A revision of current management theory which involves cultivating and harnessing tension. Based on interviews with America's most innovative business leaders and on-site reporting.

This is an exploration of why companies decline, looking particularly at why so few of the top 500 companies in the US have kept their place in the last ten years. The author approaches the question partly by looking at Japanese companies which have stayed successful, particularly Honda, and partly by a close look at big American companies like Ford and General Electric. He concludes that US and British companies tend to be run by small cliques of people who, no matter how hard they work and how determined they are, eventually run out of ideas, and that Japanese companies are much more democratically managed and thus more creative.

We live in an exciting time. Technology, globalization and demographic shifts provide new potential for personal and business success. Yet, research tells that only 30% of our attempts to implement change succeed amid the turbulence we encounter both within and outside today’s organizations. We need new ways of thinking and doing if we are to turn potential into performance. Managing at the Leading Edge provides a new evidence-based roadmap for leadership success in a dynamic context. Managing at the Leading Edge highlights lessons from the navigation and piloting practices used in high performing sailing. In the contemporary “white water” business environment, as at sea, achieving goals requires choosing a destination amidst uncertainty, adjusting to continually shifting conditions, converting the push and pull of environmental forces into momentum and using different skills at different times to negotiate hazards and achieve success. Easy-to-grasp and recall, this book proposes a framework of leadership with a dual focus on navigating and piloting. This framework is supported by new evidence-based insights about personal and organizational high performance. Systematic comparisons of high performing leaders and organizations with leaders and organizations that have not yet achieved this distinction illustrate how the principles of navigation and piloting apply. This research featured surveys of over 1,000 senior and mid-level leaders, the results of over a 100 interviews and the author’s extensive consultation experience with a host of leaders and organizations. Through case studies, discussion of relevant research, practical tools and templates, Managing at the Leading Edge will help you learn: • The critical tasks of leader navigating and piloting that lead to successful business change • Leadership skills through which the critical tasks of navigating and piloting are successfully executed including accountability, influence, problem solving agility and engagement • Strategies and tactics for managing points along a strategic initiative’s leading edge through with resistance to change is converted into momentum and progress • The critical hand-offs between the navigating and piloting functions and these functions drive change at the leading edge as synchronized system of high performance leadership • Leadership practices that create organizational high performance Armed with leadership capabilities of high performance navigating and piloting you will be able to recognize and act on opportunities for enhanced leadership impact and achieve results that matter for you, your peers and your organization.

In their startling new book, authors Brown and Eisenhardt contend that to prosper in today's fiercely competitive business environments, a new paradigm--competing on the edge--must be implemented as a new survival strategy. This book focuses on specific management dilemmas and illustrates solutions that work when the name of the game is change.

Drawing on the amazing story of Shackleton and his polar exploration team’s survival against all odds, author Dennis N. T. Perkins demonstrates the importance of a strong leader in times of adversity, uncertainty, and change. Part adventure tale and part leadership guide, Leading at the Edge uncovers what the legendary Antarctic adventure of Sir Ernest Shackleton, his ship Endurance, and his team of twenty-seven polar explorers can teach us about bringing order to chaos through true leadership. Among other skills, you’ll learn how to: instill optimism while staying grounded in reality, step up to risks worth taking, consistently reinforce your team message, set a personal example, find things to celebrate, laugh small things off, and--even in the face of extreme temperatures, hazardous ice, scarce food, and complete isolation--never give up. This second edition of Leading at the Edge features additional lessons, new case studies of the strategies in action, tools to uncover and resolve conflicts, and expanded resources. An updated epilogue compares the leadership styles of the famous polar explorers Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott, which transcend the one-hundred-plus years since their historic race to the South Pole to help today’s leaders learn valuable lessons about the meaning of true success.

Every few years a book changes the way people think about a field. In psychology there is Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. In science, James Gleick's Chaos. In economics and finance, Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street. And in business there is now Surfing the Edge of Chaos by Richard T. Pascale, Mark Millemann, and Linda Gioja. Surfing the Edge of Chaos is a brilliant, powerful, and practical book about the parallels between business and nature -- two fields that feature nonstop battles between the forces of tradition and the forces of transformation. It offers a bold new way of thinking about and responding to the personal and strategic challenges everyone in business faces these days. Pascale, Millemann, and Gioja argue that because every business is a living system (not just as metaphor but in reality), the four cornerstone principles of the life sciences are just as true for organizations as they are for species. These principles are: Equilibrium is death. Innovation usually takes place on the edge of chaos. Self-organization and emergence occur naturally. Organizations can only be disturbed, not directed. Using intriguing, in-depth case studies (Sears Roebuck, Monsanto, Royal Dutch Shell, the U.S. Army, British Petroleum, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems), Surfing the Edge of Chaos shows that in business, as in nature, there are no permanent winners. There are just companies and species that either react to change and evolve, or get left behind and become extinct. Some examples: Parallels between Yellowstone National Park and Sears show why equilibrium is a dangerous place in both nature and business. How Monsanto used a "strange attractor" to move to the edge of chaos to alter its identity and transform its culture. The unlikely story of how the U.S. Army embraced the ideas of self-organization and emergence. Why the misapplication of linear logic (reengineering a business or attempting to eradicate predators in nature) will inevitably fail. The stories in Surfing the Edge of Chaos are of pioneering efforts that show how the principles of living systems produce bottom-line impact and profound transformational change. What's really striking about them, though, is their reality. They are about success and failure, breakthroughs and dead-ends. In short, they are like the business you are in and the challenges you face.