Today we work in an environment where people don't just ask "What should I do?" but "Why should I do it?" To successfully answer this "why" question is to persuade. Yet many individuals misunderstand and still more make poor use of persuasion. The problem? Persuasion is widely perceived as a skill reserved for selling products and closing deals. But in reality, good managers are persuading all day long.  Today's most effective managers are influencing others through constructive forms of persuasion -- and their employees repay them with levels of commitment and motivation that the managers of the last generation could only dream of.

Conger exposes the most commonly held myths and stereotypes about persuasion and shows how to influence others productively, without manipulation. Most important, he outlines the four crucial components of effective leading by persuasion: building one's credibility, finding common ground so that others have a stake in one's ideas, finding compelling positions and evidence, and emotionally connecting with colleagues so that solutions resonate with them on a personal level. In Winning 'em Over, Jay Conger explains how to implement a leadership style that will succeed in what is becoming a fundamentally and radically different business environment, and he provides readers with all of the new tools they will need to become effective, constructive persuaders.

The best leaders know how to communicate clearly and persuasively. How do you stack up?If you read nothing else on communicating effectively, read these 10 articles.  The editor combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you express your ideas with clarity and impact―no matter what the situation. Jay Conger’s The Necessary Art of Persuasion is one of the must reads.

Within the next few years, ""baby boomer"" leaders and managers will be retiring in huge numbers. From the executive suite on down, the challenge of putting the right person in place for every job will become acute. The potential shortfall of talent and leadership mean your  organization must place succession planning at the top of the priority lists. Growing Your Company's Leaders offers the results of a study of five global leaders in succession strategy. You will learn what these and sixteen other high-profile organizations are doing to identify, secure, and prepare the next generation of leaders. This book examines the critical link between succession management and business strategy, the architecture of effective plans, the essential role of technology,  the importance of individual employee development planning, the effective engagement of senior management and how best to monitor the effectiveness of the succession management systems.

This book reveals how boards governing 21st-century organizations can change their practices and align their principles to successfully govern the organization of the modern global economy. Exploring the full range of boardroom best practices, the authors critique the value added of each and illustrate how to realistically implement them in a boardroom. They also propose that judging a board's effectiveness should be done not in a "shareholder" context but in a "stakeholder" context instead. They organize their insights and reforms in a framework that focuses on what determines effective governance behavior: information, knowledge, power, and rewards.They argue it is behavior, not practices that count, and look at boards from a group dynamics and organizational perspective.

Research shows that there is little or no relationship between the presence or absence of governance best practices and the performance of a boardroom. Drawing upon the top governance experts, this book organizes the sea of opinions and research on boardroom performance into a coherent picture of what it takes to build an effective governance culture. It critically evaluates the many practices that have become commonplace in boards from lead directors to non-executive chairs to board evaluations to criteria for independent directors. This book demonstrates that boardroom leadership and character make the primary difference in the performance of a board - not a set of practices. Effective boards are more often the product of a leadership capacity shared across the board and a culture that encourage candid dialogue and inquiry. The book illustrates the action steps that boards need to take to achieve these two critical outcomes.

Additional Books
by Jay

• The Charismatic Leader: Beyond the Mystique of Exceptional Leadership
• Learning to Lead: The Art of Transforming Managers into Leaders
• Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and Whys of Leadership
• Charismatic Leadership in Organizations: The Elusive Factor in
  Organizational Effectiveness
•  Spirit at Work