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Advice to my younger self:
1 Start where you are with what you have
2 Try not to hurt other people
3 Take more chances
4 If you fail, keep trying
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Germany Kent
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The business landscape is a constantly evolving ecosystem. Changes in the macro
environment, such as technological disruptions or changing consumer preferences, can
rapidly alter the competitive landscape. A high-performing board needs to be adept at
strategic foresight.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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You are not alone in the struggles of life. Entire cosmos is with you. It evolves through the way you face and overcome challenges of life. Use everything in your advantage.
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Amit Ray (Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management)
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In today's constantly evolving economy, business models cannot be static. The business model of each business must be consistently changing and evolving in order to stay relevant and to succeed.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Principles of a Permaculture Economy)
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Tomorrow's leaders will not lead dictating from the front, nor pushing from the back. They will lead from the centre - from the heart
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Rasheed Ogunlaru (Soul Trader)
“
We are constantly evolving as we are interacting with the world. Mindfulness and growth mindset drives our evolution faster and on right tracks.
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Amit Ray (Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management)
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Scenarios are dynamic living narratives, and require updating as the world itself evolves.
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Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
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an organization cannot evolve beyond its leadership’s stage of development.
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Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness)
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All the best apps, companies, and products have broken the way we live life, transformed how we communicate, and changed our day-to-day. Good products evolve us. You’re
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Gary Vaynerchuk (#AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur's Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness)
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True leaders admit their mistakes, learn from their mistakes, and evolve so that the same mistakes are not repeated.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
one of the most powerful and disconcerting forces in human nature—confirmation bias. Our brains have evolved to crave information consistent with what we already believe. We seek out and focus on facts and arguments that support our beliefs. More worrisome, when we are trapped in confirmation bias, we may not consciously perceive facts that challenge us, that are inconsistent with what we have already concluded. In a complicated, changing, and integrated world, our confirmation bias makes us very difficult people. We simply can’t change our minds.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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Women of the thinking society are the builders of nations. Women of the sentient society are the builders of the world. And given the same honor and dignity as men, women can build a much better and more harmonious world. Harmony and conflict-solving run in their veins. Whereas men have evolved into more authoritarian creatures.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality (Humanism Series))
“
What we need, we are told every day, is more and better leadership. But what this demand involves is a closer and closer approximation to fascism. The fascists alone have evolved an efficient form of leadership: efficient leadership is fascism.
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Herbert Read (To Hell With Culture (Routledge Classics))
“
Leadership must evolve into a “science-based craft”, like surgery.
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Paul Gibbons (The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture)
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In some businesses there’s a real stigma around staying home when you’re sick, like it means you’re weak or unmotivated. (I have to admit early in my career I saw it that way, but I have evolved.) Coming in when you’re sick doesn’t show dedication, it’s selfish. And kind of gross. And not fun for your coworkers or for you. That
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Gary Vaynerchuk (#AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur's Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness)
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. . . I realized with a growing and startling sense of clarity that the seminary was educating and training me for a world that no longer existed. Moreover, the posture of this particular brand of Christianity toward the surrounding culture was one of enormous suspicion and at times hostility. It seemed that part of this evolving designation involved a posture of entrenchment and argument toward culture. But I loved culture. I loved the freedom to engage with people for the purpose of friendship and dialogue, not simply evangelism.
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Tim Keel (Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos (ēmersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith))
“
I believe we need to evolve and adapt to changing circumstances, always striving to improve and innovate.
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Christina Kumar (Take Massive Action: Toward Your Dreams)
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What do I and a diamond have in common? We are tough, brilliant, and carbon based entities which evolved into something better under immense pressure, tribulation, and trials.
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Donavan Nelson Butler
“
The answers to all the difficult questions in this world lie all around us. You just need to have that third eye open.
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Mayur Ramgir (Evolve like a Butterfly: A Metamorphic Approach to Leadership)
“
The business world is littered with the fossils of companies that failed to evolve. Disrupt or be disrupted. There is no middle ground.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
“
Stagnancy will suffocate a business… Leadership must be dynamic and evolving to ensure successful growth, enhancement, and longevity.
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Steve Maraboli
“
The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.
