Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership: Leveraging Nonlinear Science to Create Ecologies of Innovation |  | Authors: Jeffrey Goldstein, James K. Hazy, Benyamin B. Lichtenstein
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Category: Book
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Rating:  3 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 224
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Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.9 x 0.7
ISBN: 0230622275
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.34
EAN: 9780230622272
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Product Description
Using leadership to generate greater innovation, connectivity, and organizational transformation is crucial for success in this challenging era. The authors present here a new approach to leadership based on findings from complexity science. Integrating real case studies with rigorous research results, they explore the biggest challenges being faced in fast-paced organizations, and provide a host of concrete tools for leading during critical periods, catalyzing novelty, expanding networks, and generating transformative change throughout an organization.
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| Customer Reviews:
Learn about leadership from a new complexity framing June 11, 2010
Dr. Maria May Seitanidi (UK)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book is essential reading for today's leaders.
This book describes key findings from complexity science and applies them to management issues in business, but also in the nonprofit sector. Writers have applied complexity science to the problems of management before, but often the reader comes away not knowing what to actually do differently the next day. This book should change all that. In a series of clearly written chapters, cases and stories are used to illustrate key points from complexity science and the actions that practitioners can take to take advantage of these ideas. It was interesting to learn that success stories like Netflix, Starbucks, Apple, Merck and IBM can all be explained and there secrets understood using these ideas. I believe that this book clearly shows that even the most savvy executive can learn about leadership from this new complexity framing. A useful summary chapter that closes the book is a gem. I know that I will return to it for review again and again to remind me of the key insights that I was able to take away from this book. Reading this book is a very worthwhile investment in time. I strongly recommend it.
Bringing complexity science to public, private and nonprofit management June 25, 2010
Nicholas C Peroff
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Jeffrey Goldstein and his co-authors really hit a home run with Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership. I've been waiting to see a book like this for a long, long time. I'll use it in my graduate "capstone" course in our Masters in Public Administration (MPA) program and in an executive education course also offered by the the University of Missouri-Kansas City's Bloch School of Business and Public Administration.
Could be I'm getting carried away by my enthusiasm for it, but the book could be the butterfly preceding the phase change "complexifiers" have been looking for in the way we think about managing organizations. Bringing in the concept of an ecological system as a metaphor to convey complexity thinking works especially well. And, maybe a minor thing, but I really liked the Benard story about heating fluids and how that was a root idea behind dissipative structures and even, to some extent, self-organization. I have read a lot of complexity-related literature over the years and always wondered where the terms came from.
From the standpoint of teaching a course about managing complexity in public, private and nonprofit organizations, two things about the book are especially strong. The first is the authors' extensive use of "real world" cases or stories that helped me respond to students who, once introduced to complexity theory, ask: So what? Or this is interesting, but it's too abstract. How can I apply it where I work? The cases in the book show them how complexity thinking is applied and how it can lead to the emergence of new ideas and new innovations in organizational management.
The second thing I liked is the concluding chapter. Again, from the perspective us using the book in a classroom, the last chapter summarizes the previous chapters and ties them all together to reinforce the central concepts in managing complexity without excessive repetition of material previously covered in the book. The end result is a valuable textbook in leadership and managing organizational complexity.
Based on all of the complexity-related books and articles already out there, the audience should be warmed up and ready for this book. No doubt, the fact that traditional management models and ideas have taken a serious hit or two in the financial markets crisis, the world-wide recession, etc. too also make this book an especially timely and needed addition to the literature in organizational leadership and management.
I noticed that the book is already scheduled to go into paperback so the publisher must agree with me.
Finally a practical book about complexity & management! June 20, 2010
ManageChangeNow
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
What do companies like Netflix, Starbucks, Apple, Merck, eBay, Cisco and Oracle have in common? They can all be used as examples of how companies can succeed in today's complex and difficult competitive environment. These companies and others survive and prosper, the author's of this book argue, because they are able to continuously generate new ideas, what they call "experiments in novelty".
By staying closely connected within their ecologies, these companies quickly learn to use these experiments to identify and penetrate profitable and defensible niches within which they can prosper and grow. And then they do it again and again. The authors show that this skill can be learned, and that it can be effectively "systematized" -- not by routinization, but rather by improved information sharing and synthesis, what they call "interaction resonance" -- so that the entire organization becomes adaptive rather than stagnant.
The book is jammed with practical examples and suggested actions that certainly seem to make sense and are actionable. I for one can't wait to begin to hear about other organizations who have used this kind of generative leadership to make the leap to the next level of performance. Any takers out there?
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