Unquestioned Brilliance PDF Download

Author: John Austin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780996703703
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
All leaders must walk a fine line between creating focus and questioning conventional wisdom, between confidence in their ability and unrealistic overconfidence, and between the demands of fast action and a clear-eyed assessment of the situation. Unquestioned brilliance gets in the way of this balance. It is a fundamental leadership trap. Unquestioned brilliance sounds like a good thing. After all, how can brilliance be bad? In the context of this book, unquestioned brilliance is not a good thing. Unquestioned brilliance is being so confident in your own intelligence and point of view that, you not only fail to question your conclusions, you may not even you see the potential for other points of view or better solutions. Unquestioned brilliance is not just overconfidence or a problem for egotistical megalomaniacs. It is something that every leader struggles with. This does not mean every leader is an egotistical megalomaniac. It means every leader is human. Each of us struggles with balancing ignorance (what we don't know) with overconfidence (what we want to believe we know). The unquestioned brilliance at the center of this book is not simply arrogance. It is far more subtle and pervasive than that. This particular leadership trap limits innovation and critical thinking and contributes to risk aversion within leadership teams. Because this process tends to happen without thought, leaders need to actively counteract this cognitive dysfunction within their teams. The book outlines ten techniques, built from research and validated through application, designed to counter the fundamental leadership trap. The techniques described in this book will not automatically make you a great leader but they will potentially help you navigate your teams on a path away from this dysfunctional cycle. Some common implications of unquestioned brilliance: -We argue that our profession or industry is too complex for outsiders to understand and yet we immediately form strong "common sense" opinions about things outside our area of expertise. -We set our strategy based on today's world and are slow to acknowledge when fundamental changes in the external environment make this plan no longer a good fit for tomorrow's world. -We spend significant amounts of time attempting to keep stakeholders satisfied. Yet we spend very little time trying to understand why people choose not to engage with our organization or questioning our understanding of stakeholder interests. -We carefully design large-scale change initiatives. Yet we do not look for, or even acknowledge, the blind spots in our plans. The techniques outlined in this book can help leaders and their teams begin building their strategic thinking muscles and help them to better navigate around the unquestioned brilliance trap.

Author: John Austin
Publisher: Fisher Baldwin Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
It does not matter if you are an experienced leader or are just starting out as a new manager or entrepreneur, the techniques outlined in Unquestioned Brilliance can improve your decision making and critical thinking. The book outlines ten techniques, built from research and validated through application, designed to help leaders and their teams become better strategic thinkers. For less than the price of a single dinner at a restaurant, this book offers the same content found in executive education strategic thinking courses. Unquestioned Brilliance is best viewed as a handbook for the aspiring leader. It provides a variety of tools for leaders of teams at all levels of an organization. Techniques included in this book include: -Uncertainty Vectoring: Sort and manage environmental uncertainties to use them for strategic insight and competitive advantage. -TAP Analysis: Align team expertise and task requirements in a manner that develops teams and improves performance. -Tension Tracking: Understand and manage prevailing interests that create stress and paralyze employees within your organization. -Blind-Spot Centering: Stress test strategic initiatives to identify limiting mindsets and strategic blind-spots. -GSO Decision-Making: Diagnose a decision process with a quick heuristic for finding the missing step. -Stakeholder Mapping: Identify the key individuals and groups early enough in a process to draw on their perspectives and expertise. -HERE Snapshot: Use a quick situational assessment when executing a strategic initiative in a new environment. -Backward-Forward Flip: Learn from past industry mistakes to improve odds of success of new organization innovations. The techniques outlined in this book can help leaders and their teams begin building their strategic thinking muscles and help them to better navigate around the unquestioned brilliance trap.

Author: Edgar H. Schein
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1523095407
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
The more traditional forms of leadership that are based on static hierarchies and professional distance between leaders and followers are growing increasingly outdated and ineffective. As organizations face more complex interdependent tasks, leadership must become more personal in order to insure open trusting communication that will make more collaborative problem solving and innovation possible. Without open and trusting communications throughout organizations, they will continue to face the productivity and quality problems that result from reward systems that emphasize individual competition and “climbing the corporate ladder”. Authors Edgar Schein and Peter Schein recognize this reality and call for a reimagined form of leadership that coincides with emerging trends of relationship building, complex group work, diverse workforces, and cultures in which everyone feels psychologically safe. Humble Leadership calls for “here and now” humility based on a deeper understanding of the constantly evolving complexities of interpersonal, group and intergroup relationships that require shifting our focus towards the process of group dynamics and collaboration. Humble Leadership at all levels and in all working groups will be the key to achieving the creativity, adaptiveness, and agility that organizations will need to survive and grow.