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Peter F. Drucker
“
confirmation bias. Our brains have evolved to crave information consistent with what we already believe.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
“
We are between stories now. We are evolving from the world dominated by technology and entering the age of biology when there will be a resurgence of interest in learning how to work with the forces of nature rather than against them. It will be a time for following what feels most natural, organic and heartfelt. And it is a time for understanding that we do not enter the world; we grow out of it. The seeds of our own unfolding future lie deep within ourselves.
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Michael Jones (The Soul of Place: Re-imagining Leadership Through Nature, Art and Community)
“
They were driven by one of the most powerful and disconcerting forces in human nature—confirmation bias. Our brains have evolved to crave information consistent with what we already believe. We seek out and focus on facts and arguments that support our beliefs.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
“
No matter how fast weapons and technology evolve in the 21st century, one thing remains constant is that war is a human endeavor, a grueling contest between two learning and adaptive forces. Victory, therefore rests on how smart, how tough, and how dedicated our boots on the ground.
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Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono
“
And so it is that towns like Salem evolve into hotbeds of rabid religiosity. There is no dissent. The townspeople do what they are told. Ironically, superstition—which is the opposite of faith—is deeply ingrained in the population. The Puritan leadership has absolute power. And, as the adage goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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Bill O'Reilly (Killing the Witches: the Horror of Salem, Massachusetts (Bill O'Reilly's Killing Series))
“
If you don’t allow one to become a lion, one will become a sheep. And the world is already filled with sheeps, which is the major cause of the society’s intellectual and moral downfall. For a better future to evolve, where humanism will be an all-pervading virtue and separatism will be a matter of ancient history, the world needs lions.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Education Decree)
“
If you think about it all the successful people you know have 5 things in common:
1) They are focused
2) They are relentless
3) They are resourceful
4) They are flexible
5) They are constantly reinventing themselves - evolving, learning and growing
If you think about it all of the unsuccessful people you know have 5 things in common:
1) They are lazy
2) They complain, A LOT
3) They tend to blame everyone else for their situation
4) They are set in their ways
5) They know it all
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”
Germany Kent
“
The efficiency of the hospital was a perfect illustration of Dunbar’s number – that magic number of 150. The size of our brain, Robin Dunbar, an eminent evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, has argued (and the brain size of other primates), is determined by the size of our ‘natural’ social group, when humans and their brains evolved in small hunting and gathering groups. We have the largest brains among primates, and the largest social group. We can relate to about 150 people on an informal, personal basis, but beyond that leadership, impersonal rules and job descriptions become necessary. So
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Henry Marsh (Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon (Life as a Surgeon))
“
Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other: We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land. We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo. We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home? We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance. We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in. We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness. We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together. We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments. We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life. In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education. Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not. We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion. We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together. Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.
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Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
“
If Bezos took one leadership principle most to heart—which would also come to define the next half decade at Amazon—it was principal #8, “think big”: Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers. In 2010, Amazon was a successful online retailer, a nascent cloud provider, and a pioneer in digital reading. But Bezos envisioned it as much more. His shareholder letter that year was a paean to the esoteric computer science disciplines of artificial intelligence and machine learning that Amazon was just beginning to explore. It opened by citing a list of impossibly obscure terms such as “naïve Bayesian estimators,” “gossip protocols,” and “data sharding.” Bezos wrote: “Invention is in our DNA and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers.
