Beyond Rational Management

Draws together extensive research on leadership, change, and organizational performance to help leaders make sense of the complexities and contradictions of organizational life. Explains how managers can come to see new possibilities for structuring organizations, designing jobs, and solving daily problems by learning to embrace and transcend paradoxes.

øIt would be unusual for a framework as powerful and predictive as the Competing Values Framework to remain unchallenged and absent of criticism. In addition to updating the examples and references, this second edition provides a new chapter motivated

Integrating theory and empirical evidence, Becoming a Master helps students and future managers master the dynamics and intricacies of the modern business environment. The text’s unique “competing values framework” provides a deep and holistic understanding of what is required to effectively manage any type of organization. Readers learn to develop and apply critical managerial skills that encourage change, promote adaptability, build stability, maintain continuity, strengthen commitment and cohesion, and yield positive organizational results. The seventh edition features new and revised content throughout, offering students a comprehensive and up-to-date presentation of critical management competencies and their underlying theoretical value intentions and real-life application. Throughout the text, classroom-tested exercises enable students to assess, analyze, practice, and apply the material while gaining insight into the paradoxes and contradictions that make the practice of management so complex.

This third edition of Competing Values Leadership serves as the key source for understanding and using the Competing Values Framework, one of the most widely used and highly cited frameworks in the world for understanding human behavior, leadership, and organizations. The authors of the framework, who have been at the foundation of developing, applying, and studying this framework for more than four decades, explain how it helps foster successful leadership, innovation, culture change, financial performance, organizational effectiveness, and value creation. In addition to explaining why the Competing Values Framework is among the most important frameworks in the history of business, this edition addresses some criticisms of the framework and provides empirical evidence for its validity, reliability, and usefulness. The authors also provide practical tools and actions that can assist any organization in improving its performance. This book is widely applicable to several fields, including financial strategy, culture change, human resource management, leadership roles, and organizational change. Both academics and business leaders will find it to be an illuminating and useful tool and reference. It has also proven to be a valuable resource in executive education programs.

"This book presents learning and knowledge management from a point of view where the basic tools and applications are provided by open source technologies. It explains an intense orientation to the critical issues of the open source paradigm: open source tools, applications, social networks, and knowledge sharing in open source communities"--Provided by publisher.