Author: William Easterly
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465080901
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
In this "bracingly iconoclastic” book (New York Times Book Review), a renowned economics scholar breaks down the fight to end global poverty and the rights that poor individuals have had taken away for generations. In The Tyranny of Experts, renowned economist William Easterly examines our failing efforts to fight global poverty, and argues that the "expert approved" top-down approach to development has not only made little lasting progress, but has proven a convenient rationale for decades of human rights violations perpetrated by colonialists, postcolonial dictators, and US and UK foreign policymakers seeking autocratic allies. Demonstrating how our traditional antipoverty tactics have both trampled the freedom of the world's poor and suppressed a vital debate about alternative approaches to solving poverty, Easterly presents a devastating critique of the blighted record of authoritarian development. In this masterful work, Easterly reveals the fundamental errors inherent in our traditional approach and offers new principles for Western agencies and developing countries alike: principles that, because they are predicated on respect for the rights of poor people, have the power to end global poverty once and for all.

Author: Robert A. Caro
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307960463
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 785

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE, THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE, THE AMERICAN HISTORY BOOK PRIZE Book Four of Robert A. Caro’s monumental The Years of Lyndon Johnson displays all the narrative energy and illuminating insight that led the Times of London to acclaim it as “one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age. A masterpiece.” The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career—1958 to1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, the time in which the presidency, the goal he had always pursued, would be thrust upon him in the moment it took an assassin’s bullet to reach its mark. By 1958, as Johnson began to maneuver for the presidency, he was known as one of the most brilliant politicians of his time, the greatest Senate Leader in our history. But the 1960 nomination would go to the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Caro gives us an unparalleled account of the machinations behind both the nomination and Kennedy’s decision to offer Johnson the vice presidency, revealing the extent of Robert Kennedy’s efforts to force Johnson off the ticket. With the consummate skill of a master storyteller, he exposes the savage animosity between Johnson and Kennedy’s younger brother, portraying one of America’s great political feuds. Yet Robert Kennedy’s overt contempt for Johnson was only part of the burden of humiliation and isolation he bore as Vice President. With a singular understanding of Johnson’s heart and mind, Caro describes what it was like for this mighty politician to find himself altogether powerless in a world in which power is the crucial commodity. For the first time, in Caro’s breathtakingly vivid narrative, we see the Kennedy assassination through Lyndon Johnson’s eyes. We watch Johnson step into the presidency, inheriting a staff fiercely loyal to his slain predecessor; a Congress determined to retain its power over the executive branch; and a nation in shock and mourning. We see how within weeks—grasping the reins of the presidency with supreme mastery—he propels through Congress essential legislation that at the time of Kennedy’s death seemed hopelessly logjammed and seizes on a dormant Kennedy program to create the revolutionary War on Poverty. Caro makes clear how the political genius with which Johnson had ruled the Senate now enabled him to make the presidency wholly his own. This was without doubt Johnson’s finest hour, before his aspirations and accomplishments were overshadowed and eroded by the trap of Vietnam. In its exploration of this pivotal period in Johnson’s life—and in the life of the nation—The Passage of Power is not only the story of how he surmounted unprecedented obstacles in order to fulfill the highest purpose of the presidency but is, as well, a revelation of both the pragmatic potential in the presidency and what can be accomplished when the chief executive has the vision and determination to move beyond the pragmatic and initiate programs designed to transform a nation. It is an epic story told with a depth of detail possible only through the peerless research that forms the foundation of Robert Caro’s work, confirming Nicholas von Hoffman’s verdict that “Caro has changed the art of political biography.”

Author: Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374151199
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Lawrence-Lightfoot is enthralled by exits: long farewells, quick goodbyes, sudden endings, the ordinary and the extraordinary. She explores the ways we leave one thing and move on to the next in an enthusiastic, uplifting lesson about ourselves and the role of transition in our lives.

Author: Jeff Sharlet
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316179736
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
C Street - where piety, politics, and corruption meet Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside the C Street House, the Fellowship residence known simply by its Washington, DC address. The house has lately been the scene of notorious political scandal, but more crucially it is home to efforts to transform the very fabric of American democracy. And now, after laying bare its tenants' past in The Family, Sharlet reports from deep within fundamentalism in today's world, revealing that the previous efforts of religious fundamentalists in America pale in comparison with their long-term ambitions. When Barack Obama entered the White House, headlines declared the age of culture wars over. In C Street, Sharlet shows why these conflicts endure and why they matter now - from the sensationalism of Washington sex scandals to fundamentalism's long shadow in Africa, where Ugandan culture warriors determined to eradicate homosexuality have set genocide on simmer. We've reached a point where piety and corruption are not at odds but one and the same. Reporting with exclusive sources and explosive documents from C Street, the war on gays in Uganda, and the battle for the soul of America's armed forces - waged by a 15,000-strong movement of officers intent on "reclaiming territory for Christ in the military" Sharlet reveals not the last gasp of old-time religion but the new front lines of fundamentalism.

