Leadership Emerging / August-November 2015
Jeffrey Pfeffer (2015). Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time. New York: Harper Business.
In the year 2000, Chris Argyris introduced the new century with his publication of Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They’re Getting Good Advice and When They’re Not. In this exceptional book Argyris calls to task various very well known management and leadership gurus and spells out why their advice should be carefully examined and much …
Leadership Emerging / August-November 2015
Robin has brilliantly woven his ThriveAbility model into a field manual for executives, policy makers and change agents in service of creating a better world for future generations. Earth’s 7.3 billion citizens are currently consuming 1.6 times its available resources. This rate is clearly not sustainable, and trends indicate it will continue to rise. We have already hit a critical point. We are already seeing serious adverse impacts. These trends will continue unless we take immediate and dramatic action to …
Leadership Emerging / August-November 2015
John Brockman, Ed. This Idea Must Die. New York: Harper, 2015.
This is a most unusual book to be included in Integral Leadership Review. But it is a significant contribution to integral understanding. It is a book of very short entries by scholars and other intellectuals on ideas that are current in the various sciences, including the social sciences, about ideas that are perceived to stand in the way of our progress as a generative civilization. This virtual …
Leadership Emerging / August-November 2015
Brian J. Robertson, Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015.
In 2007 Integral Leadership Review featured a couple of articles about holacracy (http://integralleadershipreview.com/5328-feature-article-organization-at-the-leading-edge-introducing-holacracy-evolving-organization/ ; http://integralleadershipreview.com/5333-feature-article-holacracy-in-action-theory-to-practice/), Brian Robertson’s innovative organizational approach in the software company he built and his subsequent entrepreneurial activity.
On January 15, 2014 Forbes published a story about Zappos’ experience with holacracy: (http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/01/15/making-sense-of-zappos-and-holacracy/)
On May 29, 2015 FastCompany published an article about Zappos and holacracy. (http://www.fastcompany.com/3044352/the-secrets-of-holacracy.)
On …
Leadership Emerging / August-November 2015
Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt. Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.
The foundational theme of this book: “Meeting complexity with complexity can create more confusion than it resolves.” Stuff interacts in a variety of ways. Complex approaches can overwhelm us. Simple Rules asks, what alternative is there? Use simple rules to tame complexity. The authors offer six types of rules, all of which mutate under changing conditions. They support better …
Leadership Emerging / August-November 2015
Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston. Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Here is a book that seeks to confront our historic, cultural approach to leadership and nudge leading toward addressing the more rapidly changing and complex organizational and contextual landscape. Their strategy is to identify three habits of mind that individuals need to cultivate to make this shift from a focus on what is likely to what is possible. …
Leadership Emerging / August-November 2015
Mauk Pieper. Humanity’s Second Shock and Your Unique Self: Integral Leadership & Spirituality. Lage Vuursche, The Netherlands: Venwoude, Press, 2014.
Essentially, we have here a highly readable and understandable presentation of our developmental relationship to self and the universe that is built on the work of Ken Wilber and Marc Gafni, among others. It is not a “how to” manual, but a vision with a map. The map is characterized by the author as “Unique Self over time =True …
Leadership Emerging / August-November 2015
Scott K. Edinger and Laurie Sain. The Hidden Leader: Discover and Develop Greatness within Your Company, Foreword by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. New York: Amacom, 2015.
I sometimes find that I have snobbish tendencies. One way they come out is in relation to books published by AMACOM. Most of what I have seen relevant to understanding leadership and addressing its development has not been very sophisticated. But then, I suppose they are performing a service by …
Leadership Emerging / April - June 2015
“[E]very time humanity has shifted to a new stage, it has invented a new way to collaborate, a new organizational model” (Laloux, 2014, Kindle Locations 385-386).
The above quote is the premise of Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations. As he points out in the book, data in this area is as yet pretty slim. That being said, Laloux presents case studies on 12 different companies across various economic sectors that paint a pretty clear picture. Organizations founded on a clear …
Leadership Emerging / August - November 2014
In a recent online posting –(http://www.salon.com/2014/10/26/the_dangerous_american_myth_of_corporate_spirituality/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow) – Shawn Van Valkenburgh offers “The dangerous American myth of corporate spirituality: How invocations of “karma” and Zen are being used to justify deeply unequal systems of power,” (accessed 10/27/14). There he wonders about the spiritual materialism of adoptions of Buddhist meditation and philosophy (note The Secret). He sites examples of how this religious approach leads to ignoring the implications of institutional corruption and issues like climate change and the growing economic inequality in …