Higher Ambition


Book Description

Meeting the new standard for leadership. Higher Ambition is required reading for every leader who refuses to compromise between people and performance. Choosing one or the other may have worked in the past, but it won’t work now. As global competition stiffens and businesses face increased public scrutiny and renewed government regulation, leaders must win on all fronts—with their people, their customers, their communities, and their shareholders. In short, they must deliver superior economic and social value. Brimming with powerful stories and thoughtful advice from CEOs themselves, Higher Ambition equips leaders with the practical insights they need to meet this new and higher standard. The authors, an international team of experts from leading business schools and consultancies, offer a unique view into the minds of some of the most successful and insightful leaders of our time: CEOs from vanguard companies around the world that have demonstrated the distinctive ability to do good while also doing well. These organizations are as diverse as Standard Chartered Bank, Infosys, Volvo, Cummins, IKEA, the Tata Group, and Campbell’s Soup. Readers will learn the principles and practices these pioneering leaders are using to: • Build enduring enterprises that simultaneously solve for people and profits • Forge winning strategies that leverage their companies’ unique cultural and human capabilities • Dramatically raise the aspirations and ambitions of their people • Energize and align their diverse global firms • Relentlessly upgrade leadership capabilities throughout their organizations Drawing on the author team’s extensive research and in-depth interviews with successful leaders from around the globe, this provocative new book is poised to become a management classic in the tradition of In Search of Excellence and Built to Last.




Ambition, A History


Book Description

Is “ambitious” a compliment? It depends: “[A] masterpiece of intellectual and cultural history.”—David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World From rags to riches, log house to White House, enslaved to liberator, ghetto to CEO, ambition fuels the American Dream. Yet at the time of the nation's founding, ambition was viewed as a dangerous vice, everything from “a canker on the soul” to the impetus for original sin. This engaging book explores ambition’s surprising transformation, tracing attitudes from classical antiquity to early modern Europe to the New World and America’s founding. From this broad historical perspective, William Casey King deepens our understanding of the American mythos and offers a striking reinterpretation of the introduction to the Declaration of Independence. Through an innovative array of sources and authors—Aquinas, Dante, Machiavelli, the Geneva Bible, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, and many others—King demonstrates that a transformed view of ambition became possible the moment Europe realized that Columbus had discovered not a new route but a new world. In addition the author argues that reconstituting ambition as a virtue was a necessary precondition of the American republic. The book suggests that even in the twenty-first century, ambition has never fully lost its ties to vice and continues to exhibit a dual nature—positive or negative depending upon the ends, the means, and the individual involved.




Justice and the Capabilities Approach


Book Description

The capabilities approach is a widely influential alternative theory of justice, popularized by Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen and also by Martha Nussbaum. Justice and the Capabilities Approach is the first work of its kind to publish in one place the most influential essays in the field covering a number of topics, including constitutional law, cosmopolitanism, distributive justice, the family, feminism, global justice, human rights, poverty, and social justice. The collection should help inform both scholars and students coming to the study of the capabilities approach for the first time of both the importance and complexity of the wider debate, as well as shed light on how the approach might be further improved and applied.




Value and Values


Book Description

The most pressing issues of the twenty-first century—climate change and persistent hunger in a world of food surpluses, to name only two—are not problems that can be solved from within individual disciplines, nation-states, or cultural perspectives. They are predicaments that can only be resolved by generating sustained and globally robust coordination across value systems. The scale of the problems and necessity for coordinated global solutions signal a world historical transit as momentous as the Industrial Revolution: a transition from the predominance of technical knowledge to that of ethical deliberation. This volume brings together leading thinkers from around the world to deliberate on how best to correlate worth (value) with what is worthwhile (values), pairing human prosperity with personal, environmental, and spiritual flourishing in a world of differing visions of what constitutes a moral life. Especially in the aftermath of what is now being called the Great Recession, awareness has mounted of the imperative to question the modern divorce of economics from ethics. While the domains of economics and ethics were from antiquity through at least the eighteenth century understood in many cultures to be coterminous and mutually entailing, the modern assumption has been that the goal of maximizing human prosperity and the aim of justly enhancing our lives as persons and as communities were functionally and practically distinct. Working from a wide array of perspectives, the contributors to this volume offer a set of challenges to the assumed independence of the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of human and planetary well-being. Reflecting on the complex interrelationship among economics, justice, and equity, the book resists "one size fits all" approaches and struggles to revitalize the marriage of economics and ethics by activating cultural differences as the basis of mutual contribution to shared human flourishing. The publication of this important collection will stimulate or extend critical debates among scholars and students working in a number of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including philosophy, history, environmental studies, economics, and law. Contributors: Roger T. Ames, James Behuniak Jr., Steve Bein, Nalini Bhushan, Purushottama Bilimoria, Steven Burik, Amita Chatterjee, Baoyan Cheng, Gordon Davis, Jay L. Garfield, Steven F. Geisz, Peter D. Hershock, Larry A. Hickman, Kathleen M. Higgins, Heidi M. Hurd, Thomas P. Kasulis, Workineh Kelbessa, Lori Keleher, Oliver Leaman, James McRae, Jin Y. Park, James Peterman, Naoko Saito, May Sim, Robert Smid, Paul Standish, Kenneth W. Stikkers, Karsten J. Struhl, Meera Sushila Viswanathan, Wu Shiu- Ching, Xu Di, T. Yamauchi, Yang Liuxin




