Books

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The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking

If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following “best practice” can help in some ways, it also poses a danger: By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you’ll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking—creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions—including “What are the causal relationships at work here?” and “What are the implied trade-offs?” Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge—including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, and The Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.

Five Minds for the Future

We live in a time of vast changes. And those changes call for entirely new ways of learning and thinking. In Five Minds for the Future: Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead: the disciplinary mind—mastery of major schools of thought (including science, mathematics, and history) and of at least one professional craft; the synthesizing mind—ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others; the creating mind—capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions, and phenomena; the respectful mind—awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups; the ethical mind—fulfillment of one’s responsibilities as a worker and citizen. World-renowned for his theory of multiple intelligences, Gardner takes that thinking to the next level in this book, drawing from a wealth of diverse examples to illuminate his ideas. Concise and engaging, Five Minds for the Future will inspire lifelong learning in any reader as well as provide valuable insights for those charged with training and developing organizational leaders—both today and tomorrow.

Executing Your Strategy: How to Break It Down and Get It Done

Why do businesses consistently fail to execute their competitive strategies? Because leaders don’t identify and invest in the full range of projects and programs required to align the organization with its strategy. Moreover, even when strategy makers do break their plans down into doable chunks, they seldom work with project leaders to prioritize strategic investments and assure that needed resources are applied in priority order. And they often neglect to revise the strategic portfolio to fit the demands of a dynamic environment, or to stay connected to strategic projects through completion, as new products, services, skills and capabilities are transferred into operations. In Executing Your Strategy, Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt, and William Malek present six imperatives that enable you to do the right strategic projects–and do those projects right. And it is no accident that the six imperatives combine to create the acronym INVEST: Ideation: Clarify and communicate Purpose, Identity and Long Range Intention; Nature: Develop alignment between Strategy, Structure and Culture based on Ideation; Vision: Create clear Goals and Metrics aligned to Strategy and guided by Ideation; Engagement: Do the right projects based on the Strategy through Portfolio management; Synthesis: Do Projects and Programs right, in alignment with Portfolio; Transition: Move the Project and Program outputs into Operations where benefit is realized. Full of intriguing company examples and practical advice, this crucial new resource shows you how to make strategy happen in your organization

Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators, Volume 1

The aim of this set of books is to combine the best of current academic research into the use of Communities of Practice in education with “hands on” practitioner experience in order to provide teachers and academics with a convenient source of guidance and an incentive to work with and develop in their own Communities of Practice. This set of books is divided into two volumes: volume 1 deals principally with the issues found in colocated Communities of Practice, while volume 2 deal principally with distributed Communities of Practice”

Real Enterprise Architecture: Beyond IT to the Whole Enterprise

Enterprise-architecture is often described as part of IT, but its real scope is much wider – the structure of everything the enterprise is and does. This book introduces a new approach to tackle this broader role for whole-of-enterprise architecture, using a systematic, iterative process for architecture development. Topics include how to bridge the business/IT divide; how to link architecture with business strategy; and how to improve balance between manual, machine and IT-based processes.

Knowledge Networks: Innovation Through Communities of Practice

Knowledge Networks: Innovation Through Communities of Practice explores the inner workings of an organizational, internationally distributed Community of Practice. The book highlights the weaknesses of the ‘traditional’ KM approach of ‘capture-codify-store’ and asserts that communities of practice are recognized as groups where soft (knowledge that cannot be captured) knowledge is created and sustained. Readers will gain insight into a period the life of a distributed international community of practice by following the members as they work, meet, collaborate, interact and socialize.