The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Brief article - Book review

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World. By Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky Harvard Business Press, 324 pages. $24.95.

The authors, colleagues at Cambridge Leadership Associates in Massachusetts (Heifetz and Linsky are cofounders of the consultancy), have an ambitious goal: To give readers practical information that will enable them to lead, inspire and mobilize others. Changing the world, as the title suggests? That may be a bit beyond their ken.

That hyperbole aside, this is a smart, well-constructed book that underscores the need for a new kind of leadership: "What is needed from a leadership perspective," they write, "are new forms of improvisational expertise, a kind of process expertise that knows prudently how to experiment with never-been-tried-before relationships, means of communication and ways of interacting that will help people develop solutions that go beyond the wisdom of today's experts."

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