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Brad Stone (Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire)
“
Every human has a divine spark veiled by the layers of personality. Whether we call it Allah, Jesus, Elohim, Krishna, or any other name, that spark is the same and we are foolish not to realize our astounding potential. An essential spiritual practice is to observe and witness oneself continuously and compassionately, acknowledging and laughing at foibles and weaknesses while working relentlessly to evolve into higher consciousness. The light of persistent awareness is bound, little by little, to dissolve our false self and bring us closer to our authentic self. We may not become perfect human beings, but that is not the goal. The goal is to become more aligned with our higher self and expand our worldview as we learn to see the Face of God in everyone we meet. Institutions and those who serve institutions cannot be trusted to acknowledge their weaknesses and serve the common good, and we would be wise to emulate the Mulla’s healthy skepticism about their moral leadership. Our human understanding of divine verses, such as those in the Qur’an, can be less than divine. With grace and courage we must work to change or eliminate religious customs and scriptural interpretations that do not meet the test of divine compassion and generosity
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”
Imam Jamal Rahman (Sacred Laughter of the Sufis: Awakening the Soul with the Mulla's Comic Teaching Stories and Other Islamic Wisdom)
“
building them is as hierarchies in which those at the top issue commands to those lower down. While quick to build, they are seldom efficient to run: people only obey orders if commanders monitor what subordinates are doing. Gradually, many organizations learned that it was more effective to soften hierarchy, creating interdependent roles that had a clear sense of purpose, and giving people the autonomy and responsibility to perform them. The change from hierarchy run through power, to interdependence run through purpose, implies a corresponding change in leadership. Instead of being the commander-in-chief, the leader became the communicator-in-chief. Carrots and sticks evolved into narratives.
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Paul Collier (The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties)
“
DevOps Evangelist An expert Consultant who can now evangelise a DevOps solution for an Enterprise. Typical tasks: Scaling DevOps capabilities across Enterprise Change Management Organisation Alignment This is a high-end Consulting role, with a heavy technology bend. At a DevOps Engineer level, it’s mostly about deep technical skills. As you evolve into a solution architect kind of role, along with the technical acumen, it’s also about leadership skills to build consensus/agreements and making a team work together.
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”
Savinder Puri (How do I build a career in DevOps?: A practical handbook to help you start or scale up your career in DevOps)
“
The LBDQ-VII is one of the earliest and most widely used instruments of leadership behavior. It emerged from the Ohio State leadership research teams and evolved to its present form to cover 12 aspects of leadership behavior. These were representation, demand reconciliation, tolerance of uncertainty, persuasiveness, initiating structure, tolerance of freedom, role assumption, consideration, production emphasis, predictive accuracy, integration, and superior orientation.
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Christopher Peterson (Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification)
“
In the ever-evolving business landscape, continuous learning is the key to resilience and success. As leaders, we must champion this mindset at all levels.
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Dr. Ravinder Tulsiani (Your Leadership EDGE: Mastering Management Skills for Today’s Workforce)
“
Surprisingly, this divergence continues despite the deep influence of Agile and Lean thinking on general—that is, non-IT—management. The disciplines continue to evolve separately even though corporate strategy is increasingly about both agility and IT strategy. The two worlds do not converge, even though IT leadership books advise CIOs to pull themselves closer to strategy formulation and claim a “seat at the table.” But while the other C-level executives around the table are discussing the need for agility, senior IT leaders, eager to gain or retain a seat at the strategy table, are pursuing the path of demonstrating the value of IT ... by locking in old-school practices that encourage rigidity.
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Mark Schwartz (A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility)
“
Questioning conventional wisdom is not a sign of weakness but a mark of a forward-thinking leader ready to adapt and thrive in the ever-evolving business landscape.
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Abhysheq Shukla (KISS Life "Life is what you make it")
“
nature dynamic, evolving and influenced by the context in which they occur, then one can assume that the nature of leadership (and its effectiveness) is likely to be more akin to a dynamic process, which may
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Nicholas Clarke (Relational Leadership: Theory, Practice and Development)
“
Socrates suggests that the more evolved a man is, the more he is able to put aside his fears and hankering after comfort and take a stand for his worth and the worth of those he loves. And if necessary, he will for an "alliance for battle with what seems just," even if he "suffers in hunger, cold, and everything of the sort." This quality of courage to take a stand, to fight for one's value, and to be unwilling to make moral compromises is what we call a "spirited commitment to dignity" in the Leadership Dojo. Exelemplary leaders embody this commitment. p109
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Richard Strozzi-Heckler
“
Socrates suggests that the more evolved a man is, the more he is able to put aside his fears and hankering after comfort and take a stand for his worth and the worth of those he loves. And if necessary, he will for an "alliance for battle with what seems just," even if he "suffers in hunger, cold, and everything of the sort." This quality of courage to take a stand, to fight for one's value, and to be unwilling to make moral compromises is what we call a "spirited commitment to dignity" in the Leadership Dojo. Exemplary leaders embody this commitment. p109
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Richard Strozzi-Heckler (The Leadership Dojo: Build Your Foundation as an Exemplary Leader)
“
Not living is not an option. Not evolving is not an option either. We must grow or die.