Return on Ambition


Book Description

How do you become highly successful—while living a fulfilling life and growing as a person? Most ambitious people struggle in at least one of these areas, yet they feel they don’t have the tools to improve their situation. Return on Ambition is the culmination of an ambitious effort to harness insights from recent research in psychology and neuroscience to help people pursue their ambitions more fruitfully. The result is a radical and holistic approach to achievement, growth, and well-being that includes: • The Return on Ambition Self-Assessment: instructive, clear measures of how well you are currently doing in getting the return you aspire to • The Trinity of Achievement, Growth, and Well-Being: research and wisdom that show that compromises in any of these three elements will cause declines in the others over time • The 7 Frenemies: descriptions of personal attributes that are your core strengths as an ambitious person, but that can also be the biggest obstacles to your success and fulfillment in life • The Return on Ambition Toolbox: 4 tools that will help you articulate and pursue your ambition, expand your self-awareness, and help you learn consciously • 4 Self-Coaching Sessions: instructions for 30–60-minute contemplations inspired by thought-provoking questions Nielsen and Tillisch have tried-and-tested experience inside the world of grand ambitions. This means that readers will find not only concepts brought to life with rich interviews and stories, but also two authors who inherently understand their audience. Nicolai Chen Nielsen is an associate partner at McKinsey & Company, where he advises clients on leadership development, culture change, and agile transformations. He is the co-author of Leadership at Scale and has published several articles on personal development. He is currently based in New York with his wife, Samira, and their two dogs, Napoleon and Caesar. Nicolai Tillisch works with Cultivating Leadership, the global coaching firm, and is a co-founder of Deliberate Development, the venture behind the StepUpYourDay software solution. He has been a consultant with McKinsey & Company and was an executive with DDB Worldwide, Hutchison, and Nokia Siemens Networks. Nicolai lives with his wife Ida and their children, Margaux and Axel, in Denmark.




Capabilities, Gender, Equality


Book Description

Questions of gender, injustice and equality pervade all our lives, and as such, the capabilities or 'human development' approach to understanding well-being and basic political entitlements continues to be debated. In this thought-provoking book, a range of authors provide unique reflections on the capabilities approach and, specifically, Martha C. Nussbaum's contributions to issues of gender, equality and political liberalism. Moreover, the authors tackle a broad range of development issues, including those of religion, ecological and environmental justice, social justice, child care, disability and poverty. This is the first book to examine Nussbaum's work in political philosophy in such depth, bringing together a group of distinguished experts with diverse disciplinary perspectives. It also features a unique contribution from Nussbaum herself, in which she offers reactions to the discussion and her latest thoughts on the capabilities approach. Capabilities, Gender, Equality will interest a wide range of readers and policymakers interested in new human development policies.




Capability Fuel


Book Description

Capability Fuel was written to provide its readers with the tools and habits that maximize human performance and generate momentum toward ideal outcomes. The author, Joel Puthoff, takes his readers on an introspective journey to uncover the challenges holding individuals back from accessing peak performance in areas of their life, while providing a manual for developing your most transformable capabilities, to manifest optimal progress. Capability Fuel offers wisdoms that have held true through generations of high performers and have recently been discovered through modern science and medicine. These wisdoms are directly connected to the core group of human capabilities that transcend performance forward toward intentional goals and experiences. Certain human capabilities are important at different times in an individuals journey, but there are a core group of capabilities that continue to be discussed and hold true through difficult and changing times. In Capability Fuel, you will learn about these core group of capabilities and how they are tied to the fuels and habits that propel human performance to achieve optimal outcomes. These Fuels review the Mental, Physical, Spiritual and Social Fuels and how they can work together to activate new momentum, and when implemented effectively through long-term routines, maximize human performance. Capability Fuel will offer you a manual for increasing your potential while increasing your performance. As you sharpen and increase your mental capabilities, you can more readily increase your performance in all areas of your life. Take the reins of your future and create the experiences and momentum for the life you desire to uncover. Capability Fuel is your guide for unlocking your ideal performance, by learning to implement a set of habits that is designed to fuel your most transcendent capabilities, no matter what challenges you're faced with. Get out of your comfort zone and pursue difficult objectives, just make sure you have this manual to maximize this journey! Learn, Implement, Master and use the Momentum you create, to fuel your next level of performance.




