From Oxford to the World: How Navigating the Organisational Landscape Came to Life
Some books begin as proposals. Others begin as conversations. Navigating the Organisational Landscape: A Scholar-Practitioner’s Guide to Effective Leadership began as a promise made on a summer afternoon outside the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, after a world had changed and a cohort had endured it together.
The book first emerged from work shaped at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, through the Diploma in Organisational Leadership. Developed collaboratively, its real strength lies in a collective voice—a global community of scholar-practitioners translating rigorous thinking into lived leadership.
This article traces why the book matters, and why its authors and the programme that shaped them warrant attention.
A Cohort Interrupted—and Clarified
The Diploma in Organisational Leadership is not a programme one simply completes; it is one that tests those who undertake it. Our cohort began in 2019, gathering in Oxford’s lecture halls with expectations of intellectual challenge and professional growth. What we did not anticipate was that the world itself would become our most demanding case study.
The pandemic dispersed us across continents and forced leaders everywhere to act without precedent.
Theory could no longer wait politely for practice; it had to perform, immediately, imperfectly, and publicly.
It was during that interval, between matriculation and ceremony, intention and reality, that the idea for this book took shape. Standing outside the Sheldonian Theatre in July 2022, I spoke with Professor Sue Dopson about an idea I had raised throughout the programme: that the thinking developed there should live beyond the classroom as a book authored by colleagues from the cohort. We agreed on the project there and then.
Nearly four years later, that promise is realised in a volume that reflects leadership not as abstraction, but as responsibility.
Leadership as a Moral and Intellectual Vocation
At its heart, Navigating the Organisational Landscape advances a simple but demanding claim:
leadership is a moral and intellectual vocation. It requires judgement, courage, restraint, and accountability, not merely performance.
Across thirteen chapters, the book bridges theory and practice through frameworks tested under pressure, during corporate turnarounds, ethical crises, organisational redesigns, and moments of profound uncertainty. Readers will encounter familiar thinkers, John Kotter, Kurt Lewin, Edgar Schein, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Buber, always in conversation with lived experience: dashboards, hiring rubrics, decision architectures, and the unglamorous habits through which institutions endure.
This is not a book about leadership as theatre. It is a book about leadership as craft.
A Global Chorus of Scholar-Practitioners
The authors of this volume exemplify what the Diploma in Organisational Leadership does best: it brings together accomplished professionals from across the world and invites them to think more deeply about the consequences of their decisions.
Contributors bring perspectives shaped by Austria, Finland, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Peru, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They are executives, strategists, HR leaders, social entrepreneurs, and public-sector professionals. What unites them is not sector or geography, but stance.
Each chapter reflects the scholar-practitioner ideal: ideas honed at Oxford and refined through use. From leadership assessment in a VUCA world, to ethics as a source of competitive advantage, to the paradoxes of restructuring HR, to the quiet strength of solitary leadership, these are voices shaped by responsibility, not rhetoric.
Their decision to share the book widely signals something essential: this is a collective offering.
The Authors: A Global Community of Scholar-Practitioners
Navigating the Organisational Landscape is a collective achievement. Each chapter is authored by a leader who completed the Diploma in Organisational Leadership at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and who chose to transform rigorous academic work into practical contribution.
Together, these authors represent a living map of contemporary leadership across sectors, cultures, and responsibilities. The table below lists each author, their country of origin, and their role and contribution to the volume.
