The Leader's Brain


Book Description

Leadership is a set of abilities with which a lucky few are born. They're the natural relationship builders, master negotiators and persuaders, and agile and strategic thinkers. The good news for the rest of us is that those abilities can be developed. In The Leader's Brain, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative director Michael Platt explains how.




The Cognitive Leader


Book Description

Challenges for leaders today are myriad and often seem overwhelmingly complex, but solutions begin with basics such as understanding how to: acquire needed competitive knowledge and capital, use knowledge to produce lasting results, build an organization that is aligned with mission, and improve decision-making. This book describes the process of knowledge leadership and highlights effective tools for all leaders to be successful.




New Approaches to Effective Leadership


Book Description

This book presents a new theory of leadership and management. It provides a clearer understanding of why leaders are effective, the specific characteristics of a good leader, and how to increase effectiveness of leaders and their organizations. It incorporates such elements as the leader's personality, situational factors and stress, leader behavior, and the cognitive resource variables of intelligence, technical knowledge and skills and experience. The conditions under which leaders should be directive or nondirective in order to have an efficiently running group are also looked at.




Leader Thinking Skills


Book Description

This book examines the various thinking skills that leaders may need to find success in contemporary organizations and institutions, covering a wide array of skills that are held to be important by key leadership scholars. Bridging theory and practice, chapters summarize major findings with respect to a particular ability, knowledge, or skill, providing theoretical frameworks for understanding how these contribute to leader emergence and performance, and considering implications for leader selection, assessment, and development. The text appraises the existing research on the critical cognitive capabilities that underlie leader problem-solving and implications for the assessment and development of leadership potential in real-world settings. The role of creative thinking skills on leader performance is also addressed, bearing on the importance of processes such as problem definition and idea generation, but also using constraints to potentially stimulate creative thought. With contributions from some of the most eminent scholars working in the field of leadership, this book will be in invaluable resource to academics, researchers, graduate students, and professionals interested in leadership and leader skills, I/O psychology, and business management.




The Entrepreneur as Business Leader


Book Description

The governance regime of cognitive leadership, its attractive co-operative features, and the challenges it faces in the process of organizational growth are the topic of Silke Scheer s fascinating study. . . To explore the mutual contingencies of socially shared cognitive frames, social models of task commitment, and work motivation at the empirical level is no easy task. . . her study highlights the practical relevance of the cognitive leadership regime and the characteristic motivational features on which it draws that are widely neglected in the modern theory of the firm. From the foreword by Ulrich Witt We finally have an analysis of management leadership which resolves tensions and brings theory and evidence together in a thoroughly convincing manner. This book shows how effective management leaders can build successful teams, based on commitment and loyalty, by a combination of careful recruitment, selective retention and inspirational empowerment. This significant advance in the literature merits serious attention from economists, psychologists and management scholars interested in the performance of firms. Mark Casson, University of Reading, UK An entrepreneur who decides to found a firm and to hire employees has to tackle two central problems: their employees coordination and motivation. Drawing on findings from cognitive, social and organizational psychology, this book sheds new light on the relevance of bounded rationality and social learning in the process of leadership. Silke Scheer bridges some of the missing links that can be identified within the theory of cognitive leadership and demonstrates how its scope can be broadened by investigating group level processes, and how they can have an impact on the socialization of newcomers. Combining both theoretical and empirical explorations, this book will be of great significance to anyone from a managerial or psychological background that is interested in leadership. Academics and students on business, management and entrepreneurship courses will also find this book invaluable.




The Leadership Brain For Dummies


Book Description

Discover how scientific knowledge of the brain can make you a better leader Based upon the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience and advances in brain-based education, Leadership Brain For Dummies gives you the edge to influence, lead, and transform any team or organization. Drawing concrete connections between the growing scientific knowledge of the brain and leadership, this book gives you the skills to assess your strengths and weaknesses as a leader, adopt a style of leadership that suits your characteristics, determine the learning styles of individual employees, and conduct training sessions that can physically change brains. The author is an international educational neuroscience consultant and an adjunct professor, teaching brain-compatible strategies and memory courses. She is a member of the American Academy of Neurology, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the Learning and Brain Society Leadership Brain For Dummies provides practical, hands-on guidance for applying the information to make you a better leader The Leadership Brain For Dummies positions current and aspiring leaders to be at the very top of their leadership game.




A First-Rate Madness


Book Description

The New York Times bestseller “A glistening psychological history, faceted largely by the biographies of eight famous leaders . . .” —The Boston Globe “A provocative thesis . . . Ghaemi’s book deserves high marks for original thinking.” —The Washington Post “Provocative, fascinating.” —Salon.com Historians have long puzzled over the apparent mental instability of great and terrible leaders alike: Napoleon, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, and others. In A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center, offers a myth-shattering exploration of the powerful connections between mental illness and leadership and sets forth a controversial, compelling thesis: The very qualities that mark those with mood disorders also make for the best leaders in times of crisis. From the importance of Lincoln's "depressive realism" to the lackluster leadership of exceedingly sane men as Neville Chamberlain, A First-Rate Madness overturns many of our most cherished perceptions about greatness and the mind.




Thinking, Fast and Slow


Book Description

Major New York Times bestseller Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012 Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011 A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year One of The Wall Street Journal's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.




Leadership and Coherence


Book Description

Leadership and Coherence investigates how leaders justify their decisions, and how they bring about coherence amongst followers. Taking a cognitive approach, it builds on the work of Hannah Arendt to attempt a phenomenology of judgment, examining how the moral imperative experienced by leaders can be shared by their community so both leader and led are guided by a mutual purpose. Through biographical case studies of historical leaders, this book illustrates how successful leaders operate in a turbulent world, not only making their own decisions but also gathering likeminded followers to share in a common vision and shared sense of purpose.




Cognitive Coaching


Book Description

In this greatly expanded and extensively updated edition of a widely popular resource you see how teachers' individual and collective capacities for continuing self-improvement are strengthened over time through Cognitive Coaching. You gain essential skills, protocols, guidance, research and resources to use when implementing Cognitive Coaching principles and values in your own school setting. Working toward the goals of making school better places where more students succeed and satisfaction in learning and teaching prevail, Costa and Garmston let you know about their own learning, and how new research and practice can support individuals and schools in reaching higher, more satisfying, and more holistic performance. Organized into four sections, the book clearly and effectively presents these concepts: the meanings of cognitive coaching; the basics of teaching excellence; strategies and tactics for engaging in coaching; and how to integrate Cognitive Coaching throughout the system.