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- Blended Learning Solutions
New book by Ashridge Associate, John Higgins
"Images of Authority, Working within the Shadow of the Crown"
Based around eighteen off-the-record stories, Images of Authority uses the experience of film directors, chief executives, research scientists, counsellors and many others to provide readers with material to help them think through the light and the shade of their own ambition. It also provides those already in authority, or who work with people in authority, with stories, pictures and frameworks to explore the personal consequences of their position.
The actual experience of authority always has the personal at its heart; what this book gives is an accessible way of understanding how the personal informs the professional and how individual history can inform rather than consume a person in a position of authority.
The issues it can specifically be seen to address are:
- How can someone live with the personal consequences of being in a position of authority?
- How do you know if, and how, you can survive in a senior role (and for how long)?
- What can you do when people around you start dumping their fantasies about power, authority and responsibility onto you?
Images of Authority is now available to purchase from Middlesex University Press.
What the critics say
"Whatever 'authority' is, and how, through our actions, we de-authorize or re-authorize ourselves and others, is one of the deepest human mysteries.
What Higgins makes unmistakably clear, through highly readable short cases and commentaries from multiple perspectives, is how painful mis-taken authority is and how personal the art of taking it is.
This book is a marvelous way to begin exploring this topic seriously and practically."
Bill Torbert, Management Professor Emeritus, Boston College
"Fascinating and relevant"
Sarah Sands, Editor-in-Chief of Readers Digest UK and Former Editor of the Sunday Telegraph
About the author
John Higgins is an independent researcher specialising in the interplay of the personal and the professional – he’s also a Research Associate of Ashridge Business School. He’s worked as a bad computer programmer and a better organisational consultant and tutor. He’s also benefited from ten years exposure to Jungian psychoanalysis.
His own relationship to authority is coloured by a growing realisation (and acceptance) that institutional authority is not his calling – and feelings of resentful awe towards those who can occupy such roles. He is also acutely conscious that his experience of authority is intimately bound up with starting life as part of a military family and his current reality as a father of two daughters in a patriarchal world.
His previous publication, edited with Ashridge colleagues Bill Critchley and Kathleen King, was Organisational Consulting – A Relational Perspective (Middlesex University Press, 2007). He can be contacted by email on higginsboot@bulldoghome.com or via MUP.
