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Stealing from the future: and how you can stop it
Stealing from the future affects all of us every day, it affects our relationships, our jobs and our society.By far the most common form of leadership in human history is a style of leadership that creates results by stealing from the future. Today centuries of stealing from the future are culminating in an existential threat for humanity and many other species. There is an alternative. There is another style of leadership available to us which leads to sustained success.This book is about how we can be that kind of leader if we want to and how we can avoid electing, selecting, promoting or following the other kind.
316 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 8, 2018
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May 11, 2022
I came across this via the authors' concept of organisational bandwidth and states of organisational evolution, which is a useful toolkit and which is covered in this book. And building on that, what makes for successful teams (this a direct quote by the authors from research done internally at Google), words that echo a recent session we had from some ex Royal Marines:
"We learned that there are five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google:
1. Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
2. Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
3. Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles and execution plans on our team clear?
4. Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
5. Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?”
However, there's a lot more covered as well, rather too much (the book itself admits the section on megatrends is merely summarising key points covered in more detail elsewhere). And the book as a whole seemed to alternate between rather narrow coverage of several topics and then circling back over-repetition of the key themes.
More disturbingly I felt there was something of an over-fascination with messianic leaders, particularly of the tech-bro variety (I struggle with a book where Elon Musk is held up as an exemplar). Although messianic is probably the wrong word as the book has an uncurrent of anti-religion as well (references to 'imaginary friends' etc). And add tinge of ageism (it rightly highlights ageing populations as a mega-trend but then declares any company whose average age of staff isn't in the 20s is unlikely to be innovative).
To be fair it does highlight the risks of superiority with messianic (it prefers Visionary and Authentic) leaders and the risk of Bosses and Rulers type leaders as a result, e.g. how Obama is followed by Trump, although it seems to suggest the real issue here is first-past-the-post democracy vs say the Chinese system.
Production quality wise this is I think self-published and certainly came across as such, albeit reasonable value in that it was free with Kindle unlimited.
"We learned that there are five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google:
1. Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
2. Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
3. Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles and execution plans on our team clear?
4. Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
5. Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?”
However, there's a lot more covered as well, rather too much (the book itself admits the section on megatrends is merely summarising key points covered in more detail elsewhere). And the book as a whole seemed to alternate between rather narrow coverage of several topics and then circling back over-repetition of the key themes.
More disturbingly I felt there was something of an over-fascination with messianic leaders, particularly of the tech-bro variety (I struggle with a book where Elon Musk is held up as an exemplar). Although messianic is probably the wrong word as the book has an uncurrent of anti-religion as well (references to 'imaginary friends' etc). And add tinge of ageism (it rightly highlights ageing populations as a mega-trend but then declares any company whose average age of staff isn't in the 20s is unlikely to be innovative).
To be fair it does highlight the risks of superiority with messianic (it prefers Visionary and Authentic) leaders and the risk of Bosses and Rulers type leaders as a result, e.g. how Obama is followed by Trump, although it seems to suggest the real issue here is first-past-the-post democracy vs say the Chinese system.
Production quality wise this is I think self-published and certainly came across as such, albeit reasonable value in that it was free with Kindle unlimited.
Displaying 1 of 1 review