Leading With Sense

Today's business environment demands a new approach to leadership, one that effectively connects individuals and organizations in the midst of change. Leading with Sense offers a new, practical approach to meeting this challenge. Drawing on her experience as a poetic translator and her expertise in cross-cultural leadership, Valérie Gauthier outlines the tenets of savoir-relier: a framework for building sensible, trustworthy, and lasting relationships that enables leaders to value difference, work across boundaries, and navigate complex systems. Savoir-relier teaches leaders to tap into their senses in the midst of strategizing, allowing them to act intuitively and rationally at once. Few leaders dare to claim that their "gut feelings" are critical to their decisions. But, by engaging their intuition, they are able to draw on experience, better appreciate their environment, build confidence, and summon the courage to tackle the task at hand. Leading with Sense trains readers to be poets and translators in the business context. With savoir-relier, we can write our own stories, deciphering the challenges that we face with acumen, humility, and respect. Using real-world examples of this pioneering approach, Gauthier provides readers with methods and tools for cultivating a savoir-relier mindset to build positive relationships, nurture diversity, drive mindful innovation, and foster success.

This book offers alternatives to typical leadership, highlighting new ways of thinking about how individuals can lead effectively. Specifically, it integrates several fields, including neuroscience, behavioral economics, mindfulness, cognitive and social psychology, emotional intelligence, and management decision-making. The authors challenge the “common sense,” mainstream thinking about leadership, arguing that effective leadership depends on a more complicated understanding of the underlying dynamics.When leaders rely on the common sense that they have been taught explicitly or implicitly about leadership, the results are often not effective—for themselves personally, for their followers, for the organizations in which they lead, and for society as a whole. For example, aspiring leaders often believe that the mark of good leaders is their ability to come up with quick answers to problems. Others believe that one’s ability to minimize complexity and uncertainty indicates leadership potential. In addition, despite the literature suggesting the value of engaging in self-reflection, few leaders regularly step back and look inward. Even those who can intellectually discuss emotional intelligence often focus on their ability to influence the emotions of others rather than reflecting on and learning from their own emotions.The book calls for leaders to operate with more humility and greater awareness of the multiple contexts in which they function—approaches that improve life for all organizational members. As leaders become more effective, they will become healthier and more satisfied, less harried, more grounded, and more fulfilled in their lives.

“It’s not the magic that makes it work; it’s the way we work that makes it magic.” The secret for creating “magic” in our careers, our organizations, and our lives is simple: outstanding leadership—the kind that inspires employees, delights customers, and achieves extraordinary business results. No one knows more about this kind of leadership than Lee Cockerell, the man who ran Walt Disney World® Resort operations for over a decade. And in Creating Magic, he shares the leadership principles that not only guided his own journey from a poor farm boy in Oklahoma to the head of operations for a multibillion dollar enterprise, but that also soon came to form the cultural bedrock of the world’s number one vacation destination. But as Lee demonstrates, great leadership isn’t about mastering impossibly complex management theories. We can all become outstanding leaders by following the ten practical, common sense strategies outlined in this remarkable book. As straightforward as they are profound, these leadership lessons include: Everyone is important. Make your people your brand. Burn the free fuel: appreciation, recognition, and encouragement. Give people a purpose, not just a job. Combining surprising business wisdom with insightful and entertaining stories from Lee’s four decades on the front lines of some of the world’s best-run companies, Creating Magic shows all of us – from small business owners to managers at every level – how to become better leaders by infusing quality, character, courage, enthusiasm, and integrity into our workplace and into our lives.

Building a dynamic and inspirational career against all odds, Herman Cain's sensational rise to an influential black business leader has become an extraordinary American Dream come true. Cain reaches out, engaging, challenging and motivating you with his common sense approach to tackling and conquering leadership challenges. He passionately reveals his philosophy on living your life to live your dreams.

A book about common sense, what it is, how to make it, and how to put it into practice across all contexts of leadership and life

"Tom was a young engineer employed at one of the country's largest steel companies. He had been an outstanding individual performer, and now he was a new manager, leading a team responsible for producing steel for a major automobile company. After just one week on the job, Tom and his team met with over 20 engineers from that other company. It was a rude awakening. I sat in a room with maybe 20 or 25 of their engineers for the annual quality evaluation of suppliers. And I learned for the first time that we were in the bottom of the bottom quartile as a supplier. We had lousy quality, we had lousy invoicing, we had lousy on-time delivery. And this was my first general manager role! I had grown up as an engineer. And how did Tom respond to this unexpected shock? I had a holy shit moment! I had been in the job literally a week. So part of it was, 'Oh my God, what the hell am I going to do?' Also I thought about how my guys had been in the business for a while, and I thought, 'What the hell have you been doing?' And I was thinking, 'I'm going to clean house!' But then... I've learned that you just can't react viscerally every time something comes up because it just scares people away. So Tom listened attentively as the engineers from the auto company presented their litany of complaints. When they finally finished, he stood up and said, "I wouldn't blame you if you fired us as a supplier. But if you give us a chance to fix these problems, I guarantee you that that we will not have this kind of meeting next year." When Tom met with his team the next morning to discuss the situation, he started by just listening to them. They went on for some time complaining about how the company and their previous boss had made it impossible for them to provide good products and service. Rather than disagree with them or join in pointing fingers at others, Tom listened. "I didn't think about it at the time, but that first couple of hours was very cathartic for them. My focus was not on beating anyone up but rather, what can we do to fix this?" The team responded positively to Tom's approach. The next year when they met, the auto company told Tom that they "never saw any business turn around that quickly in one year." As a result, they began giving Tom's company more business, and Tom went on to a distinguished career, eventually becoming one of his company's top executives"--

“Has the potential to transform how all companies are run…Nothing could be more valuable!”—Mark Drewell, CEO, Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative (GRLI) From two of the world’s most successful business leaders comes Common-Sense Business—an accessible, actionable guide to better leadership, increased profits, and a more sustainable economic model predicated on prudence and socially conscious business. Common sense and prudence have long been among the guiding tenets of society, but in today’s economy they have been completely abandoned in the interest of blindly maximizing profits. Common-Sense Business shows that this current economic model is both detrimental and unsustainable, and that we must transform the global economy along the lines of common sense toward the common good. Ted Malloch, a thought leader and policy influencer in global economic strategy, and Whitney MacMillan, the former chairman and CEO of the world’s largest private corporation, draw on recent research, history’s greatest minds, and their own successes to explain that ethically driven business is both a moral and financial necessity. Inspired by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, this work explains to readers in all walks of life that ethically driven business will lead to better long-term profits, larger customer bases and more positive customer relations, and a holistically improved business. This book is a must-read for business owners, entrepreneurs, students, and businessmen and women in all sectors of the economy.

Barry Jentz shows how leaders cab build the requisite trust and credibility for improving organiztional performance. Typically, leaders "talk tough" to improve performance. When that doesn't work, they "talk nice" (or vice versa). By learning to "talk sense", leaders can succeed in their efforts to improve performance.