Confucius on Leadership


Book Description

Few things are more important than the quality and credibility of leaders, as they play a vital role in every aspect of our modern lives. Yet strong leadership is a difficult skill to master. Good leaders must learn not only to manage, analyse and appraise, but also to encourage, improve and inspire. Here, John Adair, the celebrated expert on leadership training, shows how Confucian philosophy can help you become a better leader. He demonstrates how, far from merely being interesting ideas from centuries ago, Confucius's sayings, or Analects, will help you to develop the confidence, characteristics and skills you need to be the best leader you can be.




The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership


Book Description

Political leadership has made a comeback. It was studied intensively not only by political scientists but also by political sociologists and psychologists, Sovietologists, political anthropologists, and by scholars in comparative and development studies from the 1940s to the 1970s. Thereafter, the field lost its way with the rise of structuralism, neo-institutionalism, and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, government, and governance. Recently, however, students of politics have returned to studying the role of individual leaders and the exercise of leadership to explain political outcomes. The list of topics is nigh endless: elections, conflict management, public policy, government popularity, development, governance networks, and regional integration. In the media age, leaders are presented and stage-managed--spun--DDLas the solution to almost every social problem. Through the mass media and the Internet, citizens and professional observers follow the rise, impact, and fall of senior political officeholders at closer quarters than ever before. This Handbook encapsulates the resurgence by asking, where are we today? It orders the multidisciplinary field by identifying the distinct and distinctive contributions of the disciplines. It meets the urgent need to take stock. It brings together scholars from around the world, encouraging a comparative perspective, to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the major disciplines, methods, and regions. It showcases both the normative and empirical traditions in political leadership studies, and juxtaposes behavioural, institutional, and interpretive approaches. It covers formal, office-based as well as informal, emergent political leadership, and in both democratic and undemocratic polities.




Virtuous Leadership


Book Description

Drawing on the lives of some of the greatest political, intellectual and religious leaders of modern times, and the author’s personal experience, Virtuous Leadership demonstrates that leadership and virtue are not only compatible, they are actually synonymous. Virtuous Leadership defines each of the classical human virtues most essential to leadership – magnanimity, humility, prudence, courage, self-control and justice. It demonstrates how these virtues promote personal transformation and the attainment of self-fulfillment. It also considers the Christian supernatural virtues of faith, hope and charity without which no study of leadership can be complete. The book’s final section, Towards Victory, offers a methodology for the achievement of interior growth tailored to the needs of busy, professional people intent on imbuing their lives with a transcendent purpose. Thus, the aim of Virtuous Leadership is ultimately practical. It is meant to be your guidebook in the quest for excellence.







Confucianism


Book Description

This volume shows the influence of the Sage's teachings over the course of Chinese history--on state ideology, the civil service examination system, imperial government, the family, and social relations--and the fate of Confucianism in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as China developed alongside a modernizing West and Japan. Some Chinese intellectuals attempted to reform the Confucian tradition to address new needs; others argued for jettisoning it altogether in favor of Western ideas and technology; still others condemned it angrily, arguing that Confucius and his legacy were responsible for China's feudal, ''backward'' conditions in the twentieth century and launching campaigns to eradicate its influences. Yet Chinese continue to turn to the teachings of Confucianism for guidance in their daily lives.




Shu King


Book Description

The Book of Documents, Shu King, is one of the Five Classics of ancient Chinese literature. It is a collection of rhetorical prose attributed to figures of ancient China, and served as the foundation of Chinese political philosophy for over 2,000 years.




Zero Distance


Book Description

"When Danah Zohar first published the early ideas of her Quantum Management Theory in the late 1990's, she articulated a new paradigm, inspired by quantum physics, and began a major contribution to our search for a new management theory that can replace outdated Taylorism. Now, in ZERO DISTANCE, the most comprehensive account of her project, she outlines how the theory has been implemented through the revolutionary RenDanHeyi business model of China's Haier Group, and subsequently several other large companies. Zohar's suggestion that the Haier model also offers a new social and political model is thought provoking. This book is a significant addition to our continuing conversation about the best way to manage companies and other human social systems. I recommend it highly." - Gary Hamel, London Business School, Author of Humanocracy This open access book offers a new management meta-theory to replace Taylorism. It presents a new paradigm in management thinking and a new, practical organizational model for implementing it in our personal and working lives, in our companies, in our communities and nations, and in a sustainable global order. It will offer an understanding of why and how "thinking-as-usual" is failing both business and political leaders in these new times, and it will advocate new thinking and new management practices that are so radically new that they turn everything we have taken for granted inside out and upside down. This new management model is called "Quantum Management Theory", because it is rooted in the new paradigm bequeathed to us by quantum physics and its younger sibling, complexity science. Danah Zohar is a physicist, philosopher, and management thought leader. She is a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management and a Visiting Professor at the China Academy of Art.




Confucius


Book Description

"For more than two thousand years, Confucius (551- 479 B.C.) has been a fundamental part of China's history. His influence as a moral thinker remains powerful to this day. Yet despite his fame and the perennial interest in his life and teachings, Confucius the man has been elusive, and no definitive biography has emerged. In this book, the scholar and writer Annping Chin negotiates centuries of reconstructions, guess-work, and numerous Chinese texts in order to establish an absorbing and original account of the thinker's life and legacy. [In this book] Chin brings the historical Confucius within reach so that he can lead us into his idea of the moral and explain his timeless teachings on family and politics, culture and learning. Confucius is the culmination of years of research, a book that makes an important and fascinating contribution to biography and Chinese history." -- Book cover.




Confucius


Book Description

A beautifully illustrated biography of a man whose philosophy shaped the course of Chinese history: the great teacher Confucius.




Sensual Austerity and Moral Leadership


Book Description

This book examines the link between sensual austerity and moral leadership—a topic largely neglected in contemporary academic scholarship and public policy—by exploring the comparative cross-cultural perspectives of Plato, Confucius, and Gandhi, on this theme. Despite the diverse cultural contexts that gave rise to their respective philosophical perspectives, they shared similar views on what might constitute a universal and perennial basis for individual moral development in any harmonious political order. They all agreed that sensual austerity is necessary for the realization of a flourishing society and political culture: recognizing that control over sensual desire is both a vehicle for individual moral self-cultivation and social-political progress. Sensual austerity is thus an essential aspect of any morally governed person, institution, state, or society. The book also argues that further examination of this theme may assist scholars and policymakers in developing more peaceful and harmonious national and global communities.