Wise Advocate, The : The Inner Voice of Strategic Leadership

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.

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).