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Nilima Bhat (Shakti Leadership: Embracing Feminine and Masculine Power in Business)
“
The retarded development of Indian generalship after independence cannot be entirely explained away by the lack of experience of senior Indian officers. There have been other breakaway armies in history, but in none has there been such a marked reluctance either to evolve an empirical, indigenous philosophy of warfare or to introduce orthodox precepts of military science. No zeal or momentum appears to have impelled the officers left over from the Raj. Clearly the seniors among them preferred to perpetuate British affectations of amateurism; their criteria for generalship were confined to a flair for leadership and battlefield panache. Nor did they encourage their juniors to acquire professional knowledge. On the contrary, officers who studied or wrote about professional subjects were dubbed ‘theoretical’ – as though theory were something that must be avoided in the pursuit of practice.
”
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D.K. Palit (War in High Himalaya: The Indian Army in Crisis, 1962)
“
When leaders evolve systems and systems evolve people, we land up in a system of deadlocks.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
“
Systems are static, but people are dynamic. When leaders design systems to evolve people, bureaucracy is born.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
“
In a pyramid structure, evolution is so much in leaders' control because leaders evolve systems and systems evolve people. What if leaders stop evolving?
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
“
Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.[431]
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Charles Morris (Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Remade the Automotive and Energy Industries)
“
In the NGO universe, which has evolved a strange anodyne language of its own, everything has become a “subject”, a separate, professionalised, special-interest issue. Community development, leadership development, human rights, health, education, reproductive rights, AIDS, orphans with AIDS—have all been hermetically sealed into their own silos with their own elaborate and precise funding brief. Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could.
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Arundhati Roy (Capitalism: A Ghost Story)
“
The Greatest Secret of my Life: Life application of what the Holy Spirit teaches me daily. This is what determines my evolving to be who God created me to be.
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”
Benjamin Suulola
“
Education is ever-changing, even though some of our practices aren’t evolving as quickly as our students are.
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Michelle Collay (Everyday Teacher Leadership: Taking Action Where You Are (Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education Book 14))
“
Are you a ‘Listening Organization?’
Organizations that execute constant feedback loops from customers, vendors, and employees will have a competitive advantage in staying agile and evolving.
Building systems to ensure that your firm is empathetic and open-minded is critical to your survival and growth.
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Krishna Sagar Rao
“
Leading Lake County Schools in Tiptonville, TN, William Burton serves as the Director of Schools, showcasing dedicated educational leadership with over ten years of experience. He prioritizes positive relationships, strategic planning, and innovation to enhance student success amid evolving educational landscapes.
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William Burton Tiptonville TN
“
Our continuous learning is always the sign that we are alive and evolving, and we can be sure that with patient persistence, we will grow towards the light that illuminates our whole being, allowing us to be the guiding lights for others.
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Master Del Pe
“
Until the ego dissolves or evolves to become one with our true self, we remain slaves of our own egos.
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Assegid Habtewold (The 9 Cardinal Building Blocks: For continued success in leadership)
“
You must look through an opportunity and not at it
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Mayur Ramgir (Evolve like a Butterfly: A Metamorphic Approach to Leadership)
“
Opportunity to help others is the opportunity to help yourself in disguise
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Mayur Ramgir (Evolve like a Butterfly: A Metamorphic Approach to Leadership)
“
You must look through an opportunity and not at it.
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Mayur Ramgir
“
Opportunity to help others is the opportunity to help yourself in disguise.
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Mayur Ramgir
“
If American misjudgments and actions that evolved into human tragedies—i.e., racism, sexism, and other bigotries—are guiding lights, the Chinese leadership must ultimately yield its power to the sovereignty of its people.
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Patrick Mendis (Peaceful War: How the Chinese Dream and the American Destiny Create a New Pacific World Order)
“
Labels have always represented limitation, conformity, and narrow-mindedness to me since the human personality is multi-faceted and continuously evolving. Perhaps that is why I am so intrigued by the concept and labels of “introvert” and “extrovert.” Neither description accurately defines the state of my social interactions. What about yours?
