You aspire to lead with greater impact. The problem is you’re busy executing on today’s demands. You know you have to carve out time from your day job to build your leadership skills, but it’s easy to let immediate problems and old mindsets get in the way. Leadership and development expert Herminia Ibarra shows how managers and executives at all levels can step up to leadership by making small but crucial changes in their jobs, their networks, and themselves. In Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, she offers advice to help you redefine your job in order to make more strategic contributions; diversify your network so that you connect to, and learn from, a bigger range of stakeholders; and become more playful with your self-concept, allowing your familiar-and possibly outdated-leadership style to evolve.
Ibarra turns the usual “think first and then act” philosophy on its head by arguing that doing these three things will help you learn through action and will increase what she calls your outsight-the valuable external perspective you gain from direct experiences and experimentation. As opposed to insight, outsight will then help change the way you think as a leader: about what kind of work is important; how you should invest your time; why relationships matter in informing and supporting your leadership; and, ultimately, who you want to become.

A year’s worth of management wisdom, all in one place.
We’ve examined the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to bring you the latest, most significant thinking driving business today. With authors from Marcus Buckingham to Herminia Ibarra and company examples from Google to Deloitte, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations to your fingertips.
This book will inspire you to: tap into the new technologies that are changing the way businesses compete; fuel performance by redesigning your organization’s practices around feedback; learn techniques to move beyond intuition for better decision making; understand; why your strategy execution isn’t working-and how to fix it; lead with authenticity by moving beyond your comfort zone; and transform your physical office space to promote creativity and productivity.

What will it take to create a more gender-balanced workplace?
We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you understand where gender equality is today-and how far we still have to go.
This book will inspire you to: better understand the path women must take to leadership; learn the root causes of the barriers that exist for women in the workplace; check your own gender biases and distinguish between confidence and competence in your colleagues; manage a more effective gender-diversity program; recognize the issues women face when speaking up about bias or harassment; and help women reenter the workforce after taking time off-and create opportunities for them to reach their ambitions.