Who are your idea-mentors in HR, leadership, organization, or talent?

Who are your idea-mentors?

I have incredible lifetime, personal mentors who continually guide me, and I have remarkable, lifetime colleagues who support and teach me. In addition, I have been blessed to have dozens (if not hundreds) of creative and thoughtful professional colleagues who model excellence.

But I also have idea-mentors who are colleagues I personally know who perform thoughtful, forward-looking, research-based, and relevant work. They each have a track record of fresh ideas that expand as their ideas evolve. This means more than one message, story, experience, post, or book; it means a stream of innovative ideas, generally related in personal conversations and captured in books that immortalize and perpetuate their ideas.

I am asked from time to time whose work (or what book) I would recommend. The following list of authors (listed alphabetically) are some of the works of my idea-mentors whose ideas have shown up in book form and in personal conversations. Obviously, so many others’ ideas show up in LinkedIn posts, TED talks, and other forums.

I am so indebted to my lifetime mentors, personal colleagues, and professional relationships, but these idea-mentors have shaped my thinking and action. Their work is institutionalized in their books but even more through personal conversations where they have taught me by word and by deed. I hope I give due credit for how much their work has shaped my work and sufficient gratitude for their past and future contributions to me and to others.

Who are your idea-mentors?

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Michael Beer

• Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Company's Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy
• High Commitment High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage
• Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value

John Boudreau

• Achieving Excellence in Human Resources Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Functions
• Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital
• Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work
• Retooling HR: Using Proven Business Tools to Make Better Decisions About Talent
• Transformative HR: How Great Companies Use Evidence-Based Change for Sustainable Advantage

Wayne Brockbank

• HR Competencies: Mastery at the Intersection of People and Business
• HR from the Outside In: Six Competencies for the Future of Human Resources
• HR Transformation: Building Human Resources From the Outside In
• The HR Value Proposition
• Victory Through Organization: Why the War for Talent is Failing Your Company and What You Can Do About It

Peter Cappelli

• The India Way: How India's Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management
• Managing the Older Worker: How to Prepare for the New Organizational Order
• The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce 
• Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty

Ram Charan

• The Amazon Management System: The Ultimate Digital Business Engine That Creates Extraordinary Value for Both Customers and Shareholders
• The High-Potential Leader: How to Grow Fast, Take on New Responsibilities, and Make an Impact
• The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company 
• The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers
• What the CEO Wants You To Know, Expanded and Updated: How Your Company Really Works

Chester Elton (and Adrian Gostick)

• All In: How the Best Managers Create a Culture of Belief and Drive Big Results
• Anxiety at Work: Eight Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done
• The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their People, Retain Talent, and Accelerate Performance
• Leading with Gratitude: Eight Leadership Practices for Extraordinary Business Results

Marshall Goldsmith

• Lessons from Leaders Volume 1: Practical Lessons for a Lifetime of Leadership
• Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back If You Lose It 
• Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts--Becoming the Person You Want to Be
• What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful

Lynda Gratton

• Glow: How You Can Radiate Energy, Innovation, and Success
• Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces, and Organizations Buzz with Energy—and Others Don't
• The Key: How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World's Toughest Problems
• Living Strategy: Putting People at the Heart of Corporate Purpose
• The New Long Life: A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World

Gary Hamel (and C.K. Prahalad)

• Competing for the Future 
• The Future of Management
• Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them
• Strategic Intent
• What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation

Mark Huselid and Dick Beatty

• The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance
• The Workforce Scorecard: Managing Human Capital to Execute Strategy

Edward Lawler

• Assessing Organization Agility: Creating Diagnostic Profiles to Guide Transformation
• Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness
• Reinventing Talent Management: Principles and Practices for the New World of Work
• Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage
• Treat People Right!: How Organizations and Individuals Can Propel Each Other into a Virtuous Spiral of Success

Jeffrey Pfeffer

• Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It
• The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action
• Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time
• Managing With Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations
• Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don't

Norm Smallwood

• Agile Talent: How to Source and Manage Outside Experts
• Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value
• The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead
• Leadership Sustainability: Seven Disciplines to Achieve the Changes Great Leaders Know They Must Make
• Results-Based Leadership

Wendy Ulrich (wife)

• Forgiving Ourselves
• Habits of Happiness
• Let God Love You: Why We Don’t; How We Can
• Weakness Is Not Sin: The Liberating Distinction That Awakens Our Strengths
• The Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

Patrick Wright

• The Chief HR Officer: Defining the New Role of Human Resource Leaders
• Human Resource Management
• Strategic Human Resource Management: A Research Overview

Arthur Yeung

• The Globalization of Chinese Companies: Strategies for Conquering International Markets
• Organization Learning Capability: Generating and Generalizing Ideas with Impact
• Reinventing the Organization: How Companies Can Deliver Greater Value in Rapidly Changing Markets

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Dave Ulrich is the Rensis Likert Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and a partner at The RBL Group, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations and leaders deliver value.