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Susan C. Young (The Art of Communication: 8 Ways to Confirm Clarity & Understanding for Positive Impact(The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #5))
“
Behold a unique individualist employing thousands all over the world and influencing the masses as a media phenomenon. Even in the early stages of campaigning for the Republican Party’s nomination, news that Trump was about to have a press conference or deliver a speech in a stadium compelled cable TV networks stop whatever they were broadcasting, cancel their advertisement time, and give Trump—LIVE—their complete attention until his speech was over. Who else gets such treatment? A mensch possessing intuitive Uranian synchronicity with success. He’s plugged into life’s universal rules of how you win, how to transform your weaknesses into strengths and get things done you want done. When you’re Trump you make magic in part because you are a flexible Gemini riding Green-Hornet colored Uranus, adapting your ideas to unexpected changes. You can evolve them inasmuch as cardinal (leadership) and mutable planetary positioning influences your astrology
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John Hogue (Trump for President: Astrological Predictions)
“
However, in most tech organizations, marketing has evolved to be more about owning the brand and customer acquisition, while product owns the value proposition and development.
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”
Richard Banfield (Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams)
“
Everything exists in a constant state of change and knowledge of an evolving thing must evolve with the thing at the faster pace.
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Pearl Zhu (12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO's Situational Leadership Practices)
“
Your success lies in your ability to believe in yourself
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Mayur Ramgir (Evolve like a Butterfly: A Metamorphic Approach to Leadership)
“
Convince yourself that you can do it, and the rest of the world will automatically be convinced
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”
Mayur Ramgir (Evolve like a Butterfly: A Metamorphic Approach to Leadership)
“
Explore new avenues and look for ways to have a greater, much more influential impact on the world around you.
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”
Mayur Ramgir (Evolve like a Butterfly: A Metamorphic Approach to Leadership)
“
Members of highly reactive families, therefore, wind up constantly focused on the latest, most immediate crisis, and they remain almost totally incapable of gaining the distance that would enable them to see the emotional processes in which they are engulfed. The emotionally regressed family will stay fixed on its symptoms, and family thinking processes will become stuck on the content of specific issues rather than on the emotional processes that are driving those matters to become “issues.” The systemic anxiety thus locks everyone into a pessimistic focus on the pathology within the family, and it becomes almost impossible for such systems to reorient themselves to a focus on their inherent strengths. What also contributes to this loss of perspective is the disappearance of playfulness, an attribute that originally evolved with mammals and which is an ingredient in both intimacy and the ability to maintain distance. You can, after all, play with your pet cat, horse, or dog, but it is absolutely impossible to develop a playful relationship with a reptile, whether it is your pet salamander, no matter how cute, or your pet turtle, snake, or alligator. They are deadly serious (that is, purposive) creatures. Chronically anxious families (including institutions and whole societies) tend to mimic the reptilian response: Lacking the capacity to be playful, their perspective is narrow. Lacking perspective, their repertoire of responses is thin. Neither apology nor forgiveness is within their ken. When they try to work things out, their meetings wind up as brain-stem storming sessions. Indeed, in any family or organization, seriousness is so commonly an attribute of the most anxious (read “difficult”) members that they can quite appropriately be considered to be functioning out of a reptilian regression. Broadening the perspective, the relationship between anxiety and seriousness is so predictable that the absence of playfulness in any institution is almost always a clue to the degree of its emotional regression. In
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Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
“
By the term regression I mean to convey something far more profound than a mere loss of progress. Societal regression is about the perversion of progress into a counter-evolutionary mode. In a societal regression, evolutionary principles of life that have been basic to the development of our species become distorted, perverted, or actually reversed. Chief among those evolutionary principles are: self-regulation of instinctual drive; adaptation to strength rather than weakness; a growth-producing response to challenge; allowing time for maturing processes to evolve; and the preservation of individuality and integrity. Emotional regression, therefore, is more of a “going down” than a “going back”; it is devolution rather than evolution. It has to do with a lowering of maturity, rather than a reduction in the gross national product. One needs to view societal regression in three dimensions, not two. At the same time that a society is “pro-gressing” technologically it can be “re-gressing” emotionally.
