What Philosophy Can Teach You About Being a Better Leader

Alison Reynolds, Jules Goddard, Dominic Houlder, David Lewis

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780749493165
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749493172
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

For decades, we have looked to management theorists, organizational psychologists and economists to tell us how we can squeeze the most out of people at work. The result? People are uninspired, feel like cogs in a machine and prefer to leave traditional work structures behind. Numbers and productivity can only get you so far.

What Philosophy Can Teach You About Being a Better Leader offers a different route that will allow you to reconnect with the humanist values of work. By turning to philosophy, and what it teaches us about finding fulfilment and living a good life, this book uncovers the ways you can re-engage your workforce by valuing its members as people, rather than just tools within the process.

The four authors argue that the rise of the 'omnipotent leader', who focuses on telling rather than leading, risks creating a new generation of feudal CEOs and needs to be resisted. With the help of Aristotle, Socrates, Kant and Nietzsche, as well as a whole host of other brilliant minds, they turn traditional management practices on their head, showing how moving away from traditional, hierarchical, risk focused control structures can lead to improved employee engagement, increased productivity and better outcomes for the entire business.

INDEX

3E model 97

360-degree feedback 35, 117

abandonment 200–01

Ackoff, Russell 74

adaptability 108, 120

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) 182

agreement 155

Alibaba 194

alienation 3–8, 13

all-purpose remedies 179–80

Amazon 4

Ambler, Tim 77

anguish 200–01

animal spirits 28–30

annual engagement surveys 143–46

anxiety 127–28

Apple 51

applications processing department problem 105

Apprenticeshop, The 39–40

Argentinian red wine 50–51, 59

Aristotle 9, 21–22, 25–30, 38–39, 41, 89, 173

ARM 51

asymmetric knowledge 62–64

attunement states 19

authority 191–92

collapse of moral authority 32–33

and empowerment 11, 101–22

as a gift 11, 106–09, 110, 121

Hobbes 11, 101, 103, 109, 110–13

Kant 11, 101, 103, 109, 113–17

autonomous will 115, 189–90

Axial Age 48

Bacon, Francis 71

banking 52

Barings Bank 27–28

investment bank’s values statement 166–67, 170

bargaining power 45–48

Barings Bank 27–28

Barnevik, Percy 178–79

being 159, 160

and seeming 152, 155

Berkshire Hathaway 64

Berlin, Isaiah 12, 170, 174–76

biases 135–36

Black, Sir James 85

blunders, government 75–76

body–mind separation 161–62

bold conjectures 74, 75

bonuses 182

Bragg, Sir Lawrence 84

breakfast meetings 104

Buber, Martin 12, 143, 150–51, 152, 156

Buddha, Gautama 9–10, 48–53, 54–55, 56

Buffett, Warren 64–66, 70

business schools 1, 16–17

buy-in 18, 148–49

see also engagement

buzzword bingo 43

capital markets 60–70

asymmetric knowledge 62–64

lessons from 70

market inefficiency 64–65

Soros and human fallibility 67–69

cascade of curated information 124–25

Casson, Mark 73

categorical imperative 114–18, 171, 198

and leadership 115–18

category mistakes 66–67

Cavendish Laboratory 84–88, 92

ce...

Table of contents

• About the authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The dehumanized workplace
• 01 Who can reconnect us with our dreams?
• 02 Reason and passion in the humanized workplace
• 03 Humanizing strategy
• 04 Creativity and critical thinking
• 05 A question of example and fairness
• 06 The gift of authority
• 07 Meaning and communication
• 08 From engagement to encounter
• 09 Values and ethical pluralism
• 10 The freedom to do what you can
• Index