Resources

Everybody belongs to a team or a system in their professional and personal lives. Following are some of the resources provided by thought leaders with relevant information, findings and theories based on scientific research and validity in the areas of personal and/or system development. Take a moment to peruse these titles and feel free to suggest a new one to us via email.

Books

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related to teams, systems and relationship work

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Teams at the Top - By Jon Katzenbach

An integrated balance of real teams, individuals, and single-leader groups is possible and desirable among top executives; one mode of behavior is not intrinsically better than the rest. The best leaders are able to constantly reshape their top executives into and out of team mode as appropriate, varying the top team's composition, behavior patterns, and leadership approach to maximize opportunities, depending upon the challenges and issues at hand. The author advises discipline to energize rather than stifle initiative and performance among top executives; the alignment of behaviors and decisions of people throughout the organization; and the balancing of the various elements of the organization for optimum results. We learn that while top executives of organizations rarely function as a team, such teams have the most potential for immediate results and yet are most often neglected.

The Fifth Discipline

- By Peter Senge

This revised edition of Peter Senge’s bestselling classic, The Fifth Discipline, is based on fifteen years of experience in putting the book’s ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories in the book demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas in The Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published in 1990, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices.

Real Change Leaders: How You Can Create Growth and High Performance at Your Company

- By Jon Katzenbach

The consulting firm McKinsey & Company supported and encouraged Katzenbach to address an issue facing all organizations -- change. It's the same issue that has Vice-President Al Gore talking about "reinventing government" and Peter Drucker urging managers to "rediscover leadership." Numerous corporations are downsizing, restructuring or revamping. Yet the steps taken to do so may limit the resulting organizations' ability to further adapt, because workers with superior skills are terminated and middle managers with leadership skills are eliminated.

Sitting in the Fire: Large Group Transformation Using Conflict and Diversity - by Arnold Mindell

Using examples ranging from disputes in small organizations to large-scale conflicts in countries around the world, this book offers practical methods for working with conflict, leadership crises, stagnation, abuse, terrorism, violence, and other social action issues. It brings an understanding of the psychology of conflict and the knowledge that many disputes can be traced back to inequalities of rank and power between parties, providing tools that will enable people to use conflict to build community.

Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life

- by Barry Oshry

In this book, Barry Oshry explains why so many of our efforts to create more satisfying and productive human systems end in disappointment, lost opportunities, broken relationships, and failed partnerships. Oshry shows how these breakdowns are the predictable outcomes of an uninspected system life. This book provides us with a new set of lenses with which to view these systemic relationships and patterns, enabling us to recognize and stop destructive patterns of behavior.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

- by Roger Fisher

Since its original publication in 1981, Getting to Yes has been translated into 18 languages and has sold over 1 million copies in its various editions. This completely revised edition is a universal guide to the art of negotiating personal and professional disputes. It offers a concise strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict.

Authentic Happiness: Using Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment

- by Martin Seligman

In his latest user-friendly road map for human emotion, the author of the bestselling Learned Optimism proposes ratcheting the field of psychology to a new level. The time has finally arrived (since 1998) for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the `good life,' " writes Seligman. Seligman doesn't just preach the merits of happiness, he also presents brief tests and even an interactive Web site to help readers increase the happiness quotient in their own lives. Trying to fix weaknesses won't help, he says; rather, incorporating strengths such as humor, originality and generosity into everyday interactions with people is a better way to achieve happiness.

The Deep Democracy of Open Forums

- by Arnold Mindell

The focus of this organizational and group development book is practice; the deepest feeling skills and essential linear techniques needed to facilitate small and large groups. This work is adaptable to any known group or organization. Process-oriented Open Forum methods create less stressful and more creative transformations through inner and outer awareness work. The concept of the psycho-social activist is introduced together with insights into the resolution of severe organizational conflicts.

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life

- by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

The lure of this book's promise starts with the assumption in its title. Possibility--that big, all-encompassing, wide-open-door concept--is an art? Well, who doesn't want to be a skilled artist, whether in the director's chair, the boardroom, on the factory floor, or even just in dealing with life's everyday situations? Becoming an artist, however, requires discipline, and what the authors of The Art of Possibility offer is a set of practices designed to "initiate a new approach to current conditions, based on uncommon assumptions about the nature of the world."

Leadership & Self-Deception

- by The Arbinger Institute

Leadership & Self-Deception is a mainstay for Corporate transformation. This easy read takes you through personal stories of the human instinct of self-betrayal as a means to better understand professional relationships that affect our perception in the workplace. A must read...

One Thing you Need to Know

- by Marcus Buckingham

A veteran researcher and consultant gives a superb lesson on how to thrive in any organizational role. The "one thing" is a brilliant distillation of years of management theory and the author's own insights about human nature. His obvious comfort and deep well of experience make his comments both enjoyable and credible. While giving credit to the spectrum of management advice in common usage, his ideas sound fresh and original, and he offers many suggestions for putting them into practice. To achieve individually, he says, do what energizes you and eliminate what drains you. If you can't quit a role, tweak it, find the right partner, or find an aspect of the role that brings you strength.

Blink

- by Malcolm Gladwell

Blink is a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because Malcolm Gladwell thinks those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment - by Eckhart Tolle

Ekhart Tolle's message is simple: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. And while this message may not seem stunningly original or fresh, Tolle's clear writing, supportive voice, and enthusiasm make this an excellent manual for anyone who's ever wondered what exactly "living in the now" means. Foremost, Tolle is a world-class teacher, able to explain complicated concepts in concrete language. More importantly, within a chapter of reading this book, readers are already holding the world in a different container--more conscious of how thoughts and emotions get in the way of their ability to live in genuine peace and happiness.

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work - by John Gottman

John Gottman has revolutionized the study of marriage by using rigorous scientific procedures to observe the habits of married couples in unprecedented detail over many years. Here is the culmination of his life's work: the seven principles that guide couples on the path toward a harmonious and long-lasting relationship. Packed with practical questionnaires and exercises, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is the definitive guide for anyone who wants their relationship to attain its highest potential. The 4 Horseman has been adapted for use with Teams in organizations to facilitate the conversations of 'what's not being said?'

Katzenbach et al. argue that the key to changing performance capability in dynamic companies is a new breed of middle manager -- The Real Change Leader (RCL). Common characteristics of RCLs are outlined and illustrated with examples. The RCLs connect three forces of organizational change: top aspirations, work force productivity and marketplace reality. This book is highly recommended to all corporate executives who want to learn about effective leadership in large organizations.