Brilliant Leadership (Innovative Leadership Series)

The need for restructuring and transforming business practices for the benefit of humanity and the environment is a major theme of this book. Interactivity and connectedness of people and things/data is transforming everything. Many organizations, even the traditional ones, have entered a process of transformation through innovation and rethinking their business models, which affects the way leaders communicate, lead, and co-create.

Brilliant leadership is a new intellectual framework to guide strategists, gamechangers, senior executives, and aspiring leaders. This new framework is based on our current work on leadership development and focuses on what it means to become a brilliant leader. Brilliant leaders have an authentic personality, the willingness to engage people/teams, inspire others, facilitate (co-)innovation, and commit to making significant contributions (humanity, environment, ethics), and be relevant. The framework is also consistent with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education, fostering innovation, and developing a lifelong learning mindset.

Each chapter of the book is more than a collection of ideas. It is a part of the new intellectual framework that describes ‘Brilliant Leadership’. Each chapter includes a distinct contribution by experts and that at the same time is connected to other chapters through the book’s organizing schema, paralleling how the different facets of leadership are inseparable from one another. Together, the chapters present a holistic view of what it means to become a brilliant leader in the transformative digital age. The framework demonstrates this connectivity through a theoretical framework (our model) and a plan (book chapters) of how to approach the specific research inquiry, the tenets of brilliant leadership.

What makes this new edition unique? The book is aimed at providing practical strategies and becoming a source of inspiration for what it means to have a new leadership mindset - a brilliant leader who understands how to communicate with empathy and authenticity, engage and inspire others, shift responsibility into shared-commitment, and spark learning in a purpose-driven innovation culture.

Dr. Alan T. Belasen holds a Ph.D. from Rockefeller College, SUNY. For over 30 years, Dr. Belasen has been involved in executive education and development programs in the U.S. and abroad in startups, business enterprises, multinational companies, nonprofits, government agencies, academic institutions, and healthcare organizations. Dr. Belasen chaired the MBA Program at SUNY, Empire State College from 2004-2015 where he designed and supervised the implementation of the MBA in Management, MBA in Global Leadership, MBA in Healthcare Leadership, and MBA Pathway for Veterans.

Dr. Nicole Pfeffermann has in-depth expertise as a management consultant in digital business, strategy & innovation, and innovation communication and more than 15 years of professional experience in IT-driven innovation management in logistics, (high-)tech markets, and R&D transfer projects. She was startup coach and senior lecturer in digital business, information and knowledge management, and methodology and a co-editor of the international contributed volume 'Strategy and Communication for Innovation', ‘New Leadership in Strategy and Communication’, and ‘New Leadership Communication―Inspire Your Horizon’, Springer, including book presentations in collaboration with Jacobs University Bremen, Deutsche Post DHL and University of Cambridge, IfM. She holds a Diploma in Business Economics and has an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Engineering (robotics/automation) at the University of Bremen.