aWith good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters.a
Whether weare talking about United States presidents, CEOs, Major League coaches, or wartime generals, leaders are remembered for their best and worst judgment calls. In the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflicting demands, the quality of a leaderas judgment determines the fate of the entire organization. Thatas why judgment is the essence of leadership.
Yet despite its importance, judgment has always been a fairly murky concept. The leadership literature has been conspicuously quiet on what, exactly, defines it. Does judgment differ from common sense or gut instinct? Is it a product of luck? Of smarts? Or is there a process for making consistently good calls?
Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis have each spent decades studying and teaching leadership and advising top CEOs such as Jack Welch and Howard Schultz. Now, in their first collaboration, they offer a powerful framework for making tough calls when the stakes are high and the right path is far from obvious. They show how to recognize the critical moment before a judgment call, when swift and decisive action is essential, and also how to execute a decision after the call.
Tichy and Bennis bring their three-dimensional model to life with interviews with world-class leaders who have thrived or suffered because of their judgment calls. These stories include:
a[ Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, whose judgment to grow through research and development transformed GE into the worldas premier technology growth company.
a[ Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, who made tough calls about teachers, students, and parents while turning around a troubled school system.
a[ Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, whose strategic judgment helped him reinvigorate his company and restore a culture of trust and respect.
a[ The late general Wayne Downing, who found an unexpected opportunity in the midst of crisis when he led the Special Operations raid to capture Manuel Noriega.
a[ A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, who bet $57 billion to purchase Gillette and reinvent his company.
a[ Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, who made the call to commit totally to a customer-centric strategy and led his people to execute it.
Whether youare running a small department or a global corporation, Judgment will give you a framework for evaluating any situation, making the call, and correcting if necessary during the execution phase. It will show you how to handle the overlapping domains of people, strategy, and crisis management. And it will help you teach your entire team to make the right call more often.
No organization can afford to neglect this crucial disciplineaand no previous book has ever brought it into such clear focus.

OFacinating... There is at least as much to be learned here as from reading Peter Drucker John Kenneth Galbraith or Michael Porter.O DBoston Globe Acknowledged as the outstanding business leader of the late twentieth century, Jack Welch made General Electric one of the worldOs most competitive companies. This dynamic CEO defined the standard for organizational change, creating more than $400 billion in shareholder value by transforming a bureaucratic behemoth into a nimble, scrappy winner in the global marketplace. Here, Tichy and Sherman extract the enduring leadership lessons from the revolution Welch wrought at GE. Of these, the most essential is the limitless power of learning. Leadership has its mysteries, but it is a skill that anyone can acquire and enhance. Above all, great leaders select great people and lure them into an endless process of learning and adaptation.

Environmental degradation. Poverty and malnutrition. Disease and illiteracy. As the world's human population skyrockets and resources grow scarce, the multinational corporation with its ability to mobilize massive human and capital resources across geopolitical boundaries may be mankind's best defense against an onslaught of social ills. Many companies have already joined the fray, launching ambitious global corporate citizenship programs designed to improve the quality of life in the communities and nations in which they operate. Their activities, the focus of this groundbreaking work, are precursors to a new age of enlightened capitalism, and their bold break with tradition is putting them now, more than ever, in the public eye."

Why do some companies consistently win in the marketplace while others struggle from crisis to crisis? The answer, says Noel Tichy, is that winning companies possess a "Leadership Engine" -- a proven system for creating dynamic leaders at every level.

Now in paper! The blueprint for instituting change used by America's top CEOs!

THE TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADER

Lee Iacocca is one. So is GE's Jack Welch. And Unisys's Michael Blumenthal. They're "transformational" leaders—a special breed capable of managing the kind of massive turnaround most U.S. companies will have to undergo in the next decade to stay competitive. But what makes them able to steer their huge organizations down new paths? The Transformational Leader gives senior executives and managers the answers, not by profiling personalities, but by dissecting the process of transformational leadership and giving managers specific ideas for transforming their own companies.

Praise for The Transformational Leader . . .

"I hope executives everywhere take the time to learn from this valuable book." —Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School author of The Change Masters and When Giants Learn to Dance

"Takes its place in the first rank of books on leadership. It is a fascinating study of business leaders who actually accomplished major transformations. I learned a great deal from it." —John Gardner, founder of Common Cause and former Secretary of HEW

OFacinating... There is at least as much to be learned here as from reading Peter Drucker John Kenneth Galbraith or Michael Porter.O DBoston Globe Acknowledged as the outstanding business leader of the late twentieth century, Jack Welch made General Electric one of the worldOs most competitive companies. This dynamic CEO defined the standard for organizational change, creating more than $400 billion in shareholder value by transforming a bureaucratic behemoth into a nimble, scrappy winner in the global marketplace. Here, Tichy and Sherman extract the enduring leadership lessons from the revolution Welch wrought at GE. Of these, the most essential is the limitless power of learning. Leadership has its mysteries, but it is a skill that anyone can acquire and enhance. Above all, great leaders select great people and lure them into an endless process of learning and adaptation.

The Enron debacle, the demise of Arthur Andersen, questionable practices at Tyco, Qwest, WorldCom, and a seemingly endless list of others have pushed public regard for business and business leaders to new lows. The need for smart leaders with vision and integrity has never been greater. Things need to change--and it will not be easy.

We can take a first step toward producing better business leaders by changing some of our own ideas about what it means to "win." Noel M. Tichy and Andrew R. McGill have brought together a stellar group of contributors from a variety of perspectives--including General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, and renowned management gurus Robert Quinn and C. K. Prahalad, among others--to offer insights that will help build better leaders, communities, and organizations. They show how to present a "Teachable Point of View" about business ethics that will help all leaders within an organization: Internalize core valuesBuild a values-based culture across the organizationBecome engaged to teach the same values lessons to their staffTake action and raise the ethical bar

Successful business leaders must be able to articulate their own unique Teachable Point of View on business ethics and drive it through their organization to ensure that everyone knows the ethical line and is neither shy nor silent if others risk crossing it.

In The Leadership Engine, Noel Tichy showed how great companies strive to create leaders at all levels of the organization, and how those leaders actively develop future generations of leaders.

In this new book, he takes the theme further, showing how great companies and their leaders develop their business knowledge into ⳥achable points of view,⟳pend a great portion of their time giving their learnings to others, sharing best practices, and how they in turn learn and receive business ideas/knowledge from the employees they are teaching.

Calling this exchange a virtuous teaching cycle, Professor Tichy shows how business builders from Jack Welch at GE to Joe Liemandt at Trilogy create organizations that foster this knowledge exchange and how their efforts result in smarter, more agile companies, and winning results. Some of these ideas were showcased in Tichy′s recent Harvard Business Review article entitled, ⍯ Ordinary Boot Camp."

Using examples from GE, Ford, Dell, Southwest Airlines and many others, Tichy presents and analyzes these principles in action and shows how managers can begin to transform their own businesses into teaching organizations and, consequently, better-performing companies