Booked by HooksBookEvents: Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Book: Positive Leadership
Author: Kim Cameron
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publ Inc., 2008
About the Author: Dr. Cameron’s past research on organizational downsizing, organizational effectiveness, corporate quality culture and the development of leadership excellence has been published in more than 100 articles and ten books: Coffin Nails and Corporate Strategies (Prentice Hall), Developing Management Skills (Prentice Hall), Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture (Jossey Bass), Organizational Decline (Ballinger), Organizational Effectiveness (Academic Press), Paradox and Transformation (Ballinger), and Positive Organizational Scholarship (Berrett-Koehler), Leading with Values (Cambridge University Press), Competing Values Leadership (Edward Elgar), and Making the Impossible Possible (Berrett Koehler). His current research focuses on virtuousness in and of organizations—such as forgiveness, gratitude, kindness, and compassion—and their relationship to performance. He is one of the co-founders of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan, and this work was recognized as one of the 20 highest impact ideas of 2004 by the Harvard Business Review.
About the Book: Introducing a new leadership field of the same name, Positive Leadership presents a concise, accessible and practical guide to strategies that can help leaders reach beyond ordinary success to achieve extraordinary effectiveness, spectacular results, and positively deviant performance. Positive Leadership is based on analyses of organizations that have achieved levels of success that are exceptional.
For example, the Rocky Flats Nuclear Arsenal closure and cleanup crew completed their assignment 60 years ahead of schedule, $30 billion under budget, and made the area 13 times cleaner than was required by federal standards. This company’s achievement far exceeded every knowledgeable expert’s predictions of performance—it was abnormally positive. Carefully examining organizations such as this one has helped uncover some atypical leadership strategies that enable levels of performance which exceed expectations, excel beyond the norm, and reach almost impossible levels of excellence.