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Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
“
They were driven by one of the most powerful and disconcerting forces in human nature—confirmation bias. Our brains have evolved to crave information consistent with what we already believe. We seek out and focus on facts and arguments that support our beliefs. More worrisome, when we are trapped in confirmation bias, we may not consciously perceive facts that challenge us, that are inconsistent with what we have already concluded. In a complicated, changing, and integrated world, our confirmation bias makes us very difficult people. We simply can’t change our minds.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
“
Give yourself permission 2 evolve. Become a philosopher; come up with your own interpretation of life and stop accepting someone else's as your truth.
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”
Germany Kent
“
Type 1 leadership was about functional requirements and individual systems; the focus was operational. Type 2 was less about managing individual projects and systems, more about managing portfolios of projects and infrastructures, as well as playing a senior team leadership role; Type 2 leaders left the details of managing operational functions and individual systems to others, though they remained accountable for it all working. Type 3 evolved into a job of managing strategy and resources, leaving the details of management of portfolios and infrastructure to others.
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Robert D. Austin (Adventures of an IT Leader)
“
Conservatives will demand loyalty to their in-group, and once conflict begins, they will also demand subservience to leadership, so long as the leadership appears to be attempting to win the conflict or competition, and acting with their group's best interests at heart. Liberals,
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Anonymous Conservative (The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans)
“
Traditional silo or linear thinking is no longer sufficient to cope with unpredictable emergencies. We need the capacity to take a whole-system approach that is a product of personal development, of moving from the old fear paradigm to one of trust and of recognizing that humankind is evolving both socially and spiritually. Individuals can evolve far faster than the collective if they decide to embark on a personal developmental journey. Given the leadership failures that are so apparent today, a little compulsory evolution would do our leaders no harm at all. In practice the coaching process fosters evolution at every stage, for evolution emerges from within and can never be taught in prescriptive ways.
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John Whitmore (Coaching for Performance Fifth Edition: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership UPDATED 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)
“
We take too many “tactically troubled” short cuts in this profession and pay with the loss of life. Give yourself the advantages and set yourself up to respond. Let’s stop mistaking good luck for good tactics and harness every possible way to adapt, learn and evolve in our abilities to make better decisions and hence more tactically savvy techniques that give us the edge we need.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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It is common understanding that communication is at the heart of any organisation. So, why have organisational models not evolved accordingly? To truly leverage the potential of this information age, we need to rethink and redesign organisations
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Miguel Reynolds Brandao (The Sustainable Organisation - a paradigm for a fairer society: Think about sustainability in an age of technological progress and rising inequality)
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In terms of organisational models and human relationship models, humankind has not evolved much over the last millennia. In fact, most organisations still heavily rely on strong hierarchical models, where power, greed and internal competition are the main driving forces.
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Miguel Reynolds Brandao (The Sustainable Organisation - a paradigm for a fairer society: Think about sustainability in an age of technological progress and rising inequality)
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Leadership” is an intangible concept that is hard to measure; leaders are often criticized but good leadership can be difficult to implement. However, if the necessary changes discussed in this study are tested, it will provide an invaluable advantage for the Army and the nation in dealing with evolving and dangerous enemies.
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Don Vandergriff (Raising the Bar)
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Why is that so? Why is it easy to say the Army is going to create “adaptive leaders” during a Power Point presentation, but so difficult to put those words into action? Understanding leadership and how to develop leaders to be adaptive, and subsequently how to nurture those traits with the right command environment and organizational culture, is very hard. It requires current leaders at all levels to have a shared vision of change, and a thorough understanding of U.S. military and civilian history as both have evolved with the nation’s experiences in war.
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Don Vandergriff (Raising the Bar)
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It is common understanding that communication is at the heart of any organisation. So, why have organisational models not evolved accordingly?
