Based on his highly popular Columbia Business School course “Personal Leadership & Success”, Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa shares key principles for how to pursue success by letting your true self shine through in everything you do.

In our pursuit of success, we often struggle to balance the world’s demands with our own dreams. Some of us pursue Outer Success, wanting to be liked and loved, supported and promoted. But in our quest for worldly glory, we may ignore the subtle stirring of our spirit, waking up one day to realize just how far we have drifted from our personal ideals. Others among us seek Inner Success, wanting the freedom to pursue our own calling. But in our quest to be true to ourselves, we may end up hurting, disappointing, or antagonizing others, straining relationships and being sidelined.

It seems that our drives for Outer and Inner Success are destined to clash. But perhaps that’s only because we’ve been searching for success in the wrong places. We can pursue from the place where our greatest potential is held, our Inner Core, by activating Five Core Energies: Purpose, Wisdom, Growth, Love, and Self-Realization.

Through extensive scientific research and masterful storytelling about exemplary figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Theresa, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Nelson Mandela—and everyday heroes drawn from Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa’s class at Columbia Business School and client workshops at Mentora Institute—readers arrive at timeless principles of success in life and leadership. Empowered by your Five Core Energies, you discover how to create outer impact from a place of inner mastery.

With a PhD in Management Science from MIT and a lifelong study of the world’s mystic traditions, Wadhwa brings a mathematician’s rigor and a truth-seeker’s spirit to some of today’s most vexing questions about authenticity, success, leadership, and human potential. This book shows how by activating your Inner Core and expressing it in everything you do, you create the conditions where Inner Success and Outer Success can flourish in mutual harmony.

Hitendra Wadhwa is the founder of the Mentora Institute and Mentora Foundation, host of the podcast Intersections, and a Professor of Practice at Columbia Business School, where he teaches Columbia’s most popular MBA leadership course, for which he has won the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. His widely acclaimed research and teaching on leadership have been covered by Fortune, CNN, Psychology Today, BBC World Service, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Inc., and Forbes.

Wadhwa’s Mentora Institute is at the forefront of creating a new model of leadership for the 21st century. His clients include Accenture, Chevron, Kraft Heinz, Lululemon, Morgan Stanley, The New York Times, SAP, United Health Group and more. His nonprofit Mentora Foundation is committed to building a principled world by strengthening the moral, mental, and social fibers in their families, organizations, communities, and nations.  

Previously, Wadhwa was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company and the CEO/founder of a Silicon Valley start-up, Paramark, which was twice recognized as a Top-100 Internet technology company by Technologic Partners/Venture Wire.