Peter M. Senge

Charlotte Roberts

Art Kleiner

A guide to establishing learning organizations within existing companies provides exercises for individuals and teams, suggested approaches, and success stories

Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook

Bryan Smith

George Roth

Richard Ross

Outlines the challenges faced by managers and executives in a changing organization, and details how to maintain a progressive business after initial changes are introduced

The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations

The Dance of Change

In this second edition of his bestselling book, author Art Kleiner explores the nature of effective leadership in times of change and defines its importance to the corporation of the future. He describes a heretic as a visionary who creates change in large-scale companies, balancing the contrary truths they can’t deny against their loyalty to their organizations. The Age of Heretics reveals how managers can get stuck in counterproductive ways of doing things and shows why it takes a heretical point of view to get past the deadlock and move forward.

A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management

The Age of Heretics

The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success

Who Really Matters

In a breakthrough Organization Man for the twenty-first century, bestselling author Art Kleiner reveals that every organization is driven by a desire to satisfy a Core Group of influential individuals and explains why understanding this group’s expectations is the key to success. When corporate leaders announce, with seeming sincerity, “We make our decisions on behalf of our shareholders,” their words are taken at face value. But as recent news stories prove, this imperative is routinely violated. In Who Really Matters, Art Kleiner argues that the dissonance between a declared mission and actual operation can be seen at organizations large and small. All organizations have one motive in common. Every decision—which projects to back, who to promote, or how to spend money—is affected by the perceived wants and needs of a core group of people “who really matter.” The composition of the group can differ from organization to organization. Often, the most senior people in the hierarchy are members—but not always. Sometimes, the people who “matter” can extend far down the corporate ladder, or even reach outside the company to include key customers, labor union leaders, and stockholders. Kleiner gives readers clues about how to identify a core group’s real mission by observing its day-to-day actions, listening to the fundamental message it sends employees, examining its management of new members; understanding the ideas that shape its policies about management, money, and the way the world works; and avoiding the taboos governing the way it operates. Whether you’re a member of the Core Group—or want to be—this deft, engaging blend of argument and observation, anecdotes and advice, is the one guide you’ll need to achieve your career goals and aspirations by navigating the hidden pathways in any organization, large or small.

A cultural history of the 1960s cites the period's impact on such major corporations as Shell Oil and General Foods, and profiles the individuals who sought to apply democratic ideals to business

Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change

This pragmatic guide shows how to create an organization of learners. The stories in this book show that businesses, schools, agencies and even communities can undo their "learning disabilities" and achieve superior performance.

Jeffrey Schwartz

Josie Thomson

Leadership is the habit of making good choices. Even in difficult and uncertain circumstances, the most effective leaders focus their attention and overcome entrenched patterns of behavior to push an organization to new heights of success. This capability is no fluke: the latest research on the brain shows that we can pinpoint the mental activity associated with it—and cultivate it for our benefit. In this book, Art Kleiner, a strategy expert; Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist; and Josie Thomson, an executive coach, give a transformative explanation of how cutting-edge neuroscience can help business leaders set a course toward better management. Mapping the functions of a manager onto established patterns of mental activity, they identify crucial brain circuits and their parallels in organizational culture. Strategic leaders, they show, play the role of wise advocates: able to go beyond day-to-day transactional behavior to a longer-term, broader perspective that articulates their organization’s deeper purpose. True leaders can play this influencer role in an organization because they have cultivated similar self-reflective habits in their own minds. Providing a powerful guide to decision strategies and their consequences, The Wise Advocate helps managers find their own inner voice and then make that voice ring out loud and clear, with a four-step program for practice and catalytic implications for management strategy, executive education, and business results.

The Inner Voice of Strategic Leadership

The Wise Advocate

Nelda Cambron-McCabe

Timothy Lucas

Janis Dutton

Nelda H. Cambron-McCabe

Essays and case studies present advice on applying learning organization principles on a local level to help rebuild and strengthen American schools.

A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone who Cares about Education

Schools that Learn

A new edition - revised and updated with over 100 pages of new material - of the groundbreaking book that brings the principles of organizational learning to today s schools and classrooms.

A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education

Schools That Learn

This book is for people who want to learn, especially while treading the fertile ground of organizational life. The idea of a learning organization has become increasingly prominent over the last few years. This book's predecessor, The Fifth Discipline, helped give voice to that wave on interest by presenting the conceptual underpinnings of the work of building learning organizations. Since its publication in 1990, Peter Senge et al. have talked to thousands of people who have committed themselves to the idea of building a learning organization. However, many of them are still not certain how to put the concepts into practice, asking questions like 'What do we do Monday morning? How do we navigate past the many barriers and roadblocks to collective learning? How do we discover exactly what kind of learning organization we wish to create? How do we get started?' No one person has THE answers to these questions, but there are answers. It is time for a 'fieldbook' - a collection of notes, reflections and exercised 'from the field'. This volume contains 172 pieces of writing by 67 authors, describing tools and methods, stories and reflections, guiding ideas and exercises and resources which people are using effectively.

Art Kleiner

Books

Your next favorite book is out there