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Miguel Reynolds Brandao (The Sustainable Organisation - a paradigm for a fairer society: Think about sustainability in an age of technological progress and rising inequality)
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The rapidly changing world and evolving threatening challenges demand we become more self-aware and seek trade-offs. This means between traditional methods of training and operating and the uncertainty of ongoing, experiential trial and error the future demands if we are to thrive while handling crisis and conflict. 2 This must be done with an understanding we collectively have a shared purpose, which focuses on winning conflict and crisis at low cost in the moral, mental and physical dimensions which often times takes us outside our comfort zones.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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We ask you this question: is officer survival just a concept or have you internalized these safety principles into your habits every day and on every shift? The need for change is obvious, threats are real and evolving despite the fact that most people would never do harm to us. There are still those who, for whatever their personal agenda and reasoning, know we as American guardians are, what we as American Law Enforcement do, and they will unleash their rage and fury at us according to that personal agenda.
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
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People are innately prepared to act as members of tribes, but culture tells us how to recognize who belongs to our tribes, what schedules of aid, praise, and punishment are due to tribal fellows, and how the tribe is to deal with other tribes — allies, enemies, and clients. […] Contemporary human societies differ drastically from the societies in which our social instincts evolved. Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies were likely comparatively small, egalitarian, and lacking in powerful institutionalized leadership. […] To evolve largescale, complex social systems, cultural evolutionary processes, driven by cultural group selection, takes advantage of whatever support these instincts offer. […] cultural evolution must cope with a psychology evolved for life in quite different sorts of societies. Appropriate larger scale institutions must regulate the constant pressure from smaller-groups (coalitions, cabals, cliques), to subvert the large-group favoring rules. To do this cultural evolution often makes use of “work arounds” — mobilizing tribal instincts for new purposes. For example, large national and international (e.g. great religions) institutions develop ideologies of symbolically marked inclusion that often fairly successfully engage the tribal instincts on a much larger scale. Military and religious organizations (e.g., Catholic Church), for example, dress recruits in identical clothing (and haircuts) loaded with symbolic markings, and then subdivide them into small groups with whom they eat and engage in long-term repeated interaction. Such work-arounds are often awkward compromises […] Complex societies are, in effect, grand natural social-psychological experiments that stringently test the limits of our innate dispositions to cooperate.
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Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson (The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition))
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Thought leadership is by nature evolutionary, in that it must always be part of an ever-evolving flow.
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Pearl Zhu (Thinkingaire: 100 Game Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future (Digital Master Book 8))
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We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al-Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership.
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Anonymous
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government, and ceremonial activities. They must also prepare themselves for the bigger decisions, greater risks and uncertainties, and longer time spans that are inherent to this leadership level. They must always be cognizant of what Wall Street wants them to achieve in terms of the financial scorecard. Group managers can’t take a specialist mentality into a realm that mandates holistic thinking. They need to evolve their perspective to the point that they see issues in the broadest possible terms. We should also point out that some smaller companies don’t have a group manager passage. In these companies, CEOs usually undertake a group manager’s responsibilities.
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Ram Charan (The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company (Jossey-Bass Leadership Series Book 391))
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questions Those taking a new leadership role should ask: How is your industry changing and, in particular, how are your customers’ expectations evolving? What are the global developments (for example, increased migration, urbanisation or proliferation of mobile communications) that could benefit, threaten or generally alter the way that you do business? What are the political, economic, social, technological, legislative or environmental trends that could affect your business? What situation best describes the challenges and opportunities faced by the business? Is this clearly and widely recognised? What specific challenges are likely to be encountered? How can they be addressed? What are the major opportunities and what action is needed to realise them? Are there quick wins or low-hanging fruit that can be secured? What are the greatest risks, threats and potential pitfalls? How will these be avoided or overcome? What are the expectations of stakeholders? Are these expectations realistic – do they need adjusting? What should be the priorities?
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Jeremy Kourdi (Business Strategy: A Guide to Effective Decision-Making (Economist Books))
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So while our ever-evolving opposition movement made some progress in drawing attention to the undemocratic reality of Putin’s Russia, we were in a losing position from the start. The Kremlin’s domination of the mass media and ruthless persecution of all opposition in civil society made it impossible to build any lasting momentum. Our mission was also sabotaged by democratic leaders embracing Putin on the world stage, providing him with the leadership credentials he so badly needed in the absence of valid elections in Russia. It is difficult to promote democratic reform when every television channel and every newspaper shows image after image of the leaders of the world’s most powerful democracies accepting a dictator as part of their family. It sends the message that either he isn’t really a dictator at all or that democracy and individual freedom are nothing more than the bargaining chips Putin and his ilk always say they are. In the end, it took the invasion of Ukraine to finally get the G7 (I always refused to call it the G8) to expel Putin’s Russia from the elite club of industrial democracies.
