Connected Leadership

Foreword

The hundreds of leaders I meet each year give voice to a wide range of issues and concerns about their businesses, their careers and effectiveness in their roles, and sometimes also about the impact that they and the businesses they lead have on society. They talk of the problems of responding to uncertainty and change, about finding, nurturing and retaining talent, and about the stress of managing organisations that are increasingly complex, even when they employ fewer people.

One of the reasons leaders find it so hard to lead is that our brains and the algorithms that describe how we interact with the world outside ourselves did not evolve to handle large enterprises. The maximum size of a group within which we can feel a high level ...