Develop the qualities of strategic leadership and become an active contributor to the short- and long-term success of your organization Today's organizations face two daunting challenges: 1. How to create new sources of competitive advantage to sustain long-term growth, and 2. How to engage leaders at every level of the organization so that they are more proactive and forward-looking in their area of responsibility. The Art of Strategic Leadership uses a unique approach to examine what it means to be a strategic leader. Instead of focusing on the skills, behaviors, and tools found in typical books on strategic leadership, the authors shed light on the attributes and qualities necessary to lead strategic change and help transform a business. Strategic leadership is what modern leadership is all about. Organizations expect leaders to anticipate and be proactive more than ever before. In this book, the authors draw on their vast experience working directly with leaders at all levels and use an intriguing narrative to explain this inside-out approach to understanding strategic leadership. The narrative follows the journey of how one manager discovered these critically important qualities. You will experience first-hand how these values and attributes manifest in the lives of realistic leaders; how they orchestrate long-term strategic change needed for the organization to compete and survive and actively shape the future while delivering short-term results. The Art of Strategic Leadership provides the content that will help you informally assess and reflect on your own strategic leadership qualities—those that are strengths and those that indicate areas you need to develop. It will guide you as you incorporate these values and qualities into your own leadership style and become a more effective catalyst for change. This book will help you in the following ways: Develop a more proactive, forward-thinking approach to leadership Approach strategy from both short- and long-term perspectives Adopt the core values and principles of a strategic leader Model the qualities exhibited by powerful leaders Strategic leaders serve as powerful examples to others in the organization. Their qualities and traits spread rapidly to those around them, empowering people at every level to take a more active role in meeting the demands of the future. The Art of Strategic Leadership will help you deepen and broaden your understanding of the core qualities of strategic leadership, leaving you better equipped to lead yourself and your team to a better place and create greater value for customers, owners, and employees.

A strategic leader is essentially the leader of any organization and someone who has to steer the company in times of change, whilst motivating and inspiring their team. Strategic Leadership from the renowned leadership expert John Adair encourages leaders to focus on tomorrow rather than yesterday. It explores the nature and origin of strategic leadership, transferable skills and the art of inspiring others. It then describes the role itself and broad functions of that role such as building and maintaining a team, achieving a common task and motivating and developing the individual. It moves on to assess the skills you need to be effective, and the seven generic functions that make up the role of strategic leader which include providing direction, strategic thinking and planning, building partnerships and developing tomorrow's leaders. Full of checklists, summaries and historical examples, Strategic Leadership will encourage you to ask the right questions whilst defining the role and skills of a strategic leader.

"The foundation of this book is the unique five-phase model for strategy formulation and implementation developed by Kepner-Tregoe."--Introduction

Today’s organizations face difficult challenges in order to remain competitive—the quickening pace of change, increasing uncertainty, growing ambiguity, and complexity. To meet these challenges, organizations must broaden the scope of leadership responsibility for strategic leadership and engage more people in the process of leadership. In Becoming a Strategic Leader Rich Hughes and Kate Beatty from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) offer executives and managers a handbook for implementing a strategic leadership process that reaches leaders at all levels of organizations. Based on CCL’s successful Developing the Strategic Leader Program, this book outlines the framework of strategic leadership and contains practical suggestions on how to develop the individual, team, and organizational skills needed for institutions to become more adaptable, flexible, and resilient. The authors also show how individual managers can exercise effective strategic leadership through their distinctive and systemic approach—thinking, acting, and influencing.

This book integrates and assesses the vast and rapidly growing literature on strategic leadership, which is the study of top executives and their effects on organizations. The basic premise is that in order to understand why organizations do the things they do, or perform the way they do, we need to deeply comprehend the people at the top-- their experiences, abilities, values, social connections, aspirations, and other human features. The actions--or inactions--of a relatively small number of key people at the apex of an organization can dramatically affect organizational outcomes. The scope of strategic leadership includes individual executives, especially chief executive officers (CEOs), groups of executives (top management teams, or TMTs); and governing bodies (particularly boards of directors). Accordingly, the book addresses an array of topics regarding CEOs (e.g., values, personality, motives, demography, succession, and compensation); TMTs (including composition, processes, and dynamics); and boards of directors (why boards look and behave the way they do, and the consequences of board profiles and behaviors). Strategic Leadership synthesizes what is known about strategic leadership and indicates new research directions. The book is meant primarily for scholars who strive to assess and understand the phenomena of strategic leadership. It offers a considerable foundation on which professionals involved in executive search, compensation, appraisal and staffing, as well as board members who evaluate executive performance and potential, might build their tools and perspectives.

More than two millennia ago the famous Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote the classic work on military strategy, The Art of War. Now, in a new edition of Sun Tzu and the Art of Business, Mark McNeilly shows how Sun Tzu's strategic principles can be applied to twenty-first century business. Here are two books in one: McNeilly's synthesis of Sun Tzu's ideas into six strategic principles for the business executive, plus the text of Samuel B. Griffith's popular translation of The Art of War. McNeilly explains how to gain market share without inciting competitive retaliation, how to attack competitors' weak points, and how to maximize market information for competitive advantage. He demonstrates the value of speed and preparation in throwing the competition off-balance, employing strategy to beat the competition, and the need for character in leaders. Lastly, McNeilly presents a practical method to put Sun Tzu's principles into practice. By using modern examples throughout the book from Google, Zappos, Amazon, Dyson, Aflac, Singapore Airlines, Best Buy, the NFL, Tata Motors, Starbucks, and many others, he illustrates how, by following the wisdom of history's most respected strategist, executives can avoid the pitfalls of management fads and achieve lasting competitive advantage.

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.