Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organization Change : How the Best Companies Ensure Meaningful Change and Sustainable Leadership (Essential Knowledge Resource)

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Summary: Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organization
Review: Best Practices vividly share the stories of leading business struggling and succeeding to get great results. Leadership development books often fail on the side of practicality and true examples, Best Practices does the opposite by telling inspiring and true stories of how businesses changed and grew. For instance, Corning Glass openly reveals how it strategies lead the company to drawing profits from tired product lines with diminishing margins. Not until new leadership dramatically changed leadership and organizational practices did Corning make significant changes. Best Practices is filled with company achievements that have practical value for others facing similar challenges.

Edward Lehner

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Summary: Towards Benchmarking Best Practices in Change Management
Review: Leading the change in the contemporary business environment, which is surcharged with chaotic competition, is becoming a serious challenge for business as well as social organizations. In this scenario, Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organizational Change is a significant contribution towards designing change efforts in variegated situations. The cases in it are illustrations of strategies, structures and processes of leading change management by some of the best performing global organizations. David Norton of the Balanced Score Card fame had rightly pointed out that "managing strategy is, in essence, managing change." The best practice cases mapped in the book tell us how this has actually happened in some of the most successful global organizations.

These narrations and analyses tell the reader the tools and methods used in leading the change processes and help her get the answers to several intriguing questions: why some leaders are able to use these tools to change more dramatically; how successful leaders conceive new ideas, engineer consensus on their adoption and internalize them throughout the length and breadth of the organization; the constant pull and trade-off between short-term and long-term viewpoints eventually leading to a strong management process; how visionary leaders took big and decisive moves; how sense of urgency could be nurtured among individuals and teams; how change management processes could be linked with quantifiable business results; what are the critical success and failure factors in change efforts; how vision is created and communicated to give clear mandates to people; how resistance to change is overcome in short- and the long term; and thus how change culture gets internalized to become a way of organizational life? In sum, the best practice cases remind us that the key to effective leadership is to stay focused on change, making all others in the organization do the same, and eventually create excitement to remain committed to change.

This book is a useful new resource for thought and action leaders in developing competitive position in today's changing business environment. It maps the emerging paradigm of leadership development for managing change. It helps the reader designing and implementing change initiatives and evaluating their effectiveness. The book will be seen as a professional guide towards discovering winning and successful business strategies. Corporate leaders, CEOs, boards of directors and change masters, trainers, organizational development (OD) designers and project leaders have useful lessons to learn from these best practices. The case studies themselves show that each organization is distinct in adopting their change path, processes and methods. Yet they underscore that all organizations had constant willingness to learn. Some of the other commonalities among them included: collaboration, humility, ethical working, innovation, regard for people expectation and psyche, and passion for change. Organizations across the globe will learn important how-to lessons about the contexts in which these virtues were demonstrated and how specific measurable results were realized through leading the change effort.


Dr. Debi S. Saini
Professor of Human Resource Management
Management Development Institute
Gurgaon-1220 001 INDIA


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