Intelligent Disobedience: The Difference between Good and Great Leaders

Obeying all of the rules rarely generates breakthrough business performance because it does not generate new approaches. Breaking the rules randomly does not work either. Intelligent disobedience values improved business performance over compliance with the rules, when conditions permit. This is the essence of intelligent disobedience: knowing when and how to break, bend, or invent new rules to get better outcomes.

This book promotes enhanced performance by promoting a higher form of ethics. Intelligent disobedience seeks to surface hidden truth and to produce actions that are of higher integrity to yield superior results. The book guides the reader to evaluate their work environment, current business results, and risk, to determine if, when, and how acting with intelligent disobedience can enhance their business outcomes and their career.

Intelligent Disobedience: The Difference between Good and Great Leaders seeks to:

• enhance the reader’s business success;
• help the reader examine methods for proposing potentially unpopular directions or opinions;
• propose a decision-making process for when the reader should "bend or break the rules" – leveraging common sense over common processes on an exception basis;
• guide the reader to determine instances in which improved outcomes are better than ensuring compliance with corporate norms or management directions.

This rich and sophisticated book interweaves real-life experiences from successful leaders with the themes of human psychology, ethics, decision making, delegation, communicating upwards and downwards...Everything the senior manager needs to survive and thrive in a complex, uncertain, ambiguous, and fast-changing world.

About the Author

Bob McGannon is director of Intelligent Disobedience Leadership, and has worked in management roles in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Over a career spanning 35 years, Bob has managed technology teams, outsourced services, and major change initiatives for large companies. He is also an entrepreneur, having launched and directed three companies in the consulting and training industries.

Bob is an author of more than 20 courses that can be found on the online LinkedIn Learning platform and has contributed chapters to two compiled works: Advising Upwards, edited by Linda Bourne; and The Keys to Our Success: Lessons Learned from 25 of Our Best Project Managers, edited by David Barrett. In addition, Bob has written numerous articles for his company newsletters, and writes the Intelligent Disobedience blog.

Bob’s passions are developing people, team creation, motivation and management focused on strategic implementation, and day-to-day process optimization. He is known for building cohesive, high-performing teams through strategy, culture development, project management, and suitable doses of intelligent disobedience – with a bit of fun mixed in.