Bob Aubrey
Creating Aspirational Leaders
This book is for leaders who want to be on the solution side rather than the problem side of today’s aspirational workforce.
Leaders have always had the job of developing people at work, but today’s workers demand that their identities and aspirations be valued and developed along with their skills. In this book, author Bob Aubrey, explains how the aspirational movement, covered by the media in the streets from Cairo to New York, is also a force for change in the factories, stores and offices of companies large and small. The message is that companies must make work more aspirational or risk losing their talented workers. The lesson for leaders is that they must be capable in developing employee aspirations or they won’t be leading for long.
Starting with the story of an aspirational leadership disaster in the world’s largest factory, Bob Aubrey takes the reader through a process of building an aspirational organisation, developing leadership wisdom, using new tools for aspirational development and mastering new dimensions of employee motivation. This book is full of illustrations and stories of leaders who have improved business results while developing people potential to achieve the status of a great company for people development.
Whether you are leading a global organisation, running a small business or managing a team of employees, this book will help you develop the right leadership to create a competitive workforce advantage.
Managing your Aspirations:
This book represents the first time that the Personal Enterprise Plan is being put into the public domain. So I am keenly interested in hearing from you if you are writing your PEP, either in a program in your company or your university, or on your own. We have tested the PEP on four continents and across age groups. What has surprised me is the continuity of key elements of the plan. This includes how people identify their core identity. What they say about their aspirations, especially when they go to the stage of enterprise – deciding to realize those aspirations. And also I find that people’s personal competencies really drive their careers. So that makes it worth the time investing in writing this down. But what is your experience?
A second thing I want to follow is how people in institutions build programs using the PEP as a tool. What is the reason for using this tool? What is the population? How is the program designed? What else goes into the program? These are initiatives that deserve sharing in this space.
Professor Bob Aubrey is the founder and CEO of Metizo, an international personal development company, and Professor of Personal Development at Euromed Management school in France. A leading contributor to the new field of personal development in institutions, he created the first personal development certification for institutions of higher education as well as mentoring certification for corporate leaders. He also chairs Asia’s first MBA for talent professionals. Professor Aubrey travels frequently, working with companies such as Volkswagen, Nokia, Areva, ConocoPhillips and SAP on their talent and employee development strategies. His previous books deal with the wisdom of renewal, the future of work and changes in higher education. He is an accomplished teacher and speaker for business schools and personal development conferences in China, France, Singapore, Brazil and USA.
My ongoing research working with students and managers is dreams. Not the dreams you have at night. Not the Freudian analysis of dreams. It is about career dreams, meng xiang in Chinese, which are the basis of aspirations. I am interested in what readers think about the power of dreams in making a non-obvious career choice. I am also interested in the consistency of dreams over time. Did you have dreams in university, forget about them when you got caught up in your career and managing your life, only to find the dream come back as a moment of truth with the question “Am I going to do this or not?”. Another question may be “Am I going to be the person I dreamed to be, or the person I just grew into?”.
Publicity
McGraw-Hill Education (Asia)
