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The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia Business School Publishing) Kindle Edition
David Hurst has a unique knowledge of organizations—their function and their failure—both in theory and in practice. He has spent twenty-five years as an operating manager, often in crises and turnaround conditions, and is also a widely experienced consultant, teacher, and writer on business. This book is his innovative integration of management practice and theory, using a systems perspective and analogies drawn from nature to illustrate groundbreaking ideas and their practical application. It is designed for readers unfamiliar with sophisticated management concepts and for active practitioners seeking to advance their management and leadership skills.
Hurst's objective is to help readers make meaning from their own management experience and education, and to encourage improvement in their practical judgment and wisdom. His approach takes an expansive view of organizations, 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 and maturation. He 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 rational in an ecological, rather than a logical, sense. 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 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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherColumbia Business School Publishing
- Publication dateApril 24, 2012
- File size2323 KB
Editorial Reviews
Review
At the core of effectiveness is the ability to anticipate the future. This book provides the tools for doing exactly that. It is a must read. -- Robert E. Quinn, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
In this outstanding book, David K. Hurst draws on his very considerable executive experience and combines it with a sophisticated understanding of the latest in academic thinking. The New Ecology of Leadership will appeal to both the 'roll up your sleeves' manager and the grounded academic. -- Karl Moore, Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University
A thoughtful, eclectic look at organizations. ― Globe & Mail
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B007ZDEG8C
- Publisher : Columbia Business School Publishing (April 24, 2012)
- Publication date : April 24, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 2323 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 364 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0231159714
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,892,961 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #660 in Business Management Science
- #1,175 in Management Skills
- #1,945 in Management Science
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
David K. Hurst a speaker, educator and writer on management. As a reflective practitioner, he has a unique niche in the field. He spent twenty-five years working in corporations in several countries in a series of organizational “train wrecks” as the Western World began its radical transition from the industrial era to the age of knowledge and information. He extracted from his experience some highly innovative ideas about leadership, the management of change and the dynamics of organizations that promote creativity and learning.
He has honed these ideas for twenty years as an educator to managers and organizations around the globe. The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World is his most ambitious and comprehensive book to date. It is a successor to Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change.
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Years ago I developed a controversial and objectively unsubstantiated theory that many executives read the first few chapters of management books on planes then fall asleep bored and fatigued by it all. If you number among them "The New Ecology of Leadership" is much more bite than you can chew.
This is a lot of book. Hurst variously critiques, synthesizes, rejects or applies principles of management practice. An intellectual itinerant we follow Hurst's mental excursions across theories and approaches to management practice that have been articulated and advanced over the last 100 years; more than this, Hurst offers us his own mental framework and guide to tackling challenges in context. At the core of this framework is the notion of the "ecocycle". Hurst offers us an experience-based lens on the shifting challenges that organizations face in the cycle of birth, renewal and decline. Different management "practices" are required in different contexts to overcome the demands of change while resisting stasis in stability.
Hurst illustrates his arguments about the nature of growth, innovation, change and decline in organizations using memorable analogies drawn from nature and describes the attributes and behaviors of the leaders and communities of actors in organizations in the language of anthropology and psychology. Hurst demonstrates that the narrative of organizational success or failure is the collective stories of its people and these are written as much with passion as with reason. The tendency to over emphasize the rational in conversations about management actually distorts our understanding about how organizations evolve and indeed decline. Hurst also points out that the narrative arc of businesses' life-cycles draw their cohesion from the interplay between trust and power.
Hurst suggests new ways of viewing the dynamics of passion and reason, power and trust to help leaders sustain success in widely divergent contexts. This is not a book for the insecure looking for potted answers or 4-point plans but it will excite those who are curious and eager to look with Proustian "new eyes" at the ecology of management.
The author focuses on how thought is changed by action and experience not by abstract ideas. This is important and brings all sorts of practical managerial benefits as we better appreciate how our minds are "rational in an ecological way," i.e., causality is tied to context.
The book's short and effective chapters will help you to analyze firms' life-cycles in general, and in particular, develop new angles for addressing the hyper-important challenge of sustaining a firm in a highly profitable "zone" in which stability and change are complementary.
Readers will benefit from the wide intellectual net Hurst casts and the manner in which he explains how the ideas of important thinkers fit with the ecological lens.
Bart Madden
Not either...or, but both...and!
Been waiting for this book for 20 years.
It is so authentic and sincere that it is impossible to fault. OK Hurst's diet of ideas and frameworks is so rich that it isn't always the easiest of reads. But who wants to waste their time on anything less profound?
I might wish he had folded in a bit more of Weick and Sutcliffe's "Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity" or Theodore Modis's four-season metaphor of the S-curve. But in so generously sharing with us his journey of discovery, Hurst never pretends that his is the last word.
I don't quite buy his entire ecology framework but that only makes it more valuable and thought-provoking. Nevertheless, it is a book I wish I had written and I can't say more than that. It has got to have a five-star rating.
I can't wait until David's next book, and the next instalment in this wonderful, evolving distillation of management thought and practice.
Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty