The Cycle of Leadership : How Great Leaders Teach Their Companies to Win

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Summary: Great Team Building Ideas
Review: After hearing about all the corporations with failing management, my business team went looking for some guidance. I learned a lot from this book about building and teaching teamwork, leadership skills and trust within a team. I really enjoyed the business case examples from other corporations. Our team is now going through the exercises in the leadership handbook in the back of the book and know it will help us all be better leaders. I highly recommend this book for any business team looking for some leadership training.

Rating:
Summary: Great Team Building Ideas
Review: After hearing about all the corporations with failing management, my business team went looking for some guidance. I learned a lot from this book about building and teaching teamwork, leadership skills and trust within a team. I really enjoyed the business case examples from other corporations. Our team is now going through the exercises in the leadership handbook in the back of the book and know it will help us all be better leaders. I highly recommend this book for any business team looking for some leadership training.

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Summary: Walking the talk and openness to change
Review: I found this a wonderful book, so much so that I read it in one sitting, all 435 pages. I have also adopted it as the main text for my graduate class in "Leadership of Organizational Change." The most compelling imagery is what I call (a) walking the talk (that is, leading) and (b) openness to change (that is, learning). I am a professor of adult education and to see a book for business readers with a teaching-learning dynamic built into its fabric was very heart-warming. The book's emphasis on a "Virtuous Teaching Cycle" and a "Teachable Point of View" were beautifully presented. The details of the different business examples, while helpful, were not of key importance for me as the philosophy of a leader who must be both a teacher and a learner: walk the talk and be open to change. If business leaders would follow through on Tichy's philosphical thrust that leaders teach and learn, just think how incredibly more creative, life-giving, and profitable organizations could be. A wonderful read.

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Summary: Robert Knowling?
Review: I just read the intro to this book by Robert Knowling. As far as I can tell Robert Knowling was booted out of Covad having delivered dismal results. He is listed as CEO of Simbion, which according to Hoovers has 1-5 employees and $50-$100K in revenues. He is even featured on the cover. Am I missing something?

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Summary: Robert Knowling?
Review: I was somewhat disappointed in this book despite its endorsement by one of my business school classmates. Professor Tichy discusses already well known principles of leadership within the context of what is promoted as a "new" approach. Only a few individuals and companies are profiled and are used repeatedly throughout the book. The examples cited fit awkwardly into the message that is being presented. The title of the book attributes greatness to the individuals profiled based on only one attribute--a belief in teaching and learning. This seems such a narrow focus on which to base such accolades.

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Summary: Nothing new
Review: I was somewhat disappointed in this book despite its endorsement by one of my business school classmates. Professor Tichy discusses already well known principles of leadership within the context of what is promoted as a "new" approach. Only a few individuals and companies are profiled and are used repeatedly throughout the book. The examples cited fit awkwardly into the message that is being presented. The title of the book attributes greatness to the individuals profiled based on only one attribute--a belief in teaching and learning. This seems such a narrow focus on which to base such accolades.

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Summary: A New "Business Classic"
Review: Those who are familiar with my reviews of other business books already know that on several dozen occasions, I have strongly recommended The Leadership Engine (1997) which Tichy wrote with Eli Cohen and Nancy Cardwell. He teams up with her again in this book, expanding and enriching his concept of leadership development at all levels throughout any organization, regardless of its size or nature. Hence the importance of what Tichy calls a "Virtuous Teaching Cycle": Everybody teaches and everybody learns; all practices, processes, and values promotion teaching; all teaching is interactive to generate the effective exchange of knowledge; thereby, maximum use is made of everyone's skills and talents to ensure all-level alignment for smart and rapid response to needs, problems, opportunities, etc. Tichy asserts (and I agree) that hypertransformation (in established organizations) and hypergrowth (in start-ups) are essential to business success. The challenge in established organizations is to overcome what Jim O'Toole characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." For start-ups, the challenge is to achieve appropriate scale while ensuring that new employees are brought on line and up to speed ASAP. In ten chapters, and with prevision as well as eloquence, Tichy explains how various organizations (notably GE) have met those and other challenges.

