Leadership Pipeline: Developing Leaders in the Digital Age, 3rd Edition

Robust and adaptive leadership is necessary for business success in today’s rapidly changing world. Without proper leadership scouting, training, and retention, static and non-adaptive organizations can find themselves in increasing disarray due to an unqualified and unprepared leadership team.

In The Leadership Pipeline, a team of seasoned leadership practitioners presents a framework for identifying future leaders, assessing their competence, planning their development, coaching them through challenges, and assessing the results of those efforts. The highly qualified authors integrate their leadership development process (a proven one, based on their extensive experience inside top companies) with a succession planning process that enables companies to line up skilled leaders for critical positions throughout the company.

Building on the success of previous editions, this newly updated and revised Third Edition covers a variety of emerging leadership challenges:

• Digitization has enabled business decision making at lower levels, requiring additional skills, a different allocation of time, and slightly different work values
• Employee leverage, especially for knowledge workers, where employees increasingly feel empowered to have their needs and interests met
• Societal pressure, demanding organizations of all kinds make changes in the way they operate and what leaders at all levels must focus on
• Global uncertainty, including climate change, inflation, and migration, forcing leaders to improvise and adapt to unforeseen yet highly impactful external circumstances

Chief executives, future leaders, and talent development specialists can harness the proven framework, tools, and techniques in The Leadership Pipeline to change the dialogue at the executive table, focusing more on strategy and talent rather than just revenue and profit, help push accountability down the organization in a coherent way, freeing those at the top to focus more on the future while lower levels drive productivity and early operating results, and produce common standards for both performance and potential, differentiated by layers of leadership.

Future-proof leadership at all levels of an organization

This Third Edition of The Leadership Pipeline contains 80% new material. It offers a deep, systemic approach to developing a strong network of leadership talent across an entire organization to solve today’s leadership challenges while staying prepared to navigate the uncertainty of tomorrow. Building on the success of previous editions, this newly revised and updated Third Edition explores highly impactful modern challenges like evolving work structures and a demanding workforce to help organizations thrive in a rapidly changing global business environment.

Readers will learn how to face new employee challenges, such as increased employee leverage by skilled workers and the rise of a remote workforce. The book also addresses cultural changes, such as guaranteeing diversity and inclusion and adapting business practices to meet societal expectations, as well as technological disruptors, such as vastly increased connectivity through data and digitization.

Holding up over time thanks to a focus on leadership-first principles, The Leadership Pipeline is a must-have blueprint for future and current leaders and executives who are looking to optimize skills, work values, and time application to achieve a distinct competitive advantage.

RAM CHARAN is an award-winning educator and consultant to senior business leaders and boards around the globe. He is one of the world’s bestselling business book authors with over 2 million copies sold. His book with Honeywell CEO Larry Bossidy, Execution, spent 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

STEPHEN DROTTER is Chairman of the Leadership Pipeline Institute. For over 50 years he has been actively involved in succession planning, executive assessments and leadership development. His work provides the source material for his books, which include The Performance Pipeline, as well as co-authorship of The Success Pipeline and Pipeline to The Future.

JIM NOEL is a retired consultant and leadership coach who assisted companies in the selection, assessment, and development of key leadership teams. He is a former manager of Executive Education and Leadership Effectiveness at GE.

KENT JONASEN is CEO of the Leadership Pipeline Institute and works with large organizations on strategic succession planning and development for leaders and experts. Previous to this role, Kent was Deputy Head of Human Resources at Maersk and is the author of the bestselling book The Specialist Pipeline: Winning the War for Specialist Talent.