The High Performance Series

Great ideas don’t matter if you can’t execute–bestselling leadership expert Mark Miller offers a proven, research-based method for creating workplaces where everyone performs at the highest level.

All high performance organizations have one thing in common: execution. The men and women who work there sustain performance at seemingly otherworldly levels of precision, accuracy, and consistency. In the fifth and final book of Mark Miller’s High Performance series, he uses his trademark business fable format to show how any organization can cultivate the kind of everyday habits that yield extraordinary results.

Miller tells the story of Blake Brown, a CEO who learns how to help his team to consistently excel at execution from a perhaps unlikely source: his son’s high school football coach. The story is fictional, but the principles and practices are very real, derived from years of research led by a team from Stanford University. Miller and his team interviewed leaders and employees from numerous world-class organizations, including the Navy SEALS, Starbucks, Apple, Southwest Airlines, the Seattle Seahawks, Mayo Clinic, Cirque du Soleil, and more. The lessons learned were then field-tested with over seventy businesses employing over 7,000 people. Miller gives you proven tools to release the untapped potential in your people, create a strong competitive advantage, and win not just on game day but every day.

Employee engagement is shockingly low–but it’s not an employee problem; it’s a leadership problem. Bestselling author Mark Miller says it’s up to leaders to create a workplace where their employees truly want to be–and he reveals four keys to doing it.

Every great company has an engaged workforce, and nurturing a culture of engagement is at the heart of great leadership–employees who really care about their work, their coworkers, and the organization can supercharge a company’s success. But for many years, engagement has been suffering. Gallop reports that 70 percent of employees are not fully engaged on the job. Mark Miller draws on more than forty years of leadership experience to show leaders at all levels how to change the conversation and create real competitive advantage in the process.

In the fourth book in Miller’s High Performance Series, CEO Blake Brown sets out to discover how to create the kind of workplace where everyone feels excited to come to work, passionate about what he or she brings to the company, and energized at the end of the day. It’s a journey that takes him literally all over the world–from Italy to Greece to Green Bay and more. What he discovers from the pages of history is as relevant as the evening news.

Engagement unleashes untapped potential buried deep within the hearts of your people. An engaged workforce is more creative, more driven, and more enthusiastic about reaching company goals. If you put the lessons in this book to work, your people will never look at work, or their leaders, the same way again.

What Does Top Talent Really Want?

More than vision, strategy, creativity, marketing, finance, or even technology, it is ultimately people that determine organizational success. That’s why virtually every organization wants more top talent. But do you know what they’re looking for? It might not be what you think! Talent Magnet will show you how to attract and keep great people.

Great leaders create great organizations. However, a scarcity of leaders today means a shortfall in performance tomorrow. Don’t gamble with your company’s future!

You don’t need to hope that leaders emerge from the ranks or that search firms can find the leaders you need in a timely fashion. Hope is not a strategy! You can build an organizational culture that will ensure your leadership pipeline is full and flowing.

Bestselling author and Chick-fil-A executive Mark Miller describes how to nurture leaders throughout the organization, from the front lines to the executive ranks. Leaders Made Here outlines a clear and replicable approach to creating the leadership bench every organization needs.

To bring his ideas to life, Miller uses the story of Blake, a new CEO, and Charles and old friend and colleague, as they search for the best practices from around the world to ensure a continuous supply of their most precious asset – leaders. Blake and his team then translate their findings into a practical plan that any organization can use to create a leadership culture, sustained competitive advantage, and long-term success.

As organizations grow in volume and complexity, the demands on leadership change. The same old moves won’t cut it any more.

In Chess Not Checkers, Mark Miller tells the story of Blake Brown, newly appointed CEO of a company troubled by poor performance and low morale. Nothing Blake learned from his previous roles seems to help him deal with the issues he now faces. The problem, his new mentor points out, is Blake is playing the wrong game.

The early days of an organization are like checkers: a quickly played game with mostly interchangeable pieces. Everybody, the leader included, does a little bit of everything; the pace is frenetic. But as the organization expands, you can’t just keep jumping from activity to activity. You have to think strategically, plan ahead, and leverage every employee’s specific talents—that’s chess. Leaders who continue to play checkers when the name of the game is chess lose.

On his journey, Blake learns four essential strategies from the game of chess that transform his leadership and his organization. The result: unprecedented performance!