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Today's radically transformed knowledge economy requires winning
companies to be fast -- and smart. In his new book, best-selling management author
Noel Tichy shows that the smartest, fastest, and most successful organizations
are explicitly designed to encourage the creation and sharing of knowledge. These
companies foster the continual generation and sharing of valuable information
throughout the organization by creating cycles of learning and teaching. In these
Virtuous Teaching Cycles everyone learns and everyone teaches. They start with
top leaders clearly defining and personally teaching their ideas, values, and
strategies. But the teaching is not the traditional one-way cram-down of policies
and instructions. It is interactive teaching in which the students are
encouraged to process what they've heard against their own experience and knowledge.
They then become the teachers, sharing their knowledge and insights with the leaders. Throughout
The Cycle of Leadership, Tichy examines the teaching strategies of great
company builders from Jack Welch in his days at GE to Michael Dell, to Joe Liemandt
at Trilogy Software, and more than a dozen other winning leaders. He details how
they have created organizations that foster knowledge exchange and how for their
efforts they have developed smart, aligned, and energized workforces that consistently
beat out the competition. Delving deeply into leading
companies, Tichy examines an array of teaching and learning methodologies. These
include: - General Electric's deployment of 15,000
Black Belt leaders who teach and lead Six Sigma quality-improvement projects
- Trilogy
Software's use of the new hires in its Trilogy University orientation program
to drive product development and continual transformation of the company
- Accenture's
creation of small communities that bring its far-flung consultants together to
share best practices and to coach one another.
Other
examples come from Home Depot, 3M, Dell, Pepsico, Yum! Brands, Intel, Cisco, Genentech,
Limited Brands, and the U.S. Special Operations Forces. Tichy
shows how choosing between business results and people development is no longer
a zero-sum game but the only way to thrive and avoid the "vicious nonteaching
cycles" that have recently destroyed so many companies and prominent leaders. A
handbook is included in this volume that gives readers specific tools for building
and leading a Teaching Organization. If you follow
the advice and the models offered in The Cycle of Leadership, everyone
in your organization will teach, everyone will learn, and the company will get
smarter and faster every day. Noel M. Tichy is
a professor at the University of Michigan Business School, director of the school's
Global Leadership Partnership, and a worldwide advisor to CEOs on leadership and
transformation. His previous books include The Leadership Engine (with
Eli Cohen) and Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will (with Stratford Sherman). Nancy
Cardwell is the former national editor of the Wall Street Journal and was
a senior editor at Business Week. She has written extensively about business
and leadership. She worked with Noel Trichy and Eli Cohen on The Leadership
Engine.
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