India's Naval Strategy and Asian Security


Book Description

This book examines India’s naval strategy within the context of Asian regional security. Amidst the intensifying geopolitical contestation in the waters of Asia, this book investigates the growing strategic salience of the Indian Navy. Delhi’s expanding economic and military strength has generated a widespread debate on India’s prospects for shaping the balance of power in Asia. This volume provides much needed texture to the abstract debate on India’s rise by focusing on the changing nature of India’s maritime orientation, the recent evolution of its naval strategy, and its emerging defence diplomacy. In tracing the drift of the Navy from the margins of Delhi’s national security consciousness to a central position, analysing the tension between its maritime possibilities and the continentalist mind set, and in examining the gap between the growing external demands for its security contributions and internal ambivalence, this volume offers rare insights into India’s strategic direction at a critical moment in the nation’s evolution. By examining the internal and external dimensions of the Indian naval future, both of which are in dynamic flux, the essays here help a deeper understanding of India’s changing international possibilities and its impact on Asian and global security. This book will be of much interest to students of naval strategy, Asian politics, security studies and IR, in general.




The International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru


Book Description

Why do leaders sometimes challenge, rather than accept, the international structures that surround their states? In The International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru, Andrew Kennedy answers this question through in-depth studies of Chinese foreign policy under Mao Zedong and Indian foreign policy under Jawaharlal Nehru. Drawing on international relations theory and psychological research, Kennedy offers a new theoretical explanation for bold leadership in foreign policy, one that stresses the beliefs that leaders develop about the 'national efficacy' of their states. He shows how this approach illuminates several of Mao and Nehru's most important military and diplomatic decisions, drawing on archival evidence and primary source materials from China, India, the United States and the United Kingdom. A rare blend of theoretical innovation and historical scholarship, The International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru is a fascinating portrait of how foreign policy decisions are made.




Over Ambitious and Over Demanding Parents


Book Description

Table of Contents Introduction Stress in Children What are we doing to our children? Positive and Negative Stress Knowledge Overload Psychosocial Stress Tips to Deal with Psychosocial Stress Odious Comparisons Subconscious Pressurization Children and Aptitude Conclusion Author Bio Publisher Introduction Since time immemorial, our parents have been our first friends, philosophers, guides, and caretakers. They have been our support and they have been the first medium to give us knowledge and encouragement. This book is all about the role of parents in shaping your destiny, especially when they play the part of your advisor, teacher and guide. On the other hand, this encouragement can become quite claustrophobic and pushing, especially when the parents are overly ambitious. A parent with a laissez-faire attitude who does not bother to discipline our guide his or her child is at one end of the scale. Along with him is the parent who in calculates negativism in his kids. On the other end of the scale is that one track minded parent who is living his life wholly through his children, and whose main ambition is to make a Superman and a Superwoman out of his very ordinary normal little child. Naturally, this is going to cause plenty of stress in the child, because he is going to try to live up to the expectations of the parents. Many times an over demanding parent has big plans for his firstborn, especially if he is a boy. The son is either going to carry on in his father’s footsteps , or he is going to be a trail Buster with his parents behind him. Let me give you one clear example of one of these overtly ambitious parents. Martina Hinges’ mother wanted to make a tennis player out of her daughter from day go itself. That is why the child was named Martina, after Martina Navratilova. That child was not allowed to do any other activity which would take her away from her regular tennis practice. Today Martina Hinges has retired from match early from professional tennis because of numerous injuries. I wonder what her family life is like, with her mother, harping about the sacrifices she made in order to make her daughter a world-class level tennis player. How many sacrifices on the altar of parental ambitions are suffering quietly out there? I know about many parents, who have decided that their children are going to be outstanding All- rounders and a pride to their parents. With avid zeal, I have seen these parents driven from one academic class and extracurricular activity to another. In this process, the children are being driven around the bend, trying to keep up with their parent’s expectations of them.