| Name | Country of Origin | Role & Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Shawn D. Mathis | United States | Editor of the volume and author of Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice in Leadership. Writes on the scholar–practitioner identity, leadership frameworks, and the moral dimensions of organisational decision-making. |
| Shamini Murugesh | India | Associate Editor and author of Moving the Elephant Without a Stick. Explores leadership through core behaviours, introducing the roles of organisational Prophet and Ambassador as humane alternatives to command-and-control models. |
| Lukas-Kajetan Gruber | Austria | Associate Editor and author of The Power-Tetrahedron in Organisational Leadership. Develops a practical philosophy of power grounded in Weber, Buber, and Arendt, shaped by experience in the Austrian Armed Forces. |
| Mitsuhiro Kawashima | Japan | Author of Leadership Assessment: Evaluating Performance and Potential in a VUCA World. Designs assessment architectures that integrate performance, potential, and uncertainty. |
| Maximilian Wischow | Germany | Author of Creating and Implementing Effective Product Strategy. Translates strategy from aspiration into system through disciplined choice and customer value. |
| Silvana Perez Yalan | Peru | Author of Cultivating Compliance, Ethics, and Corporate Integrity. Shows how ethics and compliance become strategic advantages when aligned with leadership behaviour and organisational culture. |
| May Ongola | Tanzania | Author of A Context-Driven Approach Towards Creating Diverse and Inclusive Workplaces. Argues that diversity and inclusion succeed only when designed for context, cadence, and accountability. Originally from Tanzania, she is currently based in Germany. |
| Mikko Nieminen | Finland | Author of The Bright Triad of Leadership. Introduces Credibility, Respectability, and Trustworthiness as operational leadership principles, expressed through eight Finnish verbs. |
| Michelle Money | United Kingdom | Author of Restructuring the Restructurers. Examines the paradox of HR leaders managing change while being subject to it, using tame, critical, and wicked problem frames. |
| Antonio md Zingale | Italy | Author of The Move Attitude. Presents leadership as an iterative practice—observe, learn, act—capable of sustaining momentum under uncertainty. |
| Nick Edwards | United Kingdom | Author of Effective Communication Strategies for Corporate Turnaround. Focuses on leadership communication as a stabilising force in moments of organisational crisis. |
| Allen Pearson | United States | Author of The Journey of a Self-Doubting Leader. Explores leadership transformation through reflective practice, examining how self-doubt, humility, and moral awareness become sources of strength rather than liability. |
| Francesca Del Mese | United Kingdom | Author of The Lone Leader. Explores integrity, resilience, and moral courage when leadership must be exercised in solitude. |
A Shared Achievement
Each of these authors writes not about leadership, but from within it. Their chapters reflect decisions made under pressure, responsibilities carried without certainty, and judgement refined through consequence.
They are not only contributors to a volume; they are ambassadors for a way of leading shaped at the University of Oxford and tested in the world.
Professor Sue Dopson and the Architecture of the Programme
No account of this book would be complete without acknowledging the intellectual leadership of Professor Sue Dopson. As Programme Director of the Diploma in Organisational Leadership, she has shaped generations of leaders by insisting on a balance between academic rigour and practical obligation.
Her foreword situates the book where it belongs, not as another manual, but as a human exploration of leadership excellence. She gives voice to what is often left implicit: that leadership today is defined less by authority than by the capacity to release energy, build trust, and act with integrity under pressure.
The Diploma itself embodies this philosophy. It does not train leaders to perform certainty; it equips them to navigate ambiguity with judgement. For those considering advanced leadership development, the programme stands as a serious invitation to think harder, decide better, and lead more responsibly.
An Open Offering: Why This Book Is Freely Available
From the outset, we were clear about one thing: Navigating the Organisational Landscape should not be gated by privilege, paywalls, or institutional access. Leadership, as explored in this volume, is not proprietary knowledge; it is a shared human responsibility.
For that reason, we chose to publish the book as open access, freely available to anyone who wishes to read, teach from, or reflect with it. The volume is hosted on Zenodo, the open research repository supported by CERN and the European Commission, and can be accessed via its DOI:
👉 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18314652
This decision reflects our shared values as organisational leaders, formed through lived professional experience and shaped by our time at Oxford. The programme gave those values structure; the book gives them voice.
The Diploma in Organisational Leadership consistently invites participants to think beyond individual success and towards collective contribution, asking not only what do I know?, but how should this knowledge be used and shared? Making the book freely available is our collective response to that challenge.
The volume is offered as a resource for leaders, scholars, practitioners, students, and institutions. Whether read in a boardroom, a classroom, a public service organisation, or in quiet personal reflection, it is intended to travel, to be debated, and to be used.
In this sense, the book is not only a publication. It is a gift from the graduates of the Diploma in Organisational Leadership, made possible through the programme led by Professor Sue Dopson, and offered to Oxford and to a global community of leaders navigating complexity with judgement and care.
If the book helps even one reader make a wiser decision, ask a better question, or lead with greater integrity, offering it freely will have been the right choice.
Why This Book—and Why Now
Navigating the Organisational Landscape is intended for leaders, aspiring leaders, scholars, and institutions seeking frameworks that endure beyond the news cycle.
Its relevance lies in both timing and tone. Written across years marked by disruption, the book resists easy answers. Instead, it offers integration: theory with tools, performance with potential, power with relationship, and compliance with value.
An Invitation
This volume emerged from University of Oxford, but it is not confined to Oxford. It is an invitation to practise leadership as a craft of consequence, and to join a community of scholar-practitioners who believe that how we lead matters.
I invite you to read the book, share it, and engage with its authors. And if your own leadership journey calls for deeper reflection, I invite you to explore the Diploma in Organisational Leadership at Saïd Business School.
A promise was made. It is now shared with the world.