Steve Denning — one of those I look up to — was kind enough to include my book Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization as an example of recent literature that is helping to redefine leadership and management in the organization in his Forbes piece entitled, “The Management Revolution That’s Already Happening“.
Alongside 17 other books, Steve deftly explains the management revolution is underway, and that the Creative Economy is becoming a reality. (at least for some organizations) As he says, “<a> coherent constellation of fundamentally different principles in leadership and management has emerged.” Well, at least some of us are writing about it.
Flat Army contains a set of five frameworks for leaders AND the organization and when used in conjunction it’s my (biased) belief they can enable “an unobstructed flow of corporate commonality.” It’s shifting from a ‘culture of fears’ to a ‘culture of peers’.
One of the best paragraphs from Steve’s article (and review) is as follows:
The books are inspired by the idea that management must embody truth, both in what is said and how it is said. Clichés about the manipulation of systems and efficiency and incremental fixes will not do. The truth of our organizations, bitter and disheartening as it is, must be faced with honesty and imagination. These books do so with a force and a clarity that have not often been heard in management before.
I hope you have the chance to read the entire piece by Steve.
The books he is sourcing — including Flat Army — are as follows:
Fixing the Game (Roger Martin), What Matters Now (Gary Hamel), Reorganize for Resilience (Ranjay Gulati), The Power of Pull (John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison), The Innovator’s Prescription (Clayton Christensen et al), The Leader’s Guide To Radical Management (Stephen Denning), The Leader’s Dilemma (Franz Röösli et al), Conscious Capitalism (John Mackey and Raj Sikodia), Peak (Chip Conley), The Lean Startup (Eric Ries), The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Fred Reichheld et al) and Leadership in a Wiki World (Rod Collins), The Elastic Organization (2012) by Nicholas Vitalari and Haydn Shaughnessy; The End of Competitive Advantage (2013) by Rita McGrath; Flat Army (2013) by Dan Pontefract: The Connected Organization (2013) by Dave Gray; Enterprise Software Delivery (2013) by Alan Brown and Reinventing Giants (2013) Bill Fischer et al.
