Using scores of real-world examples and practical exercises, this book helps leaders find a truly authentic purpose, and describes concrete actions leaders can take to ensure that employees own it, customers and recruits connect with it, and every corporate action and activity reflects it. --

How Good Leaders Create Engagement and Competitive Advantage in an Age of Social Good We're in the midst of a purpose revolution. Customers, employees, and investors are making it clear that they want companies to do more than provide good products, good prospects, and good profits - they want companies to do some social good too. Ironically, as this extremely timely book demonstrates, purpose-driven companies do better on nearly every traditional metric: greater customer loyalty, higher retention, more innovation, and a healthier bottom line. But how do you become a purpose-driven company? Just crafting an inspiring new mission statement and starting a CSR program won't cut it, says John Izzo, who predicted the purpose revolution in his 1994 book Awakening Corporate Soul. Purpose must pervade every part of your organization. In this thoroughly researched hands-on guide, Izzo and Jeff Vanderwielen provide a tool kit for deeply embedding purpose into your leadership and organizational culture. Using scores of real-world examples and practical exercises, Izzo and Vanderwielen help leaders find a truly authentic purpose, one that is a natural fit for them and their organization. They describe concrete actions leaders can take to ensure that employees own it, customers and recruits connect with it, and every corporate action and activity reflects it. They show leaders how to avoid common pitfalls on the path to purpose and how to use purpose to guide all their decision making. In an increasingly crowded economic landscape, purpose gives you a powerful competitive advantage. But it does more than that. Finding and communicating an inspiring purpose will revitalize the entire organization, top to bottom. Purpose makes business more rewarding in every sense.

Discover the Purpose Advantage! Customers, employees, and investors are no longer satisfied with companies providing good products, good prospects, and good profits—they want them to do some social good, too. These “purpose-driven” companies do better on nearly every traditional metric: greater customer loyalty, higher retention, more innovation, and a healthier bottom line. But a nice mission statement and donations to charity won't make your company stand out. Using scores of real-world examples and practical exercises, John Izzo and Jeff Vanderwielen help leaders find a truly authentic purpose, one that is a natural fit for them and their organization. They describe concrete actions leaders can take to ensure that employees own it, customers and recruits connect with it, and every corporate action and activity reflects it.

This book claims that CSR is the Tao of sustainable enterprise development. It examines the intersection of practical wisdom of Taoism, CSR and Sustainability, looking at the theoretical and historical implications associated with a Taoist approach to CSR, sustainability and responsible leadership. Implications for sustainable enterprise development will be presented. The book analyzes perspectives found in Taoist classical texts and within the larger Chinese cultural context in order to delineate key issues found in the classical texts. Through these analyses, the book assesses the applicability of modern-day Taoism thought and practice in China and the West with respect to the contemporary sustainability situation. The book also explores the values, ideas and practices Taoism offers to inspire a new generation of leaders, and particularly business leaders to manage companies in a more social and sustainable way.

The entrance of fast-paced technology into the workplace necessitates a proper re-look into performance management whether it is in education, marketing, finance, or information technology. Maintaining happiness and wellbeing despite the pressure of performance at work is a serious challenge. Happiness is not only important for work performance, but also for the physical and mental health of human beings. This book provides different concepts, theories, and methods to better understand the relationship between performance and happiness in the context of work in this information and technology era. Various domains of performance management are covered in the context of management and information technology, including topics related to the performance of digital wallets from the customer's point of view; evaluating the sustainability of micro-finance institutions; challenges in employee retention; problems the workforce faces in IT and management; dimensions of happiness for women in the workplace; the role of happiness in building a meaningful life; and the quality of work life. The findings are useful for practical applications in management and business scenarios. They also provide informative insights for researchers, academicians, industry professionals, and scholars.

It is an old cliché that leading and managing academics is like herding cats. This book challenges this myth and presents a way to deal with the many challenges of academic leadership, from managing departments, research groups and teams to managing tensions between research and teaching. The book is a practical and stimulating guide to different pathways to successful academic leadership, both in personal and organizational terms.