Riding The Leadership Rollercoaster

A collection of short, bite-sized nuggets of insight into the psychological ups and downs of the leadership journey from one of the world’s top thinkers on leadership. Leadership often means living on the edge, living a life less ordinary, leaving the straight and narrow to take a more exciting path. Like riding a roller coaster, there will be moments that take our breath away but it is in those moments that we feel truly alive. Although we may not know what is coming round the next bend or after the next rise, we have a great time on the ride. Kets de Vries’s examination of the “inner theatre” pushes leaders and their coaches to become a personal and organizational detectives, to look beyond the obvious and discover the deeper meaning of their own and others’ actions. Doing so can prevent leaders becoming prisoners of their own past, failing to recognize the repetitive patterns in their behavior, making the same mistakes over and over again. Leaders are more likely than followers to experience ups and downs, successes and failures, happy days and sad. The intensity of the experience depends on the “rider.” They can scream or enjoy the ride—or, indeed, do both. They can make the best out of the beginnings and endings, the good times and bad, or they can sink beneath them. In Riding the Leadership Rollercoaster Kets de Vries provides leaders and their coaches with the insights that can help them take some control of the ride.

Riding the Creative Rollercoaster is a pioneering new work that turns our understanding of leadership and innovation on its head. Innovation is the holy grail of growth and progress. The challenge lies in evoking the creativity and productivity of teams, functions, organizations and even ecosystems of organizations, in order to catalyze new patterns of thought and action. Nick Udall shares his passion for the future of leadership, and defines a critical threshold that leaders, teams and organizations of all kinds now need to cross in order to help shape more purposeful, innovative and sustainable futures. In doing so, he introduces a groundbreaking set of subtle leadership skills that explicitly link innovation and creativity with specific states and qualities of individual and collective consciousness. And he challenges leaders to learn how to leverage difference, play with new and novel intersections, hold creative tension, and work with collective intelligence, in order to help their teams and organizations powerfully embrace the highs and lows of the creative process.

Build your success as a teacher leader with the practical advice in this book. Award-winning educator Melissa Collins shows how you can grow in your role by fostering relationships with colleagues, organizations, and mentors. She also spotlights rock star educators. She offers thorough advice on a wide variety of topics such as finding the right support, building your reputation, reinventing yourself, knowing your purpose, and developing leadership mindsets. She also explains how to manage your time wisely, build a network, enact purposeful practice, and, most of all, dare to dream. Appropriate for teachers at any level of their career who want to take on a larger role in their school or beyond, the book’s honest anecdotes and step-by-step suggestions will put you on the right path, so teacher leaders can develop in their careers and help their students thrive.

Why do great companies and other organizations fail, sometimes abruptly? Why do admired leaders fall from their organizational pedestals? Why do young and promising managers derail? Why do organizations create and reinforce rules that manifestly damage both them and those that they employ, serve and sustain? Leadership is a much-discussed but ill-defined idea in business and management circles. Analysing and understanding the skills and behaviours exhibited in leadership practice reveal that leaders exhibit paradoxical activities that challenge our understanding of organizations. In this text, the authors identify leadership behaviours that compete towards business equilibrium: selfish versus selfless, distance versus proximity, consistency versus individuality, enforcing professional standards versus flexibility and control versus autonomy. These paradoxical dilemmas require a reflexive and analytical approach to a subject that is tricky to define. The book explores the paradoxes of power and leadership not as a panacea for solving organizational problems but as a lens through which leadership and power are seen as an exercise in dynamic balance. Read this book as an invitation to the paradoxes of power and leadership that frame organizational life today. Be prepared to find surprises – and some counterintuitive arguments. Providing a thought-provoking guide to the traits and skills that will help readers to understand and navigate paradoxical leadership behaviour, this reflexive book will be a useful reading for students and scholars of business, management and psychology globally.

