Ambition is a good thing, but too much of it can cause problems. You need ambition to be successful, but if you have too much, it can derail your career. This guidebook will help you determine whether you have a problem with ambition. You will gain a fuller understanding of its basic drivers: the need for competence, the need for achievement, and the need for rewards. You will learn how these drivers can affect your work, and you will learn strategies for managing them.

Ambition is a good thing, but too much of it can cause problems. You need ambition to be successful, but if you have too much, it can derail your career. This guidebook will help you determine whether you have a problem with ambition. You will gain a fuller understanding of its basic drivers: the need for competence, the need for achievement, and the need for rewards. You will learn how these drivers can affect your work, and you will learn strategies for managing them. Each of the drivers has identifi able components. The need for competence, for example, has three components: superiority, competitiveness, and pride. The exercises in this guidebook will help you identify which components could be a problem for you and prioritize your efforts in addressing them. You will also be encouraged to seek ongoing feedback from others and to observe and learn from how other leaders deal with their ambition. With this guidebook, you can learn to understand and manage your ambition so that it won't derail your career but will contribute to your efforts to achieve personal and organizational success.

In this wise and profound book, a noted social psychologist draws on the latest research and theory on human development and, illustrating with arresting real life examplesfrom love and marriage, the workplace and careers, sports and games, and moreshows how we deal with winning and losing in our personal lives.

Meeting the new standard for leadership. Higher Ambition is required reading for every leader who refuses to compromise between people and performance. Choosing one or the other may have worked in the past, but it won’t work now. As global competition stiffens and businesses face increased public scrutiny and renewed government regulation, leaders must win on all fronts—with their people, their customers, their communities, and their shareholders. In short, they must deliver superior economic and social value. Brimming with powerful stories and thoughtful advice from CEOs themselves, Higher Ambition equips leaders with the practical insights they need to meet this new and higher standard. The authors, an international team of experts from leading business schools and consultancies, offer a unique view into the minds of some of the most successful and insightful leaders of our time: CEOs from vanguard companies around the world that have demonstrated the distinctive ability to do good while also doing well. These organizations are as diverse as Standard Chartered Bank, Infosys, Volvo, Cummins, IKEA, the Tata Group, and Campbell’s Soup. Readers will learn the principles and practices these pioneering leaders are using to: • Build enduring enterprises that simultaneously solve for people and profits • Forge winning strategies that leverage their companies’ unique cultural and human capabilities • Dramatically raise the aspirations and ambitions of their people • Energize and align their diverse global firms • Relentlessly upgrade leadership capabilities throughout their organizations Drawing on the author team’s extensive research and in-depth interviews with successful leaders from around the globe, this provocative new book is poised to become a management classic in the tradition of In Search of Excellence and Built to Last.

Ambition needs to be rescued and put to work for God's glory. This book will encourage and embolden believers to pursue their dreams with a godly ambition that seeks more for God and from God.

Ambition is a good thing, but too much of it can cause problems. You need ambition to be successful, but if you have too much, it can derail your career. With this guidebook, you can learn to understand and manage your ambition so that it won?t derail your career but will contribute to your efforts to achieve personal and organizational success.

How do you become highly successful—while living a fulfilling life and growing as a person? Most ambitious people struggle in at least one of these areas, yet they feel they don’t have the tools to improve their situation. Return on Ambition is the culmination of an ambitious effort to harness insights from recent research in psychology and neuroscience to help people pursue their ambitions more fruitfully. The result is a radical and holistic approach to achievement, growth, and well-being that includes: • The Return on Ambition Self-Assessment: instructive, clear measures of how well you are currently doing in getting the return you aspire to • The Trinity of Achievement, Growth, and Well-Being: research and wisdom that show that compromises in any of these three elements will cause declines in the others over time • The 7 Frenemies: descriptions of personal attributes that are your core strengths as an ambitious person, but that can also be the biggest obstacles to your success and fulfillment in life • The Return on Ambition Toolbox: 4 tools that will help you articulate and pursue your ambition, expand your self-awareness, and help you learn consciously • 4 Self-Coaching Sessions: instructions for 30–60-minute contemplations inspired by thought-provoking questions Nielsen and Tillisch have tried-and-tested experience inside the world of grand ambitions. This means that readers will find not only concepts brought to life with rich interviews and stories, but also two authors who inherently understand their audience. Nicolai Chen Nielsen is an associate partner at McKinsey & Company, where he advises clients on leadership development, culture change, and agile transformations. He is the co-author of Leadership at Scale and has published several articles on personal development. He is currently based in New York with his wife, Samira, and their two dogs, Napoleon and Caesar. Nicolai Tillisch works with Cultivating Leadership, the global coaching firm, and is a co-founder of Deliberate Development, the venture behind the StepUpYourDay software solution. He has been a consultant with McKinsey & Company and was an executive with DDB Worldwide, Hutchison, and Nokia Siemens Networks. Nicolai lives with his wife Ida and their children, Margaux and Axel, in Denmark.