About the book

The Cycle of Leadership
by Noel M. Tichy
with Nancy Cardwell

In The Leadership Engine, Noel Tichy showed how great companies strive to create leaders at all levels of the organization, and how those leaders actively develop future generations of leaders. In this new book, he takes the theme further, showing how great companies and their leaders develop their business knowledge into "teachable points of view," spend a great portion of their time giving their learnings to others, sharing best practices, and how they in turn learn and receive business ideas/knowledge from the employees they are teaching.

Calling this exchange a virtuous teaching cycle, Professor Tichy shows how business builders from Jack Welch at GE to Joe Liemandt at Trilogy create organizations that foster this knowledge exchange and how their efforts result in smarter, more agile companies, and winning results. Some of these ideas were showcased in Tichy's recent Harvard Business Review article entitled, "No Ordinary Boot Camp." Using examples from GE, Ford, Dell, Southwest Airlines and many others, Tichy presents and analyzes these principles in action and shows how managers can begin to transform their own businesses into teaching organizations and, consequently, better-performing companies.

Praise

"For thousands of years control of natural resources was the route to success. The richest people and the most profitable companies simply had better locations on the natural resource chain. But we are now in a knowledge-based economy where the control of knowledge is the secret of success. The world's richest man, Bill Gates, own nothing physical. This then raises the issue of how one generates and controls knowledge in the creation of wealth. And it is here that Noel Tichy's book comes to the fore. Knowledge has to be both created and taught. Learning and teaching organizations have to be built. But how is it to be done? Tichy provides the answers."
- Lester Thurow

"Tichy's contribution to developing leaders is Olympiad. This book gets the gold."
- Warren Bennis

"This book shows us the way to leadership greatness. It provides concepts, role models and tools for leader/teachers to transform their organizations through Tichy's concept of "virtuous teaching cycles." A practical and inspiring book."
-Frances Hesselbein

"Noel Tichy has devoted his distinguished career to understanding the powerful link between learning, teaching, and leadership. Now, with the CYCLE OF LEADERSHIP, he not only offers the spot-on insight that the future belongs to a new breed of companies that are big, fast, and smart, he also shows what it will take to be part of that future. It's a book filled with teachable-and learnable-moments."
- Alan Webber

"I am GUNG HO about this book because it cracks the ode on how leaders build winning organizations. Noel Tichy is spot on with his premise that world-class leaders are world-class teachers. He offers top-flight benchmarks along with practical guidelines for how to build large- scale teaching organizations."
- Ken Blanchard

"CYCLE OF LEADERSHIP defines a roadmap for business leaders that is both practical and memorable."
- Joe Forehand

"Leaders as teachers is a fundamentally important ideas- an idea that has the potential to reshape how leaders lead. THE CYCLE OF LEADERSHIP is a well conceptualized, well written, as well as pragmatic approach to building organizations where everyone teaches and everyone learns. This book significantly extends Tichy's earlier work. It is filled with ideas and practical, concrete detail that will be of immediate use to managers at all levels of a firm."
- Mike Tushman