Shop

Momentum is your greatest ally–with it you can do anything, without it you will stall. As CEO you hate surprises, especially the kind that undermines momentum–yours or the organization you lead.

Every CEO’s journey is unique. However, there exists a very predictable, but previously unknown pattern: the CEO life cycle. The Four Dilemmas of the CEO outlines the common challenges that every CEO will face during their tenure, irrespective of geography or industry. Once understood, action can be taken to break through these glass ceilings that cause CEOs to get stuck in the business, while their mandate for working on the business is continually diverted.

Framed within the life cycle of a CEO, the Four Dilemmas are:
1. You’re in charge of everything, but cannot completely trust anything.
2. You know that today’s executive cannot deliver tomorrow’s results.
3. How do you engage the full capability of your executive working on the business when they are at capacity working in the business?
4. At what point does the price of remaining personally relevant outweigh your other options?

In the first book to focus on these four issues collectively, the authors draw on their decades of experience as trusted advisers across a range of industries to show every executive how to recognize and anticipate the individual dilemmas, master them, and accelerate through them.

Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of Britain and other Western societies: thriving cities versus the provinces, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit and the return of the far right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now.

In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts – economic, social and cultural – with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervour of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession.

Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself – and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the 20th century.