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Press Release
The Cycle of Leadership
by Noel M. Tichy
with Nancy Cardwell
How Great Leaders Teach Their Companies to Win
In The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders at Every Level (HarperBusiness, 1997), which was written with Eli Cohen and named one of the top ten business books of the year by BusinessWeek, cutting-edge management guru Noel M. Tichy emphasized the importance of identifying and developing leaders company-wide. THE CYCLE OF LEADERSHIP: How Great Leaders Teach Their Companies to Win (HarperBusiness; September 1, 2002; $26.95), written with Nancy Cardwell, "builds on that work and adds a critical element," as Tichy notes. "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. More importantly, the teaching that takes place in them is a distinctive kind of teaching," and it is this two-way teaching on which Tichy now focuses.
He argues that, in today’s radically transformed information economy, companies must be big, fast, and smart to survive, and leaders who wish to do so as well must create a "virtuous teaching cycle," in which everyone teaches, everyone learns, and everyone gets smarter every day, instead of simply imposing their "teachable point of view" from the top. This is as true for established companies that have begun to ossify, and so need to become faster, as it is for small startups that need to get bigger, and Tichy explains the respective strategies of "hypertransformation" and "hypergrowth" that each requires, using examples from his long experience as an organizational psychologist and a management consultant. Tichy ran GE’s executive training center for two years and, with Stratford Sherman, wrote the national bestseller Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will: How Jack Welch Has Made General Electric the World’s Most Competitive Company (reissued in a revised and updated edition by HarperBusiness in 2001), now taught in business schools nationwide.
The leaders profiled include Welch and GE’s Jeff Immelt, 3M’s James McNerney, Dell Computer’s Michael Dell, Trilogy Software’s Joe Liemandt, Pepsico’s Roger Enrico, IBM’s Lou Gerstner, Intel’s Andy Grove, Tricon’s David Novak, Cisco’s John Chambers, Home Depot’s Bob Nardelli, Southwest Airlines’ Herb Kelleher, Accenture’s Mary Tolan, Genentech’s Myrtle Potter, and General Wayne Downing (Ret.), former head of the U.S. Special Operations Forces, now Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism. Choosing between operations and development is no longer a zero-sum game, says Tichy, but only an organization that builds the right stuff into its very DNA, avoiding the "vicious non-teaching cycles" that have destroyed so many others, will flourish in the 21st century. "It is a Teaching Organization," he writes, "in which dialogue, debate, self-improvement and leadership development are built into the fabric of everyday activities. The destination is the same for everyone. The roads to getting there, however, will be very different."
In this era of Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Andersen implosions, Tichy offers a strategy in which community service and corporate citizenship are not merely a timely
p.r. gimmick but an integral part of the virtuous teaching cycle, with benefits for all concerned. And, he concludes THE CYCLE OF LEADERSHIP with a comprehensive handbook, full of practical exercises and tools (audits, grids, action plans, matrices, checklists, charts, questionnaires, tables, diagrams)--many used successfully with thousands of executives in Tichy’s consulting business--that help leaders develop their own Teaching Organizations.
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