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The Power of Collaborative Leadership:
Lessons for the Learning Organization

Can we re-create our business organizations, making them more effective and saner, or is this just a pipe dream? What will it really take to bring about this transformation?

These are questions an increasing number of people in the business world are beginning to ask, but where will the answers come from?

Ultimately, the answers will not come from the academics or the consultants; they can come only from the people within the business environment, businesspeople who are willing—and courageous enough—to engage with the questions. So say the authors of this book.

The authors include two veteran senior managers who embarked on the journey toward organizational transformation and lived to tell the tale. The third author is the interviewer and "reflective analyst," who enables these businesspeople to share their stories, their reflections, and the lessons learned.

The Power of Collaborative Leadership: Lessons for the Learning Organization is designed as an inclusive, annotated dialogue, designed so that readers can bring their own experience to the conversation.

The conversation begins with a theoretical argument for organizational learning. It proceeds to an acknowledgement of the difficulties experienced in attempting organizational transformation, to a discussion of the challenges of personal transformation, and to "lessons learned" from personal experience. We close with reflections on the relationship between business organizations and the wider context, the larger systems in which business organizations are embedded.

In the course of the conversation the authors address such things as the question of business’s potential for transformation. Relying on their experiences with both "traditional" command-and-control and transformational leadership, they provide a unique insider’s perspective on the process of organizational change as they describe their respective journeys toward one such vision: the learning organization