Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance And Build Lasting Value

by Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood

Your company's brands hold intangible value and differentiate your firm from rivals. So does your leadership brand—a shared identity among your organization's leaders that differentiates what they can do from what your rivals' leaders can do. In Leadership Brand , Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood show how branded leadership delivers unique value for firms' investors, customers, and employees—elevating market value and creating a sharp competitive edge. The authors present a six-step process for creating leadership brand in your organization. A wealth of tools helps you differentiate your firm's leaders from those of rivals, craft a unified identity among them, and articulate a unique statement of your brand. Additional chapters and tools show you how to assess and measure your leadership brand, where to invest in the brand, which practices instill the brand, and how to communicate the brand to your many stakeholders. With its compelling new model and hands-on approach, this book helps you clarify what makes your leaders unique—and use your leadership brand to leave rivals far behind.

Genres: Leadership, Business, Nonfiction, Management, Historical Romance

288 pages, Hardcover

First published August 13, 2007

About the author

David Olson Ulrich is a university professor, author, speaker, management coach, and management consultant. Ulrich is a professor of business at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and co-founder of The RBL Group

Reviews

[Sharon Orlopp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding book on customer-centric leadership. Ulrich has two critical shifts in this book: from studying leaders to studying leadership and demonstrating how leaders connect a company to investors and customers.

Takeaways include:
1. Great leadership endures over time
2. It is the strength of the leadership bench rather than one or two leaders that promotes investor, employee, and customer confidence
3. The supply of leadership talent determines the growth potential of the company
4. Most learning occurs from doing hard things
5. Leaders who make and keep promises build credibility, confidence and conviction
6. Leadership brand is a team sport

[Gwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Organizations failing because Customer Focus is missing from all levels of leadership and organizational culture. When customer focus is at the core, leadership succession is a gentler process...business meets its customer where they are going. What is your plan for an organization that is customer focused beyond lipservice? "

[Harish B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book with lot of insights and worksheets. Not an easy read and not a one time read either.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value
Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood
Harvard Business School Press

In the Preface, Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood make this affirmation: "We believe that leaders matter, but leadership matters more. We have all experienced a gifted leader who engaged all of us -- our hearts, minds, and feet. Dynamic leaders enlist us in a cause, and we willingly follow their counsel. But leadership exists when an organization produces more than one to two individual leaders. Leadership matters more because it is tied not to a person but to the process of building leaders." By no means do Ulrich and Smallwood question the importance of individual leaders. On the contrary, they assert (and I agree) that one of the most important obligations of being a leader is to strengthen or at least sustain a process by which to identify, hire, develop, and then retain high-impact leaders at all levels and in all areas throughout her or his organization.

With regard to this book's title, Ulrich and Smallwood offer another affirmation: "We believe that all organizations have a leadership brand, either explicitly crafted and deployed or implicitly perceived and randomly perpetuated...[Therefore] leadership brand is the identity of the leaders throughout an organization that bridges customer expectations and employee and organizational behavior." I've noticed that in recent years, several of the same companies (e.g. Berkshire Hathaway, FedEx, GE, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and Toyota Motor) appear on the annual lists of those Most Valuable as well as those Most Highly Admired. These exemplary companies all have high-impact leadership that consistently produces superior results. As Ulrich and Smallwood correctly point out, a brand combines an identity with a reputation among various constituencies. "Leadership brand is the identity of the firm in the in the mind of the customers, made real to employees because of customercentric leadership behaviors. In other words, leadership brand occurs when leaders' knowledge, skills, and values focus employee behavior on the factors that target the issues that customers care about." The challenge for any organization (whatever its size or nature) is to formulate a program ensuring that everyone in that organization embraces the values, gains the knowledge, and strengthens the skills needed to drive performance and build lasting value.

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 2 out of 5]

n modern business, the brand is king. A company's survival depends on its brand. Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood offer Leadership Brand as a method for company leaders to inspire and mentor employees for the betterment of the brand and the business.

Leadership Brand is divided into nine chapters and includes two appendices. The book begins with a fuzzy definition of leadership brand and the difference between leaders and leadership. The remaining chapters show how to make a leadership brand part of the company's operations from creating the "brand statement" to assessing the leaders, investing in leadership, measuring the ROI, building awareness, preserving leadership and finally helping employees internalize the brand.

While Leadership Brand will probably become the next hot business book among managers, marketing departments and human resource departments, reading it made me glad I'm no longer working one of the huge corporations where the brand is everything. Entrepreneurs and managers at small companies probably won't benefit from reading Leadership Brand as most of the case studies and examples are based around huge multi-tiered hierarchical organizations.

If you would like a chance to win this book, please leave a comment explaining why on the original announcement. Comments left on this review will not count as entries. The contest ends at 11 PM Pacific Time on March 29, 2008.

[Calum Mcneish · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The ultimate success of a leader may be defined by what happens after the leader moves on." While still focusing on results, on of the key points that is often overlooked in leadership is the importance of attracting and developing future leaders. This book captures this point perfectly.