Unlike other authors who address many of the same issues, Tichy also includes a substantial Handbook (pages 285-394) which consists of ten Sections: The Teaching Organization, The Hand You have Been Dealt, Building Your Teachable Point of View, Pulling It All Together, Building a Team Timetable Point of View, Architecting the Leadership Pipeline, Scaling the Teaching Organization, Building Teaching into the DNA, Global Citizenship, and finally, Start the Journey. In the Handbook, Tichy explains provides decision-makers with with just about everything their need to know to design, implement, and then strengthen their own Teaching Organization, one within which the Virtuous Teaching Cycle sustains leadership development at all levels.

In his Introduction to the Handbook, Tichy quotes a brief statement from Thomas Stewart's most recent book, The Wealth of Knowledge:

"The knowledge economy stands on three pillars. The first: Knowledge has become what we buy, sell, and do. It is the most important factor of production. The second pillar is a mate, a corollary to the first: Knowledge assets -- that is, intellectual capital -- have become more important to companies than financial and physical assets. The third pillar is this: To prosper in this new economy and exploit these newly vital assets, we need new vocabularies, new management techniques, and new strategies. On these three pillars rest all the new economy's laws and its profits."

Tichy includes this brief statement because it is directly relevant to his own objectives in The Cycle of Leadership but also because, unless and until an organizations has all three pillars (not one, not two but all three), it cannot survive major challenges which await them, many of which have yet to be revealed. That is to say, the Teaching Organization can only be built on the foundation they provide.

"Winning leaders are teachers, and winning organizations do encourage and reward teaching. But there is more to it than that. Winning organizations are explicitly designed to be Teaching Organizations, with business processes, organizational structures, and day-to-day operating mechanisms all built to promote teaching." However, Tichy doesn't stop there. More importantly, the teaching that takes place is a distinctive kind of teaching. It is interactive, two-way, even multi-way. Throughout the organization, 'teachers' and 'students' at all levels teach and learn from each other, and their interactions create a Virtuous Teaching Cycle that keeps generating more learning, more teaching, and the creation of new knowledge."

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Peter M. Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990) and The Dance of Change: The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (1999), William Isaacs' Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together: A Pioneering Approach to Communicating in Business and in Life (1999), Carla O'Dell's If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice (1998), and Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak's Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (1997).

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Summary: Sensible advice, but repetitive, repetitive, repetitive
Review: While I will never dispute the premise that great leaders teach, mentor and learn, it doesn't have to be repeated over and over until I get it. The hero of this book, and that is really the only way to describe it, is Jack Welch, former head of GE. There is a lot of ink used to laud Welch and what he did at GE. While I don't dispute that Welch deserves to be acknowledged as a great leader, Tichy comes very close to crossing the line between praising and deifying him.
The basic theme of the book is the dynamics of teaching and learning within a business environment. This includes all levels, from the lowliest greeters to the CEO and board members. It starts with the leader's Teachable Point Of View or TPOV. This is basically the leader's view of the company direction and how well it is communicated to the people underneath. Without question, this is a valuable point in the success of any organization, assuming that the TPOV is reasonable and the leader is capable of accepting feedback. Or, to put it another way, is the leader capable of learning from underlings? While good leaders must teach and do it well, they must also learn even better. For even the best teachers can be rendered ineffectual if the material they are trying to impart is valueless. In the modern business world, if you don't learn and adapt, you die.
Another focus is on the Virtuous Teaching Cycle or VTC, which is about leaders teaching leaders. This is of course sensible; any leader should constantly be training several potential replacements. The problem with this is twofold. The first is that there can be only one leader, so if more than one potential leader is being groomed, it is necessary to have an unambiguous selection mechanism in place. Succession struggles have doomed many countries and organizations. Secondly, this can lead to the successor suffering from the same weaknesses that the leader does, which is why some of the most successful leaders were outsiders, brought in to provide a necessary fresh perspective.
There are two points of criticism. The first is the repetition. Some of the stories are told several times, even to the point of distraction. The other is that education is a complex task and recent revelations in the corporate world demonstrate that there are leaders that are not only incompetent, but are even criminal. I would have preferred reading more about how learning is done in these dysfunctional situations.
With the pace of life and business changing so fast, companies must learn faster than they produce. While I agree with most of the points in this book, there is a tendency of the author to ramble and repeat, which I found distracting.