Resources
Transforming the Way We Lead
“Leaders need to be able to transform their organisations if they are to be sustainable in today’s volatile and ambiguous world…But what does it take to be a transformational leader?”
The call for transformational leadership has increased significantly in recent times. Is this just a new fashion or is there substance behind the label?
Read the article here.
Personal & Organisational Transformations Through Action Inquiry
Fisher, Rooke & Torbert (2003 fourth edition)
Provides in-depth insight into the Leadership Development Framework, with exercises and case studies that enable the reader to pursue personal learning that marks a journey through these stages.
“What folly to think of developing the learning capabilities of organisations independent from the learning capabilities of the individuals within them. This book offers an exciting new view of the possible synergies between human and organizational development.” Peter Senge, Director, Society for Organizational Learning.
The price is £20 plus £3.30 p+p in UK (please enquire for postage abroad). Click the link below to order direct from Harthill.
Action Inquiry The Secret of Timely & Transforming Leadership
Bill Torbert & Associates (2004)
ACTION INQUIRY not only introduces recent research on leaders who successfully transform themselves, their teams, and their organisations, but also offers specific practices that invite readers to try new combinations of action and inquiry in the midst of their own daily leadership opportunities. In addition to potentially being of direct interest to you, ACTION INQUIRY is a good book to read with co-workers.
“Action Inquiry offers a profound step toward a more integral and comprehensive approach to leadership – including not only what constitutes effective leadership, but field tested methods for transforming your own approach into more effective, successful, and truly inspiring leadership.” Ken Wilber.
Breaking The Leadership Mold
Rosie Steeves
Those at the top have a profound impact on the success of their organization. Effective and relevant senior leadership directly translates into an engaged, sustainable and profitable organisation. Conversely, leadership that is out-of-touch, externally focused and embedded in paradigms of days gone by leads to employee disengagement, poor morale and ultimately a lack of organisational competitiveness. Unfortunately, sometimes senior leadership is marked by good intent but ineffective practice. It needn’t be this way.
Click the link below to order direct from Amazon.
Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All
Jim Collins
Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research,buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague Morten Hansen enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous and fast-moving times. This book is classic Collins: contrarian, data-driven and uplifting.
Click the link below to order direct from Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Choice-Uncertainty-Luck-Why-Despite/dp/0062120999
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
Jim Collins
The Challenge:
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.
But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
The Study:
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?
The Standards:
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
The Comparisons:
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?
Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.
The Findings:
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:
- Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
- The Hedgehog Concept: (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
- A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
- The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.
“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, “fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”
Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?
Click the link below to order direct from Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996/
The scale-up report on UK economic growth
Sherry Coutu CBE
A small group of rapidly expanding ‘scale-up’ companies create a significant proportion of the UK ’s economic growth; however, we lag behind the US and other leading economies in the relative proportion of these vital scale-up companies.
This is not because of a lack of ambition or ability in the leaders of these companies and we can reverse the trend.
Digital disruption Short fuse, big bang?
Giam Swiegers
One-third of the Australian economy faces imminent and substantial disruption by digital technologies and business models – what we call a ‘short fuse, big bang’ scenario. This presents significant threats, as well as opportunities, for both business and government
The hidden talent: Ten ways to identify and retain transformational leaders
Harthill Consulting Data 2015
Although we have seen a 10 percentage point increase in the number of Individualists, this has not yet been translated into an increase in the number of Strategists in organisations.
The Systems Thinker
The CEO’s Role in organisational transformation by David Rooke and William R. Torbert
Addressing Enterprise Leadership in Australia
