Today’s business environment is highly dynamic, making anticipating the future more complicated than ever. Market shifts can catch organizations off guard and lead to lasting problems. In How to Lead a Quest, Dr. Jason Fox suggests that pioneering leadership can help leaders effectively address issues in today’s market. The key to this approach is exploring several potential scenarios that a company may face and developing strategies to support each one. The result is a more flexible and dynamic leadership methodology.
One of the biggest challenges facing businesses today is sustaining growth. In How to Lead a Quest, Dr. Jason Fox offers a new approach to growth that he calls pioneering leadership:
- Pioneering leadership relies on exploration outside the scope of an organization’s default ways of thinking and operating. This requires four leadership superpowers: imagination, curiosity, doubt, and wonder. This form of exploration can also be referred to as Quest-Augmented Strategy.
- To prepare an organization for the future, its leaders must build a quiverof options. The best way to decide if an option is viable is to form hypotheses and conduct experiments.
- Experiments may end in failure, but some forms of failure are better than others. Failures that should be avoided include corruption, deviance, apathy, pessimism, and willful ignorance. Failures that suggest change is needed include distraction, inadequate processes, and lack of ability. Failures to be celebrated include quitting after careful consideration and lack of perfection.
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After many years of study, reflection, and practical experience as a manager, Kelly Odell identified 10 essential elements of successful leadership. These factors transcend varying organizational cultures and differences in individual personalities. In The Human Way, Odell presents his 10 commandments to transform managers into leaders. They present a values-based approach to leadership that is independent of specific activities, behaviors, and skills. Successful leaders are not perfect and do not always make the right decisions; rather, they understand and accept their own humanity, which allows them to achieve success.
The Serving Leader by Kenneth R. Jennings and John Stahl-Wert showcases the powerful yet paradoxical method of achieving greatness by serving others. They intertwine tales of an estranged son and his dying father within the lessons to provide insight into the five actions anyone can take to transform his or her organization or community. Serving Leadership has power and value in many different types of environments, including industries, nonprofits, schools, homes, and churches. The best Serving Leaders turn everything the world knows about traditional leadership upside down and achieve amazing results by doing so.
For managers and leaders, running effective virtual meetings–from conference calls to WebEx meetings–can come with an array of obstacles. Silences, interruptions, technical issues, and cultural differences can all add a degree of difficulty to hosting any kind of virtual meeting. 20 Minute Manager: Running Virtual Meetings from Harvard Business Review Press gives leaders the tools to choose the right channel for virtual meetings to take place, to prepare the materials necessary to keep participants meaningfully engaged, and to hold meeting members accountable for the meeting content, even from a distance.
Business leaders often become “human doings” rather than “human beings,” ignoring the inner landscapes that inform their decisions. In 4D Leadership, Dr. Alan Watkins presents the Enlightened Leadership Model, a framework that takes four dimensions of leadership into consideration: being, short-term doing, long-term doing, and relating. Multidimensional leaders who excel in all four areas are not just better at business–they are happier, healthier, and more fulfilled.
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