Search results for ""Author Douglas Board""

Across the world, key decisions are made by tiny coteries of political and business leaders. With enough talent, elan and hard work, any of us can join them - so we are told. Follow key rules: be transparent; defer to bosses and clients; take responsibility; feedback is everything. Understand these and the world is our oyster. But is it? Decades of working with leaders have shown headhunter, executive coach and former NGO chair Douglas Board that it may not be. Many would-be leaders and senior managers fall into traps which block their rise and undermine their self-esteem. Elites outlines those traps and shows how best to avoid them. Armed with this knowledge, you may want to use it and join the top tier. However, it may also make you reconsider. Knowing how elites work, do you still want to join them? Or can you find ways to change them? In this authoritative, ground-breaking guide, Board suggests that true fulfilment demands an adventure into the unknown inside ourselves: why do we seek what we seek? Prepared to be surprised.

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Some of the worst selection practices to be found anywhere can be found at the top of organisations. Even when senior selection is not egregiously bad, rarely is it as good as it could be. Front-line staff and middle managers are selected with much more rigour today than 30 years ago - but not the chairmen, chief executives and chief officers who lead them. So says Douglas Board in Choosing Leaders and Choosing to Lead. Dr Board draws on his extensive experience in executive search and in leadership, coupled with his own academic research embracing the sociology and psychology of scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Weick to offer ground-breaking insight into the value and limitations of established selection practice. This book illuminates ways in which senior roles differ from other positions and will help those charged with selecting individuals for senior positions, as well as potential candidates, those concerned with regulating selection policy, and researchers. Examining the classic mix of competency frameworks and selection tools such as psychological and skills assessments, simulations, reference-checking and interviews, the author concludes that senior selection choices are holding back organisations and individual careers, with implications for diversity, effectiveness, and social justice. He contends that while complacent, self-regarding elites will always need vigilant challenge, the scientific approach to selection has weaknesses as well as strengths. Those weaknesses become more pronounced at senior levels, posing particular questions about, amongst other things, the role of intuition and politics.

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Set against the 2020 general election, a monstrous rightwing demagogue with a hardcore following of violent young thugs stages an anti-elite coup to win power. A Very British Coup as rewritten by Tom Sharpe.

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