Author: Rachel Caine
Publisher: Berkley Books
ISBN: 0451489241
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
With the future of the Great Library in doubt, the unforgettable characters from Ink and Bone must decide if it's worth saving in this thrilling adventure in the New York Times bestselling series. The corrupt leadership of the Great Library has fallen. But with the Archivist plotting his return to power, and the Library under siege from outside empires and kingdoms, its future is uncertain. Jess Brightwell and his friends must come together as never before, to forge a new future for the Great Library...or see everything it stood for crumble.

Author: Jay-Z
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 1588369595
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Decoded is a book like no other: a collection of lyrics and their meanings that together tell the story of a culture, an art form, a moment in history, and one of the most provocative and successful artists of our time. Praise for Decoded “Compelling . . . provocative, evocative . . . Part autobiography, part lavishly illustrated commentary on the author’s own work, Decoded gives the reader a harrowing portrait of the rough worlds Jay-Z navigated in his youth, while at the same time deconstructing his lyrics.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “One of a handful of books that just about any hip hop fan should own.”—The New Yorker “Elegantly designed, incisively written . . . an impressive leap by a man who has never been known for small steps.”—Los Angeles Times “A riveting exploration of Jay-Z’s journey . . . So thoroughly engrossing, it reads like a good piece of cultural journalism.”—The Boston Globe “Shawn Carter’s most honest airing of the experiences he drew on to create the mythic figure of Jay-Z . . . The scenes he recounts along the way are fascinating.”—Entertainment Weekly “Hip-hop’s renaissance man drops a classic. . . . Heartfelt, passionate and slick.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Author: Andrea T Edwards
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781737294405
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Uncommon Courageis an invitation to be your courageous best self every day. It's also an antidote to the overwhelm, fear, and rage rolling around the world. This book opens a path to inner contentment, peace, and happiness, and a path to meaningful action. It brings you an opportunity to reflect. What if there was another way? What if we could do something about the bigger issues facing our world? What if we could make meaningful change? Well, we can. Despite today's turmoil-which we can utilize as a springboard to action-a transformational journey is possible for all of us. Uncommon Courage is as practical, funny, and grounded in optimism as Andrea herself, and it's your toolkit for a deep-dive journey towards joy, purpose, and the kind of inner transformation that will make a real difference in the world we all share. In this book, you will discover 108 interlinking strategies to shift your thinking, improve your mood, and lighten your heart. This book helps you take on anger, parenting, climate change, self-awareness, and career change. Some of the stories are funny, while others may lovingly push your buttons. Living a full life takes courage and this book is designed to help you build yours. Read it, reflect, laugh, and enjoy. Reactions from early readers: "Reading Uncommon Courage is like going to a dinner party and being seated with an experienced CEO, a spiritual guru, and a wise old grandma." Tara Moody, marketing and culture speaker, strategist, content creator "This is not a quick-fix self-help book, but rather a personal travel guide for you that will help you lead yourself and your life." Andrew Bryant, CSP, author, Self-Leadership: How to be a More Successful, Efficient and Effective Leader from the Inside Out "Written from the depths of her soul, Andrea's vulnerability encourages us to reflect on how we are living our lives." Shirley Taylor, CSP, author, Connecting the Dots to Inspire the Leader in You "Andrea's stories takes us through the streets of Calcutta, where she meets Mother Teresa, to being chased, robbed, and nurturedin some of the most dangerous countries on the planet-to learning unconditionally how to say YES to life. Epic." John Vincent Gordon, CEO Expat Choice Media "Uncommon Courage is a kick in the butt and a spark in the heart." Anupama Singal, author, SYZYGYmoments "These stories about travel, challenges, conflicts, people and planetary urgency remind me of sitting around a bonfire and absorbing experiences of the well-travelled wise. Uncommon Courage rocks!" Kevin Cottam, author, The Nomadic Mindset: Never Settle... for Too Long Andrea T Edwards CSP, the Digital Conversationalist, is an award-winning B2B communications professional with over 20 years' experience. She speaks on social leadership and integrity in the digital age to professionals around the world. Her travels currently have her living on an island with her husband, two sons, a dog, and two neurotic cats.