Joan Marques - Innovative Leadership in Times of Compelling Changes: Strategies, Reflections and Tools (Management, Change, Strategy and Positive Leadership)

In Chap. , titled, Awakened Leadership: Leading with Light, Joan Marques provides a mental and emotional framework to help readers understand how to deal with challenging situations both those we can and those we cannot change. After first reflecting on a long-standing concern among members in society when it comes to the short-term, excessive profit focus among leaders, she discusses the concept of wakefulness, briefly analyzes a series of contemporary leadership styles, and subsequently lays out a behavioral roadmap for those interested in adopting a reflective, awakened leadership approach.

In Chap. , Mindfulness as a Strategy to Weather Challenges, Carrie Amani Annabi, considers physiological, sociological, and positive psychological research to help us better understand historic and contemporary studies that feed into business management and leadership disciplines. Her goal is to help readers rationalize and position mindfulness, leading to the understanding that mindfulness is a logical answer for leaders faced with continued challenges.

In Chap. , Inclusive Leadership in an Increasingly Diversified World, Babar Dharani and Kurt April invite leaders to break free from the fixation on in-groups and out-groups in their work environments. They suggest that exposure to diversity is a foundational step to break free from this fixation. Considering the surge in awareness on diversity management, these authors consider the role of leadership for enhancing diversity and securing inclusion therein to be profound. They explain inclusion as ensuring justice and equity, enabling people to belong to a group while helping them preserve their uniqueness, becoming conscious of ones own privileges, and finding the voice to express our concerns and opinions skillfully when out-grouped.

In Chap. , Leading Reflectively: Treading the Noble Eightfold Path, Joan Marques presents leadership as a personal choice and discusses within the scope of Buddhist psychology the four noble truths, comprising the noble eightfold path, as a useful strategy to identify a set of behaviors that can reduce suffering at the personal and societal level. In each of the elements of the eightfold path, she presents an individual who exerted strong personal leadership, often at the odds of all other opinions, and established a positive change internally as well as for his or her society.