Leadership Unravelled: The Faulty Thinking Behind Modern Management

Leaders are unable to address wicked problems and complex challenges due to five organizational paradoxes and six management myths. This book explores these constraints and helps leaders to wriggle free of the tacit assumptions that lock them into a cul-de-sac of simplistic prescription and heroic individualism, leading to new forms of leadership practice that are fit for purpose in engaging with a world facing systemic crisis and existential risk.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 16 August 2021
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Why is it that leaders – in social, political, and (most importantly) organizational contexts – are seemingly unable to address meaningfully the wicked problems and complex challenges that we currently face? Theres an enormous buzz around reconfiguring departments and adopting ‘transformational operating models, but in general, plus ca change, plus la meme chose.

Eyewatering amounts of treasure and time are spent in corporate life on leadership development, with people working hard to try and demonstrate that something useful has happened as a result. An entire pseudo-science has emerged to try and prove its worth, in part to justify the economic dividend that goes to those who make it to the upper levels of positional power. The fetishization of leadership, especially strong leadership, fills our news outlets holding up carefully distorted images of great men (leadership is still deeply gendered) from across the worlds of politics, business, and sports.

This book explores the persistently disappeared and unacknowledged constraints that inhibit leaders in every context. It argues that these constraints – defined in this volume in terms of five organizational paradoxes and six management myths – are found at large in society and are especially impactful in organizational life. By calling attention to, and exploring in rigorous detail, these paradoxes and myths, this book helps leaders, and the leadership systems they are part of, to wriggle free of the tacit assumptions that lock them into a cul-de-sac of simplistic prescription and heroic individualism. Once these mind-forged manacles are removed, new forms of leadership practice become possible, ones that are fit for purpose in engaging with a world facing systemic crisis and existential risk.

This book is essential.

Weight: 406g
Dimension: 156 x 233 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032033686