Unusually Excellent: The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership

Master the fundamentals of leadership-at every stage in your career

Often, when leaders experience trouble, they look to blame an outside source or expect a small tweak to right their ship. But many times they've actually lost their grip on the very basic foundation of leadership. The business environment may change, but no management trend can displace the core laws, proven over centuries, of excellent leadership. Unusually Excellent is an essential resource for leaders that brings these fundamentals together in a new and comprehensive way. This book will help leaders at any level keep their focus on the bedrock principles that will make them extraordinary..

• Thoroughly practical, day-to-day primer for achieving and maintaining their highest level of leadership, for today and for a lifetime
• The author's Harvard Business Review articles are among the most highly read in the magazine's history
• Written for all leaders who need to develop and renew their leadership skills

Using a sports analogy, the author breaks the work of leaders into three parts: pregame: a matter of character; game day: a matter of competence; and postgame: a matter of consequence.

About the Author

John Hamm is a venture capitalist and a leadership advisor, coach, writer, and speaker in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works with CEOs and senior leaders across the country to maximize the effectiveness of their leadership strategies and skills through personal coaching and executive team facilitation. John is also a faculty member at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University. As a private investor and board member, John has a strong track record of successful technology start-ups, including Brocade (IPO June 1999), Military Advantage and Affinity Labs (acquired by Monster), Truveo (acquired by AOL Time Warner), Webify (acquired by IBM, 2006), and IronPort Systems (acquired by Cisco, 2007).

John has excelled in leadership and operating roles at several high-growth companies, including Whistle Communications, where he served for four years as president and CEO. Backed by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and The Mayfield Fund, Whistle became the leader in small office internet appliance products and was acquired by IBM in June 1999. Prior roles included EVP and general manager of advanced storage products, a $450 million business division at Adaptec, and executive positions at Western Digital in both the United States and Europe. John started his professional career at Hewlett-Packard.

John's writing has been published in Business 2.0, Fast Company, BusinessWeek, Fortune, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. His "Five Messages Leaders Must Manage" was the lead article in the May 2006 Harvard Business Review; "Why Entrepreneurs Don't Scale" appeared in the December 2002 Harvard Business Review.