The Wise Advocate: The Inner Voice of Strategic Leadership (Columbia Business School Publishing)

Leadership is the habit of making good choices. Even in difficult and uncertain circumstances, the most effective leaders focus their attention and overcome entrenched patterns of behavior to push an organization to new heights of success. This capability is no fluke: the latest research on the brain shows that we can pinpoint the mental activity associated with it―and cultivate it for our benefit.

In this book, Art Kleiner, a strategy expert; Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist; and Josie Thomson, an executive coach, give a transformative explanation of how cutting-edge neuroscience can help business leaders set a course toward better management. Mapping the functions of a manager onto established patterns of mental activity, they identify crucial brain circuits and their parallels in organizational culture. Strategic leaders, they show, play the role of wise advocates: able to go beyond day-to-day transactional behavior to a longer-term, broader perspective that articulates their organization’s deeper purpose. True leaders can play this influencer role in an organization because they have cultivated similar self-reflective habits in their own minds. Providing a powerful guide to decision strategies and their consequences, The Wise Advocate helps managers find their own inner voice and then make that voice ring out loud and clear, with a four-step program for practice and catalytic implications for management strategy, executive education, and business results.

• You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life
• The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force
• Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change
• The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth
• Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen
• Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity
• Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds
• The Infinite Game
• The Art of Ideas: Creative Thinking for Work and Life (Columbia Business School Publishing)
• Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement