Executive Advantage—Resilient Leadership for 21st-century Organizations

Noting the challenge for twenty-first century leaders to be agile, flexible, inclusive, and resilient while managing their own health and happiness, Grey, who has a background in law and human resources and has worked for various companies on leadership development programs, identifies the reasons leaders get stressed under pressure and strategies for coping with them. She introduces the concept of "executive gremlins" (worries, buttons, and stress triggers that cause the organization and leader to fail) and outlines a way to take stock and make better decisions in the moment. She focuses on resilience, describing why these gremlins cause stress and anxiety, how this causes strategic change strategies to fail, and these issues in the context of aggressive growth, MBO to flotation, joint ventures, recession, downsizing, and internal takeovers. She considers how understanding of their inner world and insecurities can provide leaders with an executive advantage, and what happens when core needs to feel important, be popular, and be in control are not met. She addresses the role of perception; a ten-step solution for resilience; what happens in the brain due to stress, how this relates to female executives, and how the executive advantage concept can help women; how poor leadership behaviors derail business performance; and key concerns for leaders and the behavioral capabilities required. Case studies from multinationals, law firms, investment banks, retail, manufacturing, information technology, telecoms, oil companies, and other organizations are integrated, as are descriptions of dysfunctional leaders. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)