What Philosophy Can Teach You About Being a Better Leader - Hardcover

Reynolds, Alison; Goddard, Jules; Houlder, Dominic; Lewis, David Giles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1789660262 ISBN 13: 9781789660265

Publisher: Kogan Page, 2019

Synopsis

For decades, we have looked to management theorists, organizational psychologists and economists to tell us how we can squeeze the most out of people at work. The result? People are uninspired, feel like cogs in a machine and prefer to leave traditional work structures behind. Numbers and productivity can only get you so far.

What Philosophy Can Teach You About Being a Better Leader offers a different route that will allow you to reconnect with the humanist values of work. By turning to philosophy, and what it teaches us about finding fulfilment and living a good life, this book uncovers the ways you can re-engage your workforce by valuing its members as people, rather than just tools within the process.

The four authors argue that the rise of the 'omnipotent leader', who focuses on telling rather than leading, risks creating a new generation of feudal CEOs and needs to be resisted. With the help of Aristotle, Socrates, Kant and Nietzsche, as well as a whole host of other brilliant minds, they turn traditional management practices on their head, showing how moving away from traditional, hierarchical, risk focused control structures can lead to improved employee engagement, increased productivity and better outcomes for the entire business.

About this title

About the Authors

Alison Reynolds is a business leader and consultant in strategy execution. She is part of the Faculty in Executive Education at Ashridge Business School.

Jules Goddard has spent most of his career at London Business School, first as a Professor of Marketing and latterly as an architect of its action learning programmes for corporate clients. He served as the inaugural Gresham Professor of Commerce, and is currently on the faculty of CEDEP, Fontainebleau, France. He is a member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Dominic Houlder is an Adjunct Professor in Strategic and Entrepreneurial Management at London Business School. He is internationally recognised as a leading business strategist.

David Lewis has 35 years of experience in business and academia. He is a consultant and sought-after speaker working with global business leaders. In 2019, David was cited on Thinkers 50 Radar of top global management thinkers. David's research with co-author Alison Reynolds focuses on diver[1]sity and performance - the ability of teams and organizations to thrive in the face of new, uncertain and complex situations. With Alison, David developed the Qi Index, a tool to help leaders understand and enhance the quality of interaction between people to better formulate and execute groundbreaking strategies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1789660262
• ISBN 13: 9781789660265
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232