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I was attracted to ‘The Myths of Creativity’ by David Burkus, because I enjoy personal creativity and hadn’t thought about how it might be a solution to one of the biggest challenges of our age – complexity. 

People around me can always tell when I’m engaged in a good book that supports leadership development and coaching:  I grab all the yellow sticky notes I can get my hands on and fill the book with them. 

 I ran out at the airport, so I invested in some rather colourful ‘sticky arrows’ to get me through to the book’s end. 

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You may be wondering why a book about a group of people cycling and climbing makes it to our list of books about leadership.

I’m not normally one for taking the world of sport and adventure and trying to craft parallels for the world of business. But this book is a great metaphor for all our struggles and achievements.

For me, leadership is about being successful whilst also creating success for others. It’s about having an impact, personally, for the group, the organisation and on society. Leadership is about achieving your vision, your dream, your goals, and yet, it’s only leadership when the impact is wider and when it takes others to achieve it and for them to achieve their own goals.

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There have been many debates about the difference between leaders and managers. Leaders are often set up to be a higher form of life than managers.

  Indeed, the roots of the word “manager” come from a 16^th century Italian word meaning to control horses, so it’s no wonder it gets a bad name. Leaders are often 

portrayed as the ones who do the high-end strategic thinking, whilst managers just deliver results by rote. I’ve never found this particularly useful distinction; I prefer to talk about the qualities of leadership and of management - and most people in charge of any aspect of organisations need to have a balance of both.

Another really useful book from David Clutterbuck. David is well-known for his many contributions to the field of leadership, coaching and mentoring.

What he does in this book is to apply those ideas, along with new ones, to the world of talent management and succession planning.

Even with the global economic challenges, many organisations recognise the need to hang onto the talent they have.And the need to nurture new talent. In fact, if people susn the job market picks up, they’ll remember and they’ll move. So this is a really important topic.pect your organisation is in trouble, then even when times are tough, the best talent will be looking to move on. And if you don’t nurture the talent you already have, whe

There are many challenges to getting this right. But it’s clearly worth the effort. Bringing in people from outside is rarely as successful as developing your own people. This is as true at the top as it is all the way down; although we often hear about the all-action hero CEO being parachuted in to save the company, in fact internally grown CEOs are usually more successful.

Employee engagement is a much talked about topic, especially here in the UK, with the extra boost given by the Engage for Success movement.

But is it just hype, or the latest flavour of the month? And, even if it is for real, how do we make it happen? I believe it is an idea whose time has come, and which will be relevant to organisations for many years. As we draw out of recession, the organisations that will survive and thrive will be those who have grasped the challenge of engaging their people.