The Wise Advocate - by Art Kleiner & Josie Thomson & Jeffrey Schwartz (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book gives a transformative explanation of how cutting-edge neuroscience can help business leaders set a course toward better management. Strategic leaders, it shows, 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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

With its theoretical soundness and its exceptional case materials, this is a valuable resources for those studying business. . . . Recommended.-- "Choice"

The Wise Advocate is a key book for aspiring leaders aiming to make the best--and hardest--choices. The authors provide a practical guide to decision making through a combination of neuroscience concepts, a process of self-reflection, and consideration of the greatest good for the people one must lead.--Marshall Goldsmith, author of Triggers, MOJO, and What Got You Here Won't Get You There.

You have choices. As a leader making decisions that impact your business, and as a person making decisions that impact your life, you don't have to be a prisoner of the default and (nearly) automatic ways in which your brain attends to information. You don't have to take the road everyone else travels. You can learn to guide your own attention and thinking, to make decisions that stand the test of time. Your first choice, fortunately, is an easy one--read The Wise Advocate.--Heidi Grant, PhD, chief science officer at the NeuroLeadership Institute, and author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently

When an organization commits to meaningful change, its leaders face very challenging choices every day. The Wise Advocate is about what happens in those moments and how the best leaders help move their cultures forward. The book is clearly understandable for people at multiple levels across a diversity of cultural situations.--Jon R. Katzenbach, coauthor of The Wisdom of Teams and The Critical Few

This book is timely. By emphasizing the topics of wisdom, the high vs. low roads, and ethics, the authors make a unique contribution. While some of today's university-based leadership and management researchers tend to ignore ethics, organizational context, and practical business considerations, the authors' approach is sensitive to those applied concerns.--James O'Toole, Daniels Distinguished Professor of Business Ethics, University of Denver - Daniels College of Business

About the Author

Art Kleiner is the editor in chief of strategy+business, the management magazine published by PwC. His books include Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success (2003) and The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (2008).

Jeffrey Schwartz is a research psychiatrist at UCLA School of Medicine and a leading expert in neuroplasticity. His many books include Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior (1997) and You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life (2011, with Rebecca Gladding).

Josie Thomson is an award-winning executive coach, speaker, author, and two-time cancer survivor. She is the author of Enliven-U: A Little Book of Inspirations (2015).