practices — especially in strategy, leadership, governance, talent and organizational culture. Not bound to Western thinking or practice, Indian leaders are creating a new model for leading and running companies. And just as American managers turned to Japan in the past for innovative management methods, they can now look to India for what it takes to build fast, flexible and lean enterprises. Written by the Wharton India Team (talent guru Peter Cappelli, strategy gurus Harbir Singh and Jitendra Singh and leadership guru Michael Useem) and based on decades of experience consulting and teaching in India along with over 100 interviews of the heads of India's largest companies, this book closely examines what Indian managers do differently and how their management innovations work, which of these innovations could be transferable to the Western context and ultimately how this new management model could one day modify or even supplant the old.

In this fast-reading and illuminating book, world-renowned leadership expert Michael Useem provides 15 guiding principles that form the core of the Leader’s Checklist. He helps you to personalize your checklist to the unique needs and demands of your organization. To demonstrate the power of the Leader’s Checklist, Useem examines accounts of extraordinary leadership, including the triumphant rescue of 33 miners in Chile.

Based on solid research and years of working on leadership development with a wide array of companies and organizations in the United States and abroad, The Leader’s Checklist will help you develop your ability to make good and timely decisions in unpredictable and stressful environments — for those moments when leadership really matters.

Events ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the global economic crisis have taught businesspeople an unforgettable lesson: if you don’t plan for “extreme risk,” you endanger your organization’s very survival. But how can you plan for events that go far beyond anything that occurs in normal day-to-day business? In Learning from Catastrophes, two renowned experts present the first comprehensive strategic framework for assessing, responding to, and managing extreme risk. Howard Kunreuther and Michael Useem build on their own breakthrough work on mitigating natural disasters, extending it to the challenges faced by real-world enterprises.

Along with the contributions of leading experts in risk management, heuristics, and disaster recovery, they identify the behavioral biases and faulty heuristics that mislead decision makers about the likelihood of catastrophe. They go on to identify the hidden links associated with extreme risks, and present techniques for systematically building greater resilience into the organization. The global best-seller The Black Swan told executives that “once in a lifetime” events are far more common and dangerous than they ever realized. Learning from Catastrophe shows them exactly what to do about it.

The Go Point — the moment of truth when you have to say “yes” or “no” when it’s time to get off the fence.

Michael Useem — through dramatic storytelling — shows how to master the art and science of being decisive. He places you smack in the middle of people facing their go point, where actions — or lack of them — determined the fates of individuals, companies, and countries.

• Why on earth did Robert E. Lee send General George Pickett on an almost suicidal charge against the Union lines at Gettysburg?
• How does the leader of a firefighting crew make life-or-death decisions, directing his people — with little information about weather patterns to guide him — to go up or down the mountain? One direction means safety, the other danger.
• You’ve just assumed responsibility for a scandal-wracked corporation, a company teetering on the brink of disaster. What you decide over the course of the next several days will have consequences for thousands of employees and investors. How do you fulfill your responsibilities?

Michael Useem makes you feel as if “you are there,” right in the center of the action. He was there: tramping up and down the mountain where firefighters made their momentous decisions; walking the battlefield at Gettysburg to see for himself just what General Pickett faced before making his ill-fated charge; going into a trading pit where million-dollar buy-and-sell decisions are made that affect fortunes of both the firm and the person making the call.

You’ll discover why some decisions were flawless, perfectly on target, and others utterly disastrous. Most of all, you’ll learn how to make the right calls yourself, whether you’re changing your career, hiring an assistant, launching a product, or deciding on a potential acquisition or merger.

Smartly written and offering unusual insights into the minds of decision makers such as General Lee, The Go Point will provide the guidance for you to move with confidence when it’s your turn to get off the fence.

Your team has faltered at a critical moment. A key member says he can't continue, requiring you to make a snap decision: Do you write him off? Or do you risk the whole venture by trying to get him back on his feet? It could be a scenario straight from the business world. Yet this one occurred high on the slopes of the world's deadliest mountain, K2, where lives, not just livelihoods, depended on the leader's choice. Decisions don't get much starker. That's why mountains — though seemingly a world apart from business — hold unique and surprising insights for managers and entrepreneurs at any altitude. More than just symbols of our upward strivings, they are high-altitude management laboratories: testing grounds where risk, fear, opportunity, and ambition collide in the most unforgiving of settings.

Upward Bound brings together a remarkable team of nine writers equally at home among the high peaks and in the corridors of corporate power, including Good to Great author Jim Collins, legendary climber and outdoor clothing entrepreneur Royal Robbins, and Stacy Allison, the first American woman to summit Mount Everest. While most people will never find themselves in the thin air of the world's highest places, Upward Bound brings those places down to earth for anyone seeking the path to his or her own summit. Whether it's up the career ladder or toward a creative peak, Upward Bound addresses the fundamental question of why we climb, while capturing the power of mountains to instruct as well as inspire.

Today’s best leaders know how to lead up, a necessary strategy when a supervisor is micromanaging rather than macrothinking, when a division president offers clear directives but can’t see the future, or when investors demand instant gain but need long-term growth. Through vivid, compelling stories, Michael Useem reveals how upward leadership can transform incipient disaster into hard-won triumph. For example, U.S. Marine Corps General Peter Pace reconciled the conflicting priorities of six bosses by keeping them well informed and challenging their instructions when necessary. Useem also explores what happens when those who should step forward fail to do so — Mount Everest mountaineers might have saved themselves from disaster during a fateful ascent if only they had questioned their guides’ flawed decisions.

Leading Up is a call to action. It asks us to get results by helping our superiors lead and by building on the best in everybody’s nature, and it offers a pragmatic blueprint for doing so.

Are you ready for the leadership moment?

• Merck's Roy Vagelos commits millions of dollars to develop a drug needed only by people who can't afford it
• Eugene Kranz struggles to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts home after an explosion rips through their spacecraft
• Arlene Blum organizes the first women's ascent of one of the world's most dangerous mountains
• Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain leads his tattered troops into a pivotal Civil War battle at Little Round Top
• John Gutfreund loses Salomon Brothers when his inattention to a trading scandal almost topples the Wall Street giant
• Clifton Wharton restructures a $50 billion pension system direly out of touch with its customers
• Alfredo Cristiani transforms El Salvador's decade-long civil war into a negotiated settlement
• Nancy Barry leads Women's World Banking in the fight against Third World poverty - Wagner Dodge faces the decision of a lifetime as a fast-moving forest fire overtakes his firefighting crew