Charles already is burned out from the challenge and many difficulties that accompany his position as a chimp executive officer when Cliff, his chimp information officer, starts swinging at the top of the conference room vine during a staff meeting. In that moment, Charles knows he has lost control. After yet another draining meeting, frustrations and insecurities about his leadership style and responsibilities lead Charles to wander off and eventually end up in North Forest. After he is welcomed by both the gorilla community and Gregory, their wise silverback leader, Charles begins observing, re?ecting, and learning not only from the gorillas, but also from the events taking place around him. While discovering how to lead more deliberately, demonstrate accountability, and ask the right questions, Charles encounters a branch chief, pumps wood at the fitness center, and learns how a neighboring tribe of elephants managed to partner with the gorilla community. Leading in the Jungle shares the amusing and insightful fable of a chimp's lofty quest to lead like a gorilla as he embarks on an unforgettable journey through a forest filled with powerful leadership lessons.
Charles already is burned out from the challenge and many difficulties that accompany his position as a chimp executive officer when Cliff, his chimp information officer, starts swinging at the top of the conference room vine during a staff meeting. In that moment, Charles knows he has lost control. After yet another draining meeting, frustrations and insecurities about his leadership style and responsibilities lead Charles to wander off and eventually end up in North Forest. After he is welcomed by both the gorilla community and Gregory, their wise silverback leader, Charles begins observing, re?ecting, and learning not only from the gorillas, but also from the events taking place around him. While discovering how to lead more deliberately, demonstrate accountability, and ask the right questions, Charles encounters a branch chief, pumps wood at the fitness center, and learns how a neighboring tribe of elephants managed to partner with the gorilla community. Leading in the Jungle shares the amusing and insightful fable of a chimps lofty quest to lead like a gorilla as he embarks on an unforgettable journey through a forest filled with powerful leadership lessons.
This book describes a new model of leadership – the Leadership-Map –, that helps executive managers to navigate the intricacies and complexity of their executive functions. From her 20 years of experience Ruth Seliger has learned that leadership is more a question of organization than personality, which is why established ideas of what to do or not to do as an executive are short-sighted and often misleading. The introductory part of the book outlines the specific dilemmas and challenges of leadership and establishes a basis in systems theory. This is followed by a presentation of the main dimensions of leadership according to the Leadership-Map: practice, profession and process of leadership. Finally, the author points out the latest developments in Positive Leadership. Like a good map, the book is very practice and reader-oriented: numerous case examples, many charts, exercises and tests present a vivid image of the complex material.
"Your Mindful Compass" takes us behind the emotional curtain to see the mechanisms regulating individuals in social systems. There is great comfort and wisdom in knowing we can increase our awareness to manage the swift and ancient mechanisms of social control. We can gain greater flexibility by seeing how social controls work in systems from ants to humans. To be less controlled by others, we learn how emotional systems influence our relationship-oriented brain. People want to know what goes on in families that give rise to amazing leaders and/or terrorists. For the first time in history we can understand the systems in which we live. The social sciences have been accumulating knowledge since the early fifties as to how we are regulated by others. S. Milgram, S. Ashe, P. Zimbardo and J. Calhoun, detail the vulnerability to being duped and deceived and the difficulty of cooperating when values differ. Murray Bowen, M.D., the first researcher to observe several live-in families, for up to three years, at the National Institute of Mental Health. Describing how family members overly influence one another and distribute stress unevenly, Bowen described both how symptoms and family leaders emerge in highly stressed families. Our brain is not organized to automatically perceive that each family has an emotional system, fine-tuned by evolution and "valuing" its survival as a whole, as much as the survival of any individual. It is easier to see this emotional system function in ants or mice but not in humans. The emotional system is organized to snooker us humans: encouraging us to take sides, run away from others, to pressure others, to get sick, to blame others, and to have great difficulty in seeing our part in problems. It is hard to see that we become anxious, stressed out and even that we are difficult to deal with. But "thinking systems" can open the doors of perception, allowing us to experience the world in a different way. This book offers both coaching ideas and stories from leaders as to strategies to break out from social control by de-triangling, using paradoxes, reversals and other types of interruptions of highly linked emotional processes. Time is needed to think clearly about the automatic nature of the two against one triangle. Time and experience is required as we learn strategies to put two people together and get self outside the control of the system. In addition, it takes time to clarify and define one's principles, to know what "I" will or will not do and to be able to take a stand with others with whom we are very involved. The good news is that systems' thinking is possible for anyone. It is always possible for an individual to understand feelings and to integrate them with their more rational brains. In so doing, an individual increases his or her ability to communicate despite misunderstandings or even rejection from important others. The effort involved in creating your Mindful Compass enables us to perceive the relationship system without experiencing it's threats. The four points on the Mindful Compass are: 1) Action for Self, 2) Resistance to Forward Progress, 3) Knowledge of Social Systems and the 4) The Ability to Stand Alone. Each gives us a view of the process one enters when making an effort to define a self and build an emotional backbone. It is not easy to find our way through the social jungle. The ability to know emotional systems well enough to take a position for self and to become more differentiated is part of the natural way humans cope with pressure. Now people can use available knowledge to build an emotional backbone, by thoughtfully altering their part in the relationship system. No one knows how far one can go by making an effort to be more of a self-defined individual in relationships to others. Through increasing emotional maturity, we can find greater individual freedom at the same time that we increase our ability to cooperate and to be close to others.
Adam, the lion in charge of Rainbow needs to fi nd a leader for Red, one of his regional operations. Following traditional models, he brings in various leaders from outside the community. After they each fail, he looks inside the Red community for local talent. There he learns that the usual models may not work and other options can be successful.
"When Bird mixes up something Turtle says, he accidentally starts a rumor about the watering hole drying up. One misunderstanding leads to another, with animals making their own hilarious assumptions. No one is hearing anything right, and soon the animals are in an uproar from one end of the jungle to the other ... Beard's story will have every child wondering if peace can ever be restored in the animal kingdom."--
Flying P-38s, Jerry Johnson shot down 24 aircraft in 265 combat missions in the Pacific theater. At the age of only twenty-four, he commanded the highest-scoring fighter group in the Pacific. Tragically, though Johnson had survived three combat tours, which included a mid-air collision with a Japanese aircraft and being shot down by friendly fire, the new father disappeared without a trace while flying a courier mission one month after the war’s end.
