Secrets of Special Ops Leadership: Dare the Impossible -- Achieve the Extraordinary - Paperback

by William Cohen (Author)

Can commando techniques really work in business? If you can inspire and lead your employees to work at peak performance, they will accomplish fantastic feats for you -- just as fighting commandos do in battle situations.

The Navy SEALs. The Green Berets. Delta Force. These are a few examples of what are known as "special ops" -- unique fighting forces trained to beat overwhelming odds on every mission. Using principles like speed, purpose, repetition, surprise, and simplicity, elite units such as these have throughout history accomplished extremely challenging tasks against vastly superior forces.

Secrets of Special Ops Leadership reveals the essential methods commando leaders employ, using dramatic real-life stories of commando leadership from biblical times all the way up through Iraq and Afghanistan in 2005, and showing how similar techniques are used by present-day business leaders.

You'll learn the fourteen core practices of special ops leadership, including how to:

• Create the Best - If you think you can just call some of your regular employees together and give them a pep talk and an impossible task to do, you're wrong. Your first task as a special ops business leader is to recruit, select, train, and motivate the right people.
• Build a Commando Team - Using models such as Carlson's Raiders, who fought for the U.S. Marines during World War II, the book explains how to work with different personalities, agendas, priorities, and motivations to create a team that works efficiently and effectively to get the job done.
• Dare the Impossible - Like the Sayeret Mat'kal, the Israeli Special Ops unit that staged the miraculous raid on Entebbe to free hostages on an Air France plane hijacked by terrorists in 1976, successful business ops must aggressively seek out opportunities and know when to transcend conventional thinking to stage an assault and act.

When they've got the right problems to work on, business commandos can do many times the work of normal employees, accomplish more with less, complete projects against looming deadlines, and create innovative new products and strategies. Secrets of Special Ops Leadership gives you the ammunition you need to get a business commando unit up and running and achieve the impossible for your organization.

Author Biography

William A. Cohen, Ph.D., Major General, USAFR, Ret., is president of the Institute of Leader Arts and a professor at Touro University International. He is also a former air commando and an authority on leadership and strategy. He has received the Distinguished Service Medal from the U.S. government. Dr. Cohen gives speeches and seminars for all four armed services and for corporations from Boeing to The Cheesecake Factory. He is a graduate of West Point, with an MA from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the Drucker School of Management, Claremont University. His previous books include The New Art of the Leader and The Art of the Strategist. He lives in Pasadena, California.