Abstract
In a very real sense, everything we see is an illusion. Some of those illusions are man-made, while others are naturally occurring. When we look at an object, light bounces off it and produces two-dimensional, inverted images on our retina, which then travel along the optic nerve to the brain where they become a three-dimensional, “right way up picture” in our mind’s eye. To achieve that transformation, our brain interprets the data and the image we eventually perceive is a function of context, memory, genetics and motivations. Writing this book has been something akin to the process of human visual perception, although much slower! We started three years ago with some raw data — the basic idea and a book title. Our journey from the first meeting with the editor (“the basic premise is good, but the title is boring”) to the last conversation with a friend about the final chapter (“don’t make it too long”), has transformed that data into a richer, more colorful, and perhaps more useful interpretation than we envisaged at the beginning of our project. It has been a process that has confirmed a few things we believed, but has also highlighted a lot that we needed to consider and include. Our workshops and the in-depth interviews with leaders and their followers, academics and consultants, have provided the sort of reality and insight that have shaped and clarified the empirical (but sometimes opaque) perspective we had when first putting our fingers to keyboard.
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Notes
David Faber, And Then the Roof Caved In: How Wall Street Greed and Stupidity Brought Capitalism to Its Knees (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Joseph Alois Schumpeter. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Harper Perennial, 2008).
William D. Cohan, House of Cards: How Wall Street’s Gamblers Broke Capitalism: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Collapse of the Global Market (Allen Lane, 2009).
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© 2010 Tony Hall & Karen Janman
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Hall, T., Janman, K. (2010). Elephants, Moons and Mirrors. In: The Leadership Illusion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-24670-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-24670-6_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35448-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-24670-6
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