New Holland Publishers is launching a business and natural history title called Wild Leadership by Erna Walraven. Wild Leadership offers a completely different perspective of leadership, linking us to our wild animal ancestors as it answers the question: “What can we learn about leadership from wild animals?” This book helps people understand the wild conduct in their companies and businesses, and provides a view of leadership inspired by evolutionary theory.
The book delves into our closest living relatives, Chimpanzees and Bonobos, which we share almost 99 per cent of our DNA with. We are less hairy and might wear a business suit, but we are driven by our instincts and emotions just like our wild relatives. We evolved with a primate social structure that worked well for us in the past. But now we are facing the challenges of a modern technological world with the same brain that served us two thousand years ago. Our primitive brain matter has been largely unaltered since this time, and neither have we changed the evolutionary encoded, hardwired expectations we have of our leaders. This book highlights what wild animals expect from their alphas and how understanding these expectations can help humans to lead more naturally and effectively.
Erna Walraven is the Emeritus Senior Curator at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. She has worked with and observed wild animals for more than three decades and has a deep fascination for our shared evolutionary history and the leadership lessons we can learn from a shared past.
Wild Leadership, New Holland Publishers RRP $29.99 available from all good book retailers or online.
Readers also enjoyed our preview of book Wild Dives.
