The Leadership Lab

About the Authors

The authors of this book advise the world’s leaders. These include: heads of state, entrepreneurs, key investors, politicians, CEOs, senior politicians, humanitarian organisations, military leaders, educationalists and scientists all over the world.

Chris Lewis is the founder and CEO of LEWIS. He is a skilled media trainer who has coached senior politicians, business people and celebrities. Chris is also a published author and journalist who has written for the Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Guardian. Since founding LEWIS in 1995, it has grown at an average rate in excess of 25 per cent per annum to become one of the largest independent marketing and communications agencies in the world.

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Dr Pippa Malmgren is an economist and an entrepreneur. She advised President George W. Bush, currently works closely with the British government and the world’s largest financial and military organisations. Her best-selling book Signals is about anticipating events like the Financial Crisis, the slowdown in China, Brexit and Trump through every-day signs and common sense. She travels widely and is a frequent author and broadcaster. She also founded global success story H Robotics, a high-tech manufacturer of drones.

View Too Fast to Think on Amazon also by Chris Lewis

The Leadership LAB concludes that…

• The skills and qualities of a leader in the 20^thcentury are very different from the ones needed in the 21^st
• Recommends that ‘leadership’ becomes more of a focus than ‘leaders’ themselves. A team defrays risk and shares burden. A single leader, increases vulnerability and risk.
• Points out that leadership is distracted by an overload of insistent, disruptive and attention-getting, communications. This diverts thinking to the short-term, the quantitative and tactical and has a negative effect on creativity, imagination, community values and even mental health.
• Leadership is subject to impatience from electors, staff, shareholder and other stakeholder groups with expectations that the offline world should move at the same speed as online. There is no patience to take in complexity or even to read and understand. Attention spans are falling.
• Suggests that leadersoften cling to comfortable but inaccurate and outdated models of a macroeconomic environment that no longer exists.
• Offers thoughts to allow leaders to orient themselves more firmly in the new social, cultural, technological, behavioural, political and economic realities.
• Proposes ‘situational fluency’ as a new area of study – the ability to understand and move between multi-dimensional spheres and silos of expertise. This will allow leaders to join the dots across the landscape of reality to create a new global narrative on which a fresh leadership approach can be based.
• Proposes that this new cross-connectivity requires a shift in thinking. Current leadership understands depth of analysis. Leadership in the future will need both ‘drill-down’ analysis AND ‘look-across’ parenthesis.
• Identifies eight areas of paradoxical change that have both good and bad effects simultaneously. These ‘quantum super-positions’ are at the heart of the problem leaders face. These spokes are part of a device called The Kythera, which leaders can use to navigate in this new world.
• Points out the dangers of over-reliance on analysis and extrapolation based on historic data. It proposes a cyclical rather than linear model. It calls for less prediction of one outcome and greater preparation for many outcomes. It highlights the importance of imagination to plan for contingencies and crises.
• Suggests that leadership needs a better understanding of both long-term qualitative as well as short-term quantitative values. 21^stcentury leaders need to develop ‘to be’ as well ‘to do’ lists.
• Concludes that the economic response to change and uncertainty has been short-termism. This has created a new macroeconomic landscape which is very different to that which prevailed. For the longest period in history, governments have lowered interest rates and printed money to encourage long-term growth. This is creating record debt and stimulating inflation that contributes to inequality and instability.
• Shows that contrary to the commonly held view that the internet is deflationary, the internet is having an inflationary effect. It forecasts that new internet currencies will add to the problem.
• Reviews the nature of geopolitical change at the points of the compass in China, America, Russia, Europe and the Middle East. It also shows how global infrastructure is being built outwards from China towards the source of the many of the planets resources.
• Suggests that those either in show business or currently leading businesses (especially in tech) may become the provenance of a new age of political leadership. This leadership has created and understands many of the trends and may be better at implementing them in government.It further suggests that political leaders can learn from the show business style.
• Discusses how short-termism, impatience and economic pressure challenges leadership and may even disrupt diplomacy and contribute to conflict. This has significant implications for global leadership in terms of transparency, information flows, secrecy and trade relations with some of the fastest growing economies in the world.
• Explains that a new technological, virtual world is emerging which is atomising behaviour, disintermediating human relationships and diminishing productivity.
• Shows why we are ever more connected, yet communicating ever less. It also explains why technology causes people to feel more impatient, angry and atomised.
• Forecasts that the turmoil can be defended by a return to enduring values. This will mean longer term, more qualitative metrics which seek to understand the diverse needs of leaders’ communities. It predicts that all organisations will need to demonstrate the way in which they add value to their local communities.
• Provides‘Quick tips’ for those without the patience to read a book that promotes the virtues of calm contemplation…