Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership

Book Reviews / May 2004

Offers a powerful method that leaders in organizations of all types can use to increase the timeliness and effectiveness of their actions.
Provides numerous real-world examples of action inquiry in action
Includes exercises individuals and organizations can use to begin practicing action inquiry
“A book for managers and students of management who are serious about exploring in depth how leaders and organizations can develop the capacity to continually learn and transform themselves.”

> Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline

This book introduces a fresh approach to helping individuals and organizations learn in the midst of the cut and thrust of daily action. “Action inquiry” is a highly accessible process whereby we can go beyond muddling through daily dilemmas to exercise transforming power at key moments, as well as timely action on a continual basis. This process not only allows for the correction of errors before they have negative consequences for business outcomes and trust, but can also be experienced as a pleasurable and energizing dance as a critical mass of colleagues join in, creating a positive climate for ongoing learning.

Bill Torbert and Associates illustrate how individuals and organizations can progress through more and more sophisticated “action-logics”-strategies for analyzing the world and reacting to it-until they will eventually be able to practice action inquiry continually. Offering action inquiry exercises at the end of the chapters, the book moves from junior managers beginning to practice action inquiry through CEOs transforming whole companies, to world leaders transforming whole countries, as exemplified by Czech president Vaclav Havel. Through short stories of leadership and organizational transformations, this groundbreaking book illustrates how action inquiry increases personal integrity, relational mutuality, company profitability, and long-term organizational and environmental sustainability.

Here is how to get the book:
www.bkconnection.com or call toll-free: 1-800-929-2929 Fax your order to: (802) 864-7626; Mail orders to: Berrett-Koehler Publishers PO Box 565, Williston, VT 05495; $29.95, paperback original; ISBN 1-57675-264-X

(I was asked to share the announcement with you and agreed to do so.
I am very much looking forward to reading this when it arrives. Russ)