The New Ecology of Leadership

by Hurst, David K.

• ISBN13: 9780231159708
• ISBN10: 0231159706
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-17
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

After twenty-five years as an operating manager, often in crisis and in turnaround conditions, and having spent another two decades consulting, teaching, and writing, David K. Hurst has learned a great deal about organizations, how they function, and why they fail. Here, as a reflective practitioner, he crafts an extraordinary integration of management thought and practice. He adopts a systems perspective, using analogies drawn from nature, to illustrate his ideas and their practical application. This book is both for general readers unfamiliar with sophisticated management concepts and for active practitioners seeking to advance their management and leadership skills. The author's objective is to help readers make meaning from their own management experience and education and thus improve their practical judgment and wisdom-to ask better questions of reality and tell more compelling stories about it. His approach takes an expansive view of organizations by connecting their development to humankind's evolutionary heritage and cultural history. It locates the origins of organizations in communities of trust and follows their development through the application of logic and their maturation in power. It also crucially tracks the decline of organizations as they age and shows how their strengths become weaknesses in changing circumstances. Hurst's core argument is that the human mind is not rational in a logical sense but in an ecological way. In other words, it has evolved to extract cues to action from the specific situations in which it finds itself. Therefore contexts matter, and Hurst shows how passion, reason, and power deployed as tools and embedded in settings can be used to change and sustain organizations for good and ill. The result is an inspirational synthesis of management theory and practice that will resonate with every reader's experience.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction: What to Expect	p. 1
The Dimensions of Change
Lost in Management Thought	p. 17
Economics, Evolution, and Ecology	p. 23
Scale in Space and Time	p. 27
Why Wal-Mart's Growth is like a Forest's	p. 34
The Ecocycle: Life, Death, and Renewal	p. 41
The Ecocycle in Human Organizations	p. 46
The Front Loop: Nothing Fails like Success
Communities of Trust	p. 51
Logic and Power	p. 58
Climbing the Ladder of Abstraction	p. 64
The Product Life Cycle Meets the Ecocycle	p. 70
The Pathologies of Power	p. 78
The Onset of Crisis	p. 85
The Back Loop: From Crisis to Renewal
Wisdom from the Scriptures	p. 93
Into the Wilderness	p. 99
Climbing the Mountain	p. 104
The Logic of Leadership	p. 110
The Complete Ecocycle	p. 117
Vice and Virtue	p. 122
Staying in the Sweet Zone
Tools and Settings in the Sweet Zone	p. 131
Power Tools and Settings: Instructions and Directions	p. 137
Management Tools and Settings: Rules and Incentives	p. 144
Leadership Tools and Settings: Images and Invitations	p. 152
Culture Tools and Settings: Custom and Convention	p. 163
Change in Depth	p. 174
The Design of Choice	p. 183
Lean: The Practice of "Both … And"	p. 192
Prescribed Burns: Context, Conflict, Crisis, and Creation	p. 203
Growing People	p. 216
Don't Throw the Past Away	p. 228
A Brief Orientation and Field Guide
Using the Ecocycle: Key Concepts and Questions	p. 243
Notes	p. 257
Bibliography	p. 301
Index	p. 323
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