Theorists may be familiar with Lewin’s Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze model. Those fortunate enough to hold an IVY-league MBA may be familiar with Kotter’s eight-stage model (Reviewed Here). However, more people will eventually be familiar with the Heath brothers Switch model. The creative minds behind Made to Stick recently released their sophomore effort, Switch: How to Change Things [...]
Leadership requires strategy.
But there is far more to strategy than just announcing where an organization is headed. The authors of Strategy Safari use the analogy of a syringe to explain this misconception. Where leaders believe it is solely their responsibility to fill a syringe with deliberate strategy and then inject it into the followers. What [...]
Why is the greatest military in the history of the world still fighting a war against a network of terrorists who can barely communicate from cave to cave? Why can’t a team of the highest-priced lawyers stop teenagers from downloading free music via peer-to-peer software? In The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod [...]
John Kotter is a Harvard Business School professor and prolific author on leadership and change. The bulk of Kotter’s work takes the form of scholarly articles and intellectual books. After years of research, Kotter published Leading Change. In it, he presents an 8 stage model for leading organizations through change. Leading Change presents great model, [...]
I’m going to stretch my rule on reviewing solid, researched books on leadership or organizational theory. The Peter Principle is in, fact theory. However, it hasn’t been researched because it’s also satire. The Peter Principle is both a book by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull and an organization principle similar to Parkinson’s Law.
The [...]
At first it may seem an odd choice for a book review. The One Minute Manager series is known for being a simple, easy to digest series of books seemingly designed for busy managers stuck at an airport bookstore with $20 to burn. And in fact, that is exactly what Leadership and the One Minute [...]
James Kouzes and Barry Posner began their research into leadership by asking people of every background a simple, but open-ended question: “What values, personality traits, or characteristics do you look for and admire in a leader?” The results were compiled and became The Five Practices of Exemplary Leaders® that Kouzes and Posner outline in The [...]
Warren Bennis believes that leadership is not something taught through training and development courses or, ironically, by buying books on leadership. Instead, Bennis argues that the majority of leaders have been made by accident, through circumstance and sheer grit. While Bennis acknowledges leadership courses teach skills, leaders are left on their own to develop character [...]
Strengths-Based Leadership is the culmination of 30 years of intensive research by the Gallup organization and interpreted by best selling author Tom Rath and renowned leadership and performance coach Barry Conchie. The authors of the book had access to over 40,000 personal interviews with leaders, 20,000 interviews with followers, and surveys from nearly one million [...]
About
David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab, a community of resources dedicated to promoting the practice of leadership theory. He is an executive coach, a sought-after speaker and an adjunct professor at Oral Roberts University’s School of Business.