Breaking Free of Bonkers, Hachette, 2017
"Breaking Free of Bonkers" is a new book by three organisation consultants at Ashridge Business School which offers a radical rethink of how people, at all levels, lead in big organisations.
In business and in public life, we have come to assume that "business knows best" and to place our faith in an unholy trinity of clever strategy, heroic leadership, and transformational change to "save us" and make the world a better place.
What these false gods are about is a preoccupation with management and control, the idea of driving change in organisations towards a predetermined outcome.
The conventional wisdom leaves out the subjective, the emotional and the instinctive, and the relationships and tacit understandings that make organisations successful.
What can we do? We do not have to give in or give up. Rather, we need to trust ourselves (which requires an appropriate level of self-examination), trust the group around us (that too is likely to involve some tough conversations), and connect more widely, building community to make common cause with others. We should focus on what we can do with others, not burden ourselves with what is impossible.
Purchase book on Amazon
"Breaking Free of Bonkers" is a new book by three organisation consultants at Ashridge Business School which offers a radical rethink of how people, at all levels, lead in big organisations.
In business and in public life, we have come to assume that "business knows best" and to place our faith in an unholy trinity of clever strategy, heroic leadership, and transformational change to "save us" and make the world a better place.
What these false gods are about is a preoccupation with management and control, the idea of driving change in organisations towards a predetermined outcome.
The conventional wisdom leaves out the subjective, the emotional and the instinctive, and the relationships and tacit understandings that make organisations successful.
What can we do? We do not have to give in or give up. Rather, we need to trust ourselves (which requires an appropriate level of self-examination), trust the group around us (that too is likely to involve some tough conversations), and connect more widely, building community to make common cause with others. We should focus on what we can do with others, not burden ourselves with what is impossible.
Purchase book on Amazon
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Living Leadership: A Practical Guide for Ordinary Heroes, FT Prentice Hall, 2012
Based on a unique four-year experiment working alongside real leaders in real organisations, Living Leadership explodes the myth of the charismatic transformational leader, to show that real progress comes from the dramatically ordinary stuff of leadership. From building relationships, not starting revolutions, from working with the grain of your organisation, not against it, and from knowing your limits, not pushing every boundary. The book is about ordinary heroes - people at many levels, not just great figures at the top - who provide the leadership that organisations need. Purchase book on Amazon |
Leaders in Transition: the dramas of ordinary heroes, Ashridge, 2003
This report offers a new and down-to-earth view of what happens to individuals and organisations when leaders change and what people can do to make leadership changes succeed.
An international team backed by Ashridge and Groupe HEC lived alongside leaders and their organisations for periods of one to two years and experienced the ups and downs as new leaders took up their roles in a mix of commercial and public sector organisations. The "warts and all" picture we found was very different from the sanitised, retrospective accounts you see in much management research.
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Leaning Into The Future: changing the way people change organisations
This book challenges the change programmes that have engulfed many organisations and offers an alternative view of how individuals at all levels shape radical change; how they combine leading and learning in order to lean into the future. Drawing on the experience of over 100 international companies and public organisations, it shows how successful leaders are reaching beyond the "top down" and "bottom up" approaches and bringing together strong leadership with a passionate commitment to learning. The book challenges received wisdom but does so from the perspective of the practising manager, not the academic. Purchase book on Amazon |
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Making Quality Work, Economist Intelligence Unit, 1992
This report looked at the experience of 50 companies and organisations across Europe as they implemented Total Quality approaches. It distilled the key lessons that lay behind the hype and slogans and highlighted the way that some businesses make quality an integrated part of the way they do business. |
