WHY
A Journey Through Authentic Leadership
The Book
I have spent the past four decades working with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and their Executive Committees in a significant number of the major global companies, including many innovative companies operating in new ecosystems and dynamic family-owned businesses. During these four decades the world has evolved in ways that few would have predicted back then and I have, as so many of you, lived through many different crisis.
Our social, economic, technological, and cultural frameworks are shifting rapidly. Our world has become even more asymmetric. Our clients’ expectations and behaviors have become unpredictable. Our people and teams are emotionally weary and worried about the future. Our business ecosystems are stressed. We are rethinking our business architecture, models, and strategy. We continue to see significant transformation that is fundamentally shifting the way we generate value, and the way we contribute to create a better world.
As we continue to deal with uncertainty, complexity, exponential change, immediacy, and diversity, I realize that we are all being confronted with significant issues and questions that are not being answered by the traditional frameworks and mindsets we embraced many years ago. Our environment is shifting rapidly and so needs to shift the way we think and the way we feel.
We need to urgently embrace new “mindsets” and new “heartsets” to productively thrive in this new environment. We need a different set of lenses to read and understand the world around us. Uncertainty, complexity, exponential change, immediacy, and diversity have become much more than words that we use daily. They have become an integral part of our reality. Separately they are powerful levers in today’s world and are affecting our lives like never before. When we integrate them, their impact multiplies and amplifies to levels that few, if any of us, truly understand yet.
And this is where this manual comes in.
During the past four decades, and through countless conversations, I have developed a simple and intuitive model that helps us integrate
– Who we are as human beings and professionals, with
– What we do
It connects and helps us process and integrate three dimensions
THE FOUNDATIONS
Building and Accessing The Anchors – takes the leader on a journey of introspection to connect with the three key areas that support him/her through their leadership journey – Who am I, What do I stand for, and How do Icreate meaning.
BRINGING AUTHENTICITY TO LEADERSHIP
The Path to Charisma and Gravitas – takes the leader on a journey to understand how he/she builds and sustains trustworthiness, influence, impact and credibility.
THE AUTHENTIC LEADER'S JOURNEY
Where the leader journeys through seven key spaces of action, engagement, commitment and value – self, other, team, organization, ecosystem, market and society.
The key to both reading and then accessing the full value of this manual is to
– Understand – we first read, process, and understand.
– Own – we then reflect, bring it into our own reality and make it our own.
– Activate – we move beyond understanding and owning the content and we activate it by taking some practical and real action in our daily lives.
– Accelerate – by daring to stretch the boundaries of our comfort zones and experimenting and trying new and potentially powerful perspectives.
The last few pages are a Self-Development Workbook. The Workbook follows the manual’s logic and is meant to take you on a journey of hindsight (learning from your past experience), insight (engage in introspection), and foresight (contemplate next steps and action on your journey).
One final note on how to read this manual. It has been built around a model. It has been written on the basis of asking questions and giving tips and method, so that leaders become proficient in “being” and “doing” across a series of leadership spaces where they wish to be seen to be trustworthy, of influence, with impact and credible.
It is my hope that these pages are a source for many useful and interesting conversations, and that they will contribute to the shaping of the authentic leadership style of leaders in environments of uncertainty, complexity, exponential change, immediacy, and diversity.
A Journey Through Authentic Leadership
In 2023, Luis published “A Journey Through Authentic Leadership”, a book to be used as a practical tool for senior leaders to lead in an environment of uncertainty, complexity, exponential change, immediacy and diversity. Authentic leadership is rapidly becoming a foundational necessity for leaders working with their teams in this new reality.