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Garry Kasparov (Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped)
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It’s so important to be real with our kids. If we feel we have ‘messed up’ in some way, holding space to acknowledge it, to be curious as to how it might serve us and our children, to apologize where necessary, and find a mutually aligned way to move forward is true leadership.
Our kids deserve us to stay dedicated to evolving, learning, and acting from a loving space, and to model to them what this looks like, which also gives them permission to show up in the same way in their lives.
This is truly a beautiful and awe-inspiring process for everyone involved.
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Cathy Domoney
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Today the issues most vulnerable to becoming displacements are, first of all, anything related to safety: product safety, traffic safety, bicycle safety, motorboat safety, jet-ski safety, workplace safety, nutritional safety, nuclear power station safety, toxic waste safety, and so on and so on. This focus on safety has become so omnipresent in our chronically anxious civilization that there is real danger we will come to believe that safety is the most important value in life. It is certainly important as a modifier of other initiatives, but if a society is to evolve, or if leaders are to arise, then safety can never be allowed to become more important than adventure. We are on our way to becoming a nation of “skimmers,” living off the risks of previous generations and constantly taking from the top without adding significantly to its essence. Everything we enjoy as part of our advanced civilization, including the discovery, exploration, and development of our country, came about because previous generations made adventure more important than safety.
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Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
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Only time and pressure decide if a stone evolves itself to become a brilliant gem or brittle down to soil
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Joshy A J
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Redefining the paradigm of business benchmarking in a dynamic technological world, fosters new strategic concepts that will define how businesses will evolve to gain traction.
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Wayne Chirisa
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Biology, physiology, and anatomy have less to do with our chairs than pharaohs, kings, and executives,” she writes. One kind of historical chair, called the “klismos” by historians, evolved primarily as an historical expression of status and rank. Setting a body higher than and apart from other people, in an individual structure with rigid, flat planes—a throne, if you will—evolved as a way of recognizing an individual’s power or leadership, with the earliest known models dating to ancient Egypt and southeastern Europe. Their use as an expression of authority continued through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the endurance of this symbolism lives on as metaphor in many contemporary leadership titles; to chair the committee or the department, or to sit in the designated “director’s chair” on a film set, is still to hold a seat of power.
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Sara Hendren (What Can a Body Do?)
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Leaders evolve when people evolve.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
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If the busiest person in the office is the CEO, it only means that either the leadership has failed to create evolving systems or the leadership itself has failed.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
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Evolution is a fundamental law of nature. Despite resistance to change, humans will keep evolving.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
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Leadership is not a trait you're born with, but a skill cultivated daily. Through constant reflection, we unlock our full potential, inviting growth and success. Every sunrise is an opportunity to learn and evolve - seize it. Remember, in the journey of life, it's your Daily Dose of Leadership that sets the course.
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Farshad Asl
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Currencies evolve, mirroring our society's progress. Cryptocurrency, data, skills, trust, time, and social capital—these aren't merely trends, but reflections of a new paradigm. Adapt, learn, and leverage them, for success in the modern world demands this broadened understanding.
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Farshad Asl
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Leadership at scale—and leadership as you scale—means you’re constantly adapting and evolving. You can’t follow a single style or approach. You’re always leading through transitions. Your company is always changing around you. And this means you’re naturally going to have a very resilient kind of leadership, producing a resilient team and company.
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Reid Hoffman (Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths from the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs)
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People have looked at these questions from every possible angle. Abraham Maslow famously looked at how human needs evolve along the human journey, from basic physiological needs to self-actualization. Others looked at development through the lenses of worldviews (Gebser, among others), cognitive capacities (Piaget), values (Graves), moral development (Kohlberg, Gilligan), self-identity (Loevinger), spirituality (Fowler), leadership (Cook-Greuter, Kegan, Torbert), and so on.
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Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness)