Business Leadership In Turbulent Times

'A marvellous banquet with four leaders whose lives provide lessons for all. Pull up a chair' Warren Buffett 'It is a safe bet that Leadership will soon sit on the nightstand of every chief executive officer in the land and will be avidly read by the legion of ambitious young people who want their jobs' Niall Ferguson, Sunday Times In this culmination of five decades of work, Doris Kearns Goodwin offers an illuminating exploration of the origin, growth and exercise of leadership through the lives of four US presidents Are leaders born or made? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the man make the times or do the times make the man? In Leadership, acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin looks at four presidents - Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson - to show how they first recognized leadership qualities within themselves, and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking at their entry into public life and how they confronted the dilemmas of their times, we can follow their development into leaders of their time. These stories of leadership in fractured times take on a singular urgency in today's polarized world and provide a much-needed roadmap for aspiring and established leaders. 'Colourful, fun and illuminating . . . a master storyteller' Daniel Finkelstein, The Times

In today’s organizations, it is no longer the CEO who acts as the sole strategic leader. From single individuals to larger teams and networks, leaders at all levels are infiltrating the formal organizational structure and making strategic leadership an increasingly complex endeavor. In Strategic Leadership for Turbulent Times, Kriger and Zhovtobryukh shrewdly describe the true experiences of what employees encounter as internal and external environments evolve, and how to uphold the personal and organizational values which affect both human and social capital. They examine how leadership strategies are used in real situations and highlight the importance of managerial wisdom for sustainable growth. Finally, they offer advice for strategic leaders on leading effectively in highly turbulent economic, social, technological, and multicultural times.

Business Leadership in Turbulent Times presents an integrative methodology for decision-making that advances the notion that business success involves more than strategy. Strategy is an important facet but not the only determinant for success. Devising the strategy in the first place, deploying assets, following a financial model that supports the strategy, picking the right leaders, and company culture all play critical roles. In this book, the authors share an approach for businesses to thrive during good and bad times. Reflecting on their diverse experiences in business and academia, they answer questions such as: - Why do some firms become winners while others lose? - How do successful firms create and sustain value? - Why do firms that were once great suddenly fail? Most importantly, the authors provide a framework for senior executives to make decisions even during times of crisis. The book includes an appendix of insights and predictions about the impact of COVID-19 on business leadership. The crisis has implications on short- and long-term priorities, the pace of innovation, and the role of leaders.

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER “Five gritty leaders whose extraordinary passion and perseverance changed history…a gripping read on a timeless and timely topic” —Angela Duckworth, #1 bestselling author of Grit An enthralling historical narrative filled with critical leadership insights, Forged in Crisis, by celebrated Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn, spotlights five masters of crisis: polar explorer Ernest Shackleton; President Abraham Lincoln; legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass; Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and environmental crusader Rachel Carson. What do such disparate figures have in common? Why do their extraordinary stories continue to amaze and inspire? In delivering the answers to those questions, Nancy Koehn offers a remarkable template by which to judge those in our own time to whom the public has given its trust. She begins each of the book’s five sections by showing her protagonist on the precipice of a great crisis: Shackleton marooned on an Antarctic ice floe; Lincoln on the verge of seeing the Union collapse; escaped slave Douglass facing possible capture; Bonhoeffer agonizing over how to counter absolute evil with faith; Carson racing against the cancer ravaging her in a bid to save the planet. The narrative then reaches back to each person’s childhood and shows the individual growing—step by step—into the person he or she will ultimately become. Significantly, as we follow each leader’s against-all-odds journey, we begin to glean an essential truth: leaders are not born but made. In a book dense with epiphanies, the most galvanizing one may be that the power to lead courageously resides in each of us. Whether it’s read as a repository of great insight or as exceptionally rendered human drama, Forged in Crisis stands as a towering achievement.

This thought-provoking and engaging book is for you, whatever your seniority, in the private or public sector – if you are curious about the role and purpose of leadership in a turbulent world. It will help you become a more agile leader through understanding and integrating your ego, eco and intuitive intelligence. You will gain a deeper understanding of your unique leadership blend through a short diagnostic inventory, bringing insight about your strengths and what may be tripping you up. The book offers tips, ideas and practical suggestions on how to develop your ability to use the three intelligences in order to expand your leadership repertoire. It will help you enable the teams you lead to be more flexible, responsive and autonomous. The authors have drawn on their vast experience from the boardroom to the shop floor, the classroom and research around the world, to write an easy-to-digest yet ground-breaking book that deals with the root causes of today’s twenty-first-century leadership challenges. Its contents are straightforward and widely applicable.

