Higher Ambition

The authors, an international team of experts from leading business schools and consultancies, offer a unique view into the minds of some of the most successful and insightful leaders of our time: CEOs from vanguard companies around the world that have demonstrated the distinctive ability to do good while also doing well.

Meeting the new standard for leadership. Higher Ambition is required reading for every leader who refuses to compromise between people and performance. Choosing one or the other may have worked in the past, but it won’t work now. As global competition stiffens and businesses face increased public scrutiny and renewed government regulation, leaders must win on all fronts—with their people, their customers, their communities, and their shareholders. In short, they must deliver superior economic and social value. Brimming with powerful stories and thoughtful advice from CEOs themselves, Higher Ambition equips leaders with the practical insights they need to meet this new and higher standard. The authors, an international team of experts from leading business schools and consultancies, offer a unique view into the minds of some of the most successful and insightful leaders of our time: CEOs from vanguard companies around the world that have demonstrated the distinctive ability to do good while also doing well. These organizations are as diverse as Standard Chartered Bank, Infosys, Volvo, Cummins, IKEA, the Tata Group, and Campbell’s Soup. Readers will learn the principles and practices these pioneering leaders are using to: • Build enduring enterprises that simultaneously solve for people and profits • Forge winning strategies that leverage their companies’ unique cultural and human capabilities • Dramatically raise the aspirations and ambitions of their people • Energize and align their diverse global firms • Relentlessly upgrade leadership capabilities throughout their organizations Drawing on the author team’s extensive research and in-depth interviews with successful leaders from around the globe, this provocative new book is poised to become a management classic in the tradition of In Search of Excellence and Built to Last.

‘I am passionate about my country and angry at the mendacity that has led to the appalling situation in which the UK and our people are heading for relative poverty and insignificance while our politics is offering bitter, unpalatable extremes. There has to be something better. In the absence of something better, we will have to build it.’ Tim Farron Writing with warmth, humour and compelling honesty, Tim Farron charts his rise to the leadership of the Liberal Democrats – from his childhood in Preston to his central role during the Conservative–Lib Dem coalition of 2010–15. Farron speaks openly about his role as Party President and the intense experience of leading his party through the 2016 EU referendum and the snap general election of 2017. He also reflects on the scrutiny he received because of his religious beliefs. So, having reached the top of his career, what made him voluntarily relinquish that honour? What does Tim Farron’s experience mean for those who hold to a liberal vision? Are there lessons to be learned about the role of religion in public life? And what are the prospects for true liberalism in the UK today?

This technical report outlines the rationale, process and results of a joint research study, coordinated by the World Health Organization, co-chaired by the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination and the Ministry of Climate Change. A summary of the research study describes how scenarios were modelled to examine the health and economic implications of raising ambition in Pakistan’s nationally determined contribution (NDC) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

How do you become highly successful—while living a fulfilling life and growing as a person? Most ambitious people struggle in at least one of these areas, yet they feel they don’t have the tools to improve their situation. Return on Ambition is the culmination of an ambitious effort to harness insights from recent research in psychology and neuroscience to help people pursue their ambitions more fruitfully. The result is a radical and holistic approach to achievement, growth, and well-being that includes: • The Return on Ambition Self-Assessment: instructive, clear measures of how well you are currently doing in getting the return you aspire to • The Trinity of Achievement, Growth, and Well-Being: research and wisdom that show that compromises in any of these three elements will cause declines in the others over time • The 7 Frenemies: descriptions of personal attributes that are your core strengths as an ambitious person, but that can also be the biggest obstacles to your success and fulfillment in life • The Return on Ambition Toolbox: 4 tools that will help you articulate and pursue your ambition, expand your self-awareness, and help you learn consciously • 4 Self-Coaching Sessions: instructions for 30–60-minute contemplations inspired by thought-provoking questions Nielsen and Tillisch have tried-and-tested experience inside the world of grand ambitions. This means that readers will find not only concepts brought to life with rich interviews and stories, but also two authors who inherently understand their audience. Nicolai Chen Nielsen is an associate partner at McKinsey & Company, where he advises clients on leadership development, culture change, and agile transformations. He is the co-author of Leadership at Scale and has published several articles on personal development. He is currently based in New York with his wife, Samira, and their two dogs, Napoleon and Caesar. Nicolai Tillisch works with Cultivating Leadership, the global coaching firm, and is a co-founder of Deliberate Development, the venture behind the StepUpYourDay software solution. He has been a consultant with McKinsey & Company and was an executive with DDB Worldwide, Hutchison, and Nokia Siemens Networks. Nicolai lives with his wife Ida and their children, Margaux and Axel, in Denmark.

International Cooperative Initiatives (ICIs) could hold significant promise for closing the global emissions gap between a pathway to a 2°C warming limit and current national emission reduction pledges. This report examines a selection of these ICIs to explore their potential for delivering additional greenhouse gas mitigation and for raising ambition at national and international levels. It concludes that there are a range of ICIs already making an important contribution. Many have potential to scale-up their activities and could offer promising new channels for public climate finance.

Winner of the Herbert A. Simon Book Award of the American Political Science Association, American Society for Public Administration Book Award of the American Society for Public Administration Political scientists and public administration scholars have long recognized that innovation in public agencies is contingent on entrepreneurial bureaucratic executives. But unlike their commercial counterparts, public administration “entrepreneurs” do not profit from their innovations. What motivates enterprising public executives? How are they created? Manuel P. Teodoro’s theory of bureaucratic executive ambition explains why pioneering leaders aren not the result of serendipity, but rather arise out of predictable institutional design. Teodoro explains the systems that foster or frustrate entrepreneurship among public executives. Through case studies and quantitative analysis of original data, he shows how psychological motives and career opportunities shape administrators’ decisions, and he reveals the consequences these choices have for innovation and democratic governance. Tracing the career paths and political behavior of agency executives, Teodoro finds that, when advancement involves moving across agencies, ambitious bureaucrats have strong incentives for entrepreneurship. Where career advancement occurs vertically within a single organization, ambitious bureaucrats have less incentive for innovation, but perhaps greater accountability. This research introduces valuable empirical methods and has already generated additional studies. A powerful argument for the art of the possible, Bureaucratic Ambition advances a flexible theory of politics and public administration. Its lessons will enrich debate among scholars and inform policymakers and career administrators.

This book analyzes strategic candidacy decisions to explain how primary elections for the United States Senate unfold. With new, comprehensive data on pools of potential candidates, it examines the determinants of electoral and fundraising success, analyzes the timing of candidacy decisions, and investigates the impact of strategic retirements.