Leadership can - and indeed must - be learned. But first you've got to choose to lead. If you're going to make a difference, thinking of yourself as a leader will make it more likely that your legacy - not your fantasy, but the real impact of your life, today and in the long run - is the one you really want.

The question of how to lead successfully and responsibly is crucially important in our uncertain, high-pressure, turbulent world. In this audiobook, Harvard Business School Professor Joseph Badaracco answers this question in practical and, at times, provocative ways. Leaders today are surrounded by what Badaracco calls “the new invisible hand” - powerful, pervasive markets that touch and shape almost everything. As a result, understanding the inevitability and importance of struggle is critical.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles on leadership and selected the most important ones to help you maximize your own and your organization's performance. HBR's 10 Must Reads On Leadership will inspire you to: motivate others to excel, build your team's self-confidence in others, provoke positive change, set direction, encourage smart risk-taking, manage with tough empathy, credit others for your success, increase self-awareness, and draw strength from adversity.

People have discovered that, when we’re looking for answers, we often forget to take the time to ask the right questions. But as Dr. Marilee Adams shows, intentionally using questions helps us make wiser choices, find solutions, and transform our personal and professional lives. Dr. Adams uses a highly engaging fable to illustrate how great results begin with great questions. It includes powerful and practical tools that help listeners switch from a constricting judger to an expansive learner mindset, achieve the results they desire, and foster breakthroughs.

You never dreamed being the boss would be so hard. You're caught in a web of conflicting expectations from your subordinates, from those above you, and from your peers and customers. You're not alone. As Harvard Business School's Linda Hill and manager and executive Kent Lineback reveal in Being the Boss, becoming an effective manager is a painful, difficult journey. It requires trial and error, endless effort, and slowly acquired personal insight. Many managers never complete the journey and instead just learn how to get by. At worst, they become terrible bosses.

Whatever you want to do or accomplish, there is always going to be a learning curve. The question is—can you overcome it quickly enough to get to your goals? Or will the slow progress make you give up? Refine your practice strategy to reach your potential in record time. The Art of Practice is a book from renowned learning expert Peter Hollins that simply deconstructs the entire process and gives you an easy step-by-step process to go from novice to expert.

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses in the world. But in our workplaces, anxiety has been a hidden problem—there in plain sight but ignored. Until now. The Anxious Achiever is a book with a mission: to normalize anxiety and leadership. As leadership expert and self-proclaimed anxious achiever Morra Aarons-Mele argues, anxiety is built into the very nature of leadership. It can—and should—be harnessed into a force for good.

Get more of the management ideas you want, from the authors you trust. With insights from leading experts, this book will inspire you to identify areas for personal growth; assess your strengths, work preferences, values, and contributions; build your skill set and stay relevant; develop learning agility; map out a plan for where you'd like your career to go - both short and long term; find fulfillment in your work; and prepare for your next opportunity.

Over a stellar career, Roger Martin has advised the CEOs of some of the world's most successful companies. From the beginning, he noted that almost every executive he talked to had a "model"—a framework or way of thinking that guided their strategy and activities. But these models tended to become automatic, so much so that when one didn't work, the typical response was just to apply it again—with greater enthusiasm.

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself will inspire you to: stay engaged throughout your fifty-plus-year work life; tap into your deepest values; solicit candid feedback; replenish physical and mental energy; balance work, home, community, and self; spread positive energy throughout your organization; rebound from tough times; decrease distractibility and frenzy; and delegate and develop employees' initiative.

In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey show how our individual beliefs - along with the collective mindsets in our organizations - combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us.

Speed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When Facebook made "Move fast and break things" an informal company motto, it fueled a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. That a certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for inventing the future. Leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this belief is deeply flawed—and that it keeps you from building a great company.

To lead is to live dangerously. It's romantic and exciting to think of leadership as all inspiration, decisive action, and rich rewards, but leading requires taking risks that can jeopardize your career and your personal life. It requires putting yourself on the line, disrupting the status quo, and surfacing hidden conflict. And when people resist and push back, there's a strong temptation to play it safe. Those who choose to lead plunge in, take the risks, and sometimes get burned.

In this timely, personal guide, Mónica, the chief storyteller for the national cross-partisan depolarization organization Braver Angels, takes you to the real front lines of a crisis that threatens to grind America to a halt - broken conversations among confounded people. She shows you how to overcome the fear and certainty that surround us to finally do what only seems impossible: understand and even learn from people in your life whose whole worldview is different from or even opposed to yours.   

We're in the middle of an epidemic of stress and anxiety. Average life expectancy in the US is down. At work, less than sixteen percent of us are fully engaged. In many high-stress jobs such as distribution centers, emergency room nursing, and teaching, incidences of PTSD are higher than veterans returning from war zones. We are getting something terribly wrong. Our workplaces fail utterly to provide for or capitalize on one of our most basic human needs: our need for love.