The route to hubris a beguiling and the authors depict that in an all too familiar mini case study, which is worth repeating in full here: In times of crisis, high-risk or a threat from external forces, such as a sudden hostile takeover bid, a company will look to the CEO to step up to […]
Book Review Subject: Leadership
Leading Remotely
At the heart of this book is Parkes’s distinction between ‘single-site’ leaders and ‘multi-site’ leaders. If we are to track a leader’s career progression at some point fairly early on in their leadership journey they will move from managing and leading a team that is close to them, to one which is more dispersed, at […]
Anthro-Vision
Tett applies a three-part set of principles of the anthropologist’s mindset to structure the book: Make the ‘strange’ familiar – cultivate a mindset of emapthy for strangers and value diversity Make the ‘familiar’ strange – question and explore our own environment and context with fresh eyes to identify what is strange about our own worlds – […]
The Heart of Business
Joly is one of those business people who has more depth than we tend to expect in corporate leaders these days. His shift from hard, accounting-led corporate strategy to a more holistic, purpose-led approach started quite early on in his career, through conversations with the French businessman, Jean-Marie Descarpentries who held leadership roles at Danone […]
Messengers
The authors have identified eight core traits that factor how much messaging power people have. Four of these are grouped as traits of Hard Messengers, and four of Soft Messengers. Hard messengers are those with status, whether that be through being the boss (hierarchical), successful (rich or famous) or lucky (attractive in some respect). The […]
When More Is Not Better
Economic growth in the last two centuries has been based upon the concept that business and the economy are a ‘perfectible machine’, which with ever-more finely calibrated tweaks will increase prosperity for the majority (the middle-classes) as well as the poor and the rich. In the four decades since the US bicentennial in 1976 (his […]
Humanocracy
Bureaucracy according to the authors 'grants excessive credence to the views of precedent-bound leaders, discourages rebellious thinking, creates lags between sense-and-respond, frustrates the rapid deployment of resources, discourages risk-taking, politicizes decision-making, undermines frontline capability and blinds silo-dwelling leaders to new opportunities,' and yet it is very firmly embedded. So how do you get rid of […]
Align
In a leadership world that is increasingly focused on the idea that leaders need to be focused on the people (a view Ideas for Leaders is generally in strong support of), Trevor throws a rock in the pond, and causes some necessary ripples (dissenting voices is something leaders need to listen out for). He posits that Enterprise […]
The Manager’s Guide to Human Beings
"We are not as modern and enlightened as we may wish to believe" asserts Crawley, and this is the underlying theme of the book. While we intellectually may operate at a rarefied level, emotionally we are still not that distant from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, "our emotions are with us at every moment of every day, […]
Everybody Matters
As Simon Sinek writes in the Foreword to this book “we are social animals and we respond to the environment we’re in”. Good people can do wrong in bad environments, and those who have done bad things can be transformed in good ones. The key is the culture – and culture is set by leaders. […]