Books by Sarah Wood

Stepping up could be about taking on your first leadership or management role. It could be about changing your career, or leaving employment to start up on your own. It could be about changing the way you run a team already under your management. Whatever your circumstances, you will face the same issues we all do: changing attitudes, changing technology and our fast-moving rollercoaster of a world. Stepping Up will inspire and equip you to understand and respond to that change and develop your ability to lead yourself and others through it. Follow the practical five point framework on how to step up and fulfil your ambitions: 1. Vision - How to reset your rules in a complex and changing landscape 2. Values - Develop your leadership mission by understanding why you want to lead 3. Velocity - Invest in yourself and build the skills and capabilities of a great leader 4. Votes - Invest in your team and bring together a fantastic team of people to take you on your journey 5. Victories - Deliver brilliant results and ensure you can deliver on your promises

This is an exploration of the possibilities of letting go of our inner desire for control. Without Mastery constantly engages the pleasure, rigour and strangeness of reading, invoking the forcefulness of the Weird Sisters, Plato's Lady Necessity and assorted literary animals, angels, ghosts and children to explore the inner workings of our desire for mastery, and especially the omnipotence of thoughts. For Sarah Wood the thought of Derrida, Freud, Cixous, Plato and others is a kind of dramatic interaction, a message to be received emotionally and responded to inventively in writing that is both critical and creative. The destructiveness of masterful thinking has brought the planet into environmental crisis and continues to deny the facts. Reading, this book makes clear, teaches us to engage with the unthinkable. It provides a challenge and an alternative to 'masterful' or technical approaches to theory. It demonstrates that writing and power can work productively together. It draws on the power of poetry and fiction to help us think and puts this to work in the book's own practice of creative critical writing. It presents original new readings of canonical literary writers.