Leadership and Career in the 21st Century

Leadership and Career in the 21st Century presents a novel approach to understanding and training leadership for top and middle management audiences. This guide is more than a book on teaching leadership to professional audiences in that it addresses the lay reader and shows how to raise leadership qualities in everyone's life. The author's approach is original in the sense that he has enriched and transformed the traditional leadership paradigm through basic elements of timeless wisdom, taken from Zen and the I Ching, thereby expanding the paradigm beyond the borders of the Western corporate culture, and adapting it for international audiences.This book doesn't offer quick fixes for developing your career. It presents an approach to raise the awareness level of the whole of the person. The author contends that true selfhelp must encourage the reader to be critical in the first place, and develop their self-thinking abilities, which is one quality of several when designing a first-hand life and becoming truly responsible for our destiny. To be critical means to question tradition and authority, in the first place; it means to look for realizing our personal style and cognitive preferences and to activate our heart, which according to newest HeartMath(R) research is essentially contributing to the sharpness of our cognitive apparatus, and thus a factor of right decision-making.The main focus of the guide is upon developing and using creativity as a primary tool for personal growth and expansion, and further, the creative expansion of the whole self. The author's approach is holistic and spiritual in the sense that it considers the human being as a functional and organic organism that is primarily self-organizing and that is mainly driven by an inner program. We are directing our destinies through the inner programs we are writing, while most people do this unconsciously. From the moment we begin to take charge of our lives and begin living a first-hand life, we begin to consciously direct our destiny. We do this first of all by reprogramming ourselves. There are few selfhelp guides that are deliberately holistic in their approach, that offer an encyclopedic approach to knowledge, which encompasses non-mainstream knowledge, that are beyond giving quick fixes and that are academic in the sense to be based on almost three decades of academic research.