BEING! FIVE WAYS OF LEADING AUTHENTICALLY IN ICONNECT WORLD

The second decade of the new millennium has reinforced the calculus of limited and unpredictable business life spans, and demonstrated through many high-profile examples that a track record of sustained success, demonstrable franchise, valuable brand equity, happy customers, and a strong balance sheet are insufficient protection against market failure. The body of evidence and available empirical analyses make a compelling case that businesses have limited life spans because adaptiveness remains a fundamental problem for organisations. This is unfortunate given the significant benefits that business longevity has for all its stakeholders. Such longevity is predicated however on the speed and effectiveness of the business's engagement with its constantly changing environment - ; an abiding source of many of its existential challenges. Adaptive and resilient responses to the complex problems of relentless organisational renewal in prevailing conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity are the keys to demarcating the quick from the dead. Scholars and practitioners alike must rethink leadership, to conflate its doctrinal definitions, and extend them far beyond the domain's preoccupations with dominance, influence, and relationships. Unfamiliar challenges demand a novel response: leadership's futures mindset for zeitgeist adaptiveness. This book describes a new and augmented leadership repertoire for such a zeitgeist mindset. Its arguments are situated at the intersection of many disciplines; management, psychology, neuroscience, and intercultural learning. It draws on many traditions; social construction, contemplative practice, strength-based perspectives, experiential learning, and action science. It conceptualises leadership as a virtuous undertaking; five ways of being that incorporate practices and actions that lead to human flourishing.