In the previous book in this series, Manfred Kets de Vries observed the experiences of leaders on a rollercoaster ride through their professional and personal lives. Now, he follows them down the rabbit hole into the unknown, where, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, they find a dystopian Wonderland in which everyone seems to have gone mad and life functions according to its own crazy logic, throwing up all kinds of obstacles in the search for truth. Understanding what is happening around us has become more difficult than ever in the Age of Trump. Don’t imperatives like “build that wall” sound very much like “Off with his head”? Unfortunately, and unlike Alice, we are not going to wake up from a bad dream and discover that everything is “nothing but a pack of cards”. The first part of this book looks at the psychodynamics of leadership in both a business and a political context. The second focuses on the psychopathology of everyday life in organizations and the seemingly endless ways people can make a mess of things – including mega pay packages, acting out, digital addiction and other dysfunctional behaviour patterns. Each chapter ends with a brief anecdote to illustrate the dilemma it presents. In short, sharp nuggets, Kets de Vries helps make sense of how the madness of the present has affected leadership in organizations and the workplace.

"A nicely balanced personal and practical book of corporate reflections and hard-won business lessons." —Kirkus Reviews What is it really like to be an entrepreneur? After nearly fifty years of building a successful media company, founder of American all-sports radio Jeff Smulyan shares with candor and humor just how many bitter failures come with each great victory along the way. For founder and CEO of Emmis Communications Jeff Smulyan, the path to success has been anything but straightforward. When you’ve owned a Major League Baseball team, started America’s first all sports radio station, created the world’s two largest hip hop radio stations and managed everyone from David Letterman to Ken Griffey Jr. and Don Imus and even been nationalized by an ally of Vladimir Putin, you’ve seen the rollercoaster ride of an entrepreneur from every side. Aspiring entrepreneurs, radio and media industry insiders, and avid sports fans alike will appreciate Smulyan’s honesty as he shares the countless lessons he’s learned from decades of entrepreneurship. Smulyan offers readers priceless insight into navigating the twists and turns of growing a business and teaches how to build a culture based on both trust and humor—the essential keys to surviving almost anything. Never Ride a Rollercoaster Upside Down details Smulyan’s journey: from taking over his cousin’s failing country music radio station and founding his own company, to purchasing and then selling ownership of the Seattle Mariners and guiding his company through the Golden Age of Radio. Alongside his humorous, eventful, and dramatic stories, Smulyan presents valuable pointers and tips—for anyone else brave enough to try their own hand at starting a business. The journey to booming business is a rollercoaster. Learn from someone who has experienced all the ups and downs—and knows that what’s most important is to hold on while keeping your sense of humor intact.

This book focuses on what makes a successful CEO and the paths to becoming one in today’s global economy. Chapters in the book include insights by 20 top CEOs – one from each G20 country – gathered from an extensive global qualitative research project. Through seven easy-to-digest “master classes” that demystify the role of the 21st century CEO, the authors present their findings in an accessible, conversational style that serves as a step-by-step guide for those who aspire to become CEOs, and develop essential character traits, experience, and skills required of the role.

Coaching and mentoring supervision is a rapidly expanding field. This book is a curated collection of contemporary thinking; presenting cutting-edge contributions from international writers, leaders in the professional field, academics and practitioners who offer a range of accessible applied research, practice examples, case studies, guidelines and reflective prompts to readers. As in art galleries, some pieces require reflection – and return visits may be necessary. The work is edgy and new, and yet totally grounded in the coaching and mentoring supervisor experience, bringing pragmatic solutions to current complex challenges. Over the last decade coaching supervision has moved from a rare and privileged audience to being common place amongst ‘best practice’ coaches. This book harnesses the current surge in curiosity, knowledge and practice in coaching and mentoring supervision and provides a collective statement of our times. Each chapter, in its highly individual way, equips us to face the demands of the VUCA environment. In turn, the book resources coaching and mentoring supervisors to support their supervisees – coaches and mentors who work with leaders, grappling with global, community and personal challenges, in this uncertain, fast moving world. Supervision for mentors is developing alongside coaching supervision and at present there appears to be no obvious distinctions with little current research focussing on the mentoring supervision experience. However, its distinctive identity is still forming. We invite mentors, and mentor supervisors, as they read these works, to consider the emerging similarities and differences in addressing requirements for mentoring supervision. The book brings together pioneering research and practice and as such will remain current for many years. This book will be popular with experienced professionals who want to stretch and deepen their practice, keep up-to-date with current studies, challenge and catalyse their own thinking, and embrace learning from real-world practitioner examples and applied research.