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 – […]
Book Review Subject: Leadership
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. […]
Host
We have all been to parties or attended events where the success or otherwise of what the host has been like has shaped the success of the occasion. Hosts can make or break the events they are running – their behaviours and approaches can be charming, enlivening, calming, maddening, irritating or foolish – just like […]
Fair Talk
Founded on the view that we humans are not good at improvement, the relationship of actionable feedback to performance is a central theme of this new book. It comes in three sections being firstly an exploration of the nature and practice of feedback; secondly, all that it takes to be the Fairtalk leader; and in part […]