Abstract
The world is a messy place. That does not make adaptation and anticipation easy for leaders. Despite the hopes of the 1990’s, hopes for a simpler, more unified world in which “East versus West” and “Communism versus Capitalism” were competing philosophical and economic schisms that would no longer be relevant to the geopolitical landscape, our planet has become increasingly and confusingly complex. We are faced with a dynamic and uncertain world where the global financial markets have collapsed in a shockingly precipitous fashion, in which terrorism has become a global enterprise, where unknown Russian oil magnates can buy iconic British football clubs outright and J. K. Rowling, a writer of children’s books, has gone, in the space of about five years, from an unknown author, living in a one bedroom flat in Edinburgh, to one of the richest storytellers the world has ever seen. Who could have anticipated any of that? But amidst the apparent chaos and complexity at a global level, there are patterns and structures that have real implications for leaders.
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Notes
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Richard Reeves, Happy Mondays: Putting the Pleasure Back into Work (Momentum, 2001).
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Longman, new edition, 2007).
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© 2010 Tony Hall & Karen Janman
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Hall, T., Janman, K. (2010). Our Connected World. In: The Leadership Illusion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-24670-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-24670-6_2
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