Leadership is the habit of making good choices. Even in difficult and uncertain circumstances, the most effective leaders focus their attention and overcome entrenched patterns of behavior to push an organization to new heights of success. This capability is no fluke: the latest research on the brain shows that we can pinpoint the mental activity associated with it-and cultivate it for our benefit. In this book, Art Kleiner, a strategy expert; Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist; and Josie Thomson, an executive coach, give a transformative explanation of how cutting-edge neuroscience can help business leaders set a course toward better management. Mapping the functions of a manager onto established patterns of mental activity, they identify crucial brain circuits and their parallels in organizational culture. Strategic leaders, they show, play the role of wise advocates: able to go beyond day-to-day transactional behavior to a longer-term, broader perspective that articulates their organization's deeper purpose. True leaders can play this influencer role in an organization because they have cultivated similar self-reflective habits in their own minds. Providing a powerful guide to decision strategies and their consequences, The Wise Advocate helps managers find their own inner voice and then make that voice ring out loud and clear, with a four-step program for practice and catalytic implications for management strategy, executive education, and business results.

In this second edition of his bestselling book, author Art Kleiner explores the nature of effective leadership in times of change and defines its importance to the corporation of the future. He describes a heretic as a visionary who creates change in large-scale companies, balancing the contrary truths they can't deny against their loyalty to their organizations. "The Age of Heretics" reveals how managers can get stuck in counterproductive ways of doing things and shows why it takes a heretical point of view to get past the deadlock and move forward.

The Dance of Change offers exercises, tools and techniques for sustaining organisational learning over the long term, as well as suggestions, advice, cautions and warnings based on the experience of people who have already followed the path suggested by the author in The Fifth Discipline. The central message of the text is that learning is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

A NEW EDITION OF THE GROUNDBREAKING BOOK A new edition - revised and updated with over 100 pages of new material - of the groundbreaking book that brings the principles of organizational learning to today s schools and classrooms. A unique collaboration between the celebrated management thinker and Fifth Discipline author Peter Senge , and a team of renowned educators and organizational change leaders, the revised edition of Schools The Learn addresses the new and unique pressures on our educational system that have emerged since the book's initial publication in 2000. In a fast-changing world where school populations are increasingly diverse, children live in ever-more-complex social and media environments, standardized tests are applied as overly simplistic "quick fixes," and advances in science and technology continue to accelerate, the pressures on our educational system are inescapable. Schools That Learn offers a much-needed way to open dialogue about these problems and provides pragmatic opportunities to transform school systems into learning organizations. Drawing on observations and advice from more than 70 writers and experts on schools and education, this book features: * methods for implementing organizational learning and explanations of why they work * compelling stories and anecdotes from the field - classrooms, schools, and communities * charts, tables and diagrams to illustrate systems thinking and other practices * guiding principles for how to apply innovative practices in all types of school systems Schools That Learn is the essential guide for anyone who cares about the future of education and keeping our nation s schools competitive in our fast-changing world.

Car Launch: The Human Side of Managing Change is the first book in the new Oxford series, The Learning History Library. It is edited by Art Kleiner and George Roth, both of whom originated the concept of the learning history. These extended "Living" case studies use an innovative format based on "the jointly told tale" to help narrate the story of major intra-firm transitions. The learning history succeeds in balancing traditional research with pragmatic imperatives and powerful imagery.