Today's business leaders are confronted with a variety of obstacles that threaten their very survival. To survive and thrive, the modern manager must know how to lead through adversity while preparing their companies for a new era of success. In Ruthless Execution, Amir Hartman and Craig LeGrande identify the primary approaches and techniques that keep companies from falling prey to the myriad of corporate, economic, and market challenges faced by organizations around the world. In the second edition of this book , managers and executives will learn when and how to recalibrate the balance between performance and growth; how to define a coherent, tightly-drawn business philosophy that maps to specific actions; new ways to promote accountability and business alignment; and how to use performance metrics without burying people in meaningless trivia. The authors give practical advice on how to develop stronger critical capabilities for understanding and managing complexity. This fully updated edition offers new techniques for thriving despite adversity and features new examples and cases illustrating the challenges faced by the modern global organization.

Discover true leadership with this actionable guide from a world renowned leadership expert, psychoanalyst, and executive coach In Leading Wisely: Becoming a Reflective Leader in Turbulent Times, renowned leadership expert, psychoanalyst and executive coach Manfred Kets De Vries delivers an insightful and unique exploration of what it means to lead with wisdom. The book demonstrates that exclusive reliance on knowledge, data, and information yields a superficial leadership style lacking in depth and discernment. What's more important in the wisdom equation is possessing humility, judgment, empathy, compassion, and night vision. With eleven chapters full of anecdotes and tales from a variety of spiritual and cultural traditions that enrich and lend a deeper significance to the choices we make as leaders and members of organizations, Leading Wisely provides readers with: A thorough exploration of dealing with negative—but entirely natural motivations, like envy and greed An emphasis on the Golden Rule—treating others as we like to be treated ourselves An opportunity to be courageous—to consciously and intentionally pick our battles, saving energy for what really matters Lessons on how to listen intently and actively, truly hearing what our colleagues, friends, family, and followers are saying before reacting Finding happiness within ourselves Leading Wisely: Becoming a Reflective Leader in Turbulent Times is a startlingly incisive book, filled with messages that make the book required reading for anyone in a position of leadership or power. It also belongs in the libraries of well-being and health practitioners who frequently deal with businesspeople as clients or patients.

An instant national bestseller! Stanley McChrystal, the retired US Army general and bestselling author of Team of Teams, profiles thirteen of history’s great leaders, including Walt Disney, Coco Chanel, and Robert E. Lee, to show that leadership is not what you think it is—and never was. Stan McChrystal served for thirty-four years in the US Army, rising from a second lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division to a four-star general, in command of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. During those years he worked with countless leaders and pondered an ancient question: “What makes a leader great?” He came to realize that there is no simple answer. McChrystal profiles thirteen famous leaders from a wide range of eras and fields—from corporate CEOs to politicians and revolutionaries. He uses their stories to explore how leadership works in practice and to challenge the myths that complicate our thinking about this critical topic. With Plutarch’s Lives as his model, McChrystal looks at paired sets of leaders who followed unconventional paths to success. For instance. . . · Walt Disney and Coco Chanel built empires in very different ways. Both had public personas that sharply contrasted with how they lived in private. · Maximilien Robespierre helped shape the French Revolution in the eighteenth century; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi led the jihadist insurgency in Iraq in the twenty-first. We can draw surprising lessons from them about motivation and persuasion. · Both Boss Tweed in nineteenth-century New York and Margaret Thatcher in twentieth-century Britain followed unlikely roads to the top of powerful institutions. · Martin Luther and his future namesake Martin Luther King Jr., both local clergymen, emerged from modest backgrounds to lead world-changing movements. Finally, McChrystal explores how his former hero, General Robert E. Lee, could seemingly do everything right in his military career and yet lead the Confederate Army to a devastating defeat in the service of an immoral cause. Leaders will help you take stock of your own leadership, whether you’re part of a small team or responsible for an entire nation.