How I Learned To Let My Workers Lead

Are your employees like a synchronized "V" of geese in flight-sharing goals and taking turns leading? Or are they more like a herd of buffalo-blindly following you and standing around awaiting instructions? If they're like buffalo, their passivity and lack of initiative could doom your company. In How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead, you'll discover how to transform buffalo into geese-by reshaping organizational systems and redefining employees' expectations about what it takes to succeed. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.

The moment of truth-that instant when consumers experience and judge service quality-is often a deciding factor in business success. Designing Service Excellence: People and Technology provides practical information on the design, management, and organization of many different types of service industries, such as hotels, restaurants, banks and fina

In this striking and often moving collection of first-person accounts from the Harvard Business Review, the eleven contributors describe the hazards and frustrations of trying to be a good manager. Together, the voices in First Person provide a dose of realism that will inspire and motivate the leaders of today and tomorrow.

Love Your Neighbor makes the case for capitalism as the only system that can end poverty, solve intractable crises, and increase human flourishing. Love Your Neighbor builds on the National Best Seller Flight of the Buffalo by Ralph Stayer with James Belasco. Ralph's story and experience transformed the business world. It offers a bold and straightforward plan for rethinking leadership—still taught in business schools and leadership seminars worldwide. Finally, after decades of more experience, Love Your Neighbor delivers the sequel that readers demanded. Love Your Neighbor is the fruit of that patience—and thirty years of reflection and leadership. As the longtime CEO of Johnsonville Foods, Ralph learned to let his workers lead. Love Your Neighbor shows that the real secret behind Johnsonville's success was a conscious decision to align the company's practices with God's plan for human flourishing. Love Your Neighbor defends and champions capitalism which continues to be under attack in America—and why faith-informed capitalism is the only vehicle that can bring prosperity and purpose to everyone. Love Your Neighbor goes beyond that of another pretty sermon—it's a blueprint for transformation based on Ralph's decades of experience as one of America's most successful CEOs. It provides a moral foundation for capitalism during a time of challenge and crisis, demonstrating its vast superiority over socialism and other fallen economic systems. Ralph's experience at Johnsonville Foods points to a proud and unapologetic conviction in capitalism that serves God, builds strong communities, and embodies what it means to love your neighbor.

The fastest growing and most competitive organizations in the world have no bureaucracies, no bosses, and no bullshit. The tomato sauce in your pantry. The raincoat in your closet. The smart TV hanging in your living room. What do all of these products have in common? Chances are they were created by organizations where colleagues self-allocate into teams based on intrinsic motivation. Where individuals self-manage their commitments to each other without the coercion of managers. And where teams launch new products and ventures on the market without the control of leaders. These organizations represent a new, radically collaborative breed of corporation. Recently doubling in number and already comprising 8% of corporations around the world, scientists and researchers have discovered that radically collaborative organizations are more competitive on practically every meaningful financial measure. They enjoy higher market share, higher innovation, and higher customer satisfaction than their traditional corporate competitors—and they also enjoy higher engagement, loyalty, and motivation from their employees. In this groundbreaking book, technology thought leader and organizational architect Matt K. Parker breaks down the counterintuitive principles and practices that radically collaborative organizations thrive on. By combining the latest insights from organizational science, sociology, and psychology, he illuminates four imperatives that all radically collaborative organizations must embrace in order to succeed: team autonomy, managerial devolution, deficiency gratification, and candid vulnerability. Millions of workers around the world are collapsing under the weight of command-and-control culture. The crisis has reached its breaking point. Now is the time to embrace radical change. Discover the revolutionary shift to partnership and equality and the economic superiority that follows with A Radical Enterprise.

Conflict in business and personal relationships is inevitable--much of the success of companies depends on how well they respond to it. Developing rapport, collaboration and cooperation hinges on positive conflict management strategies that stimulate innovation and growth where companies can look for solutions to common issues and needs. Conflict management can address dysfunctional outcomes that result in job stress, less effective communication and a climate of distrust, where working relationships are damaged and job performance reduced. Organizations must minimize and resolve internal and external conflicts to remain vibrant and profitable. Drawing on examples from a wide range of corporate experiences, this volume provides role-playing scenarios, checklists, tables and research studies to help employees, managers and owners better comprehend the dynamics of conflict in every interaction.

Firing on All Cylinders is based on the experiences of hundreds of public sector and business organizations improving their service/quality to master a rapidly changing world. This book brings together three organizational performance fields that have, until now, been distinct and separate. These are: 1. Customer Service - developing high perceived value and responsiveness 2. Quality Improvement - reducing defects and mistakes while increasing productivity through improved process and system control 3. Organization Development - building leadership skills and sustaining cultural change

The Organizational Learning Cycle was the first book to provide the theory that underpins organizational learning. Its sophisticated approach enabled readers to not only understand how, but more importantly why, organizations are able to learn. This new edition takes the original concepts and theories and shows how they might, and are, being put into action. With five new or completely revised chapters, Nancy Dixon describes the kind of infrastructure organizations need to put in place; there are examples of knowledge databases, whole systems in the room processes and after-action reviews originating from organizations that are making real progress with these ideas. A clearer relationship between organizational learning and more participative forms of organizational governance is drawn, along with responsibilities that employees need to take on to enable, and partake in, collective learning. With new case material from BP, the US Army, Ernst and Young, and the Bank of Montreal, for example, this book shows how you can make use of the collective reasoning, intelligence and knowledge of the organization and channel it into its ongoing and future development.