Spiral Up ... and Other Management Secrets Behind Wildly Successful Initiatives.

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

Spiral Up ... and Other Management Secrets Behind Wildly Successful Initiatives. By Jane C. Linder. AMA, 254 pages. $24.95.

It's sometimes said that the best lessons come from observation, and if that's the case, Spiral Up goes to the head of the class. It's a book written by a consultant that draws on, and successfully distills, a vast body of research.

Author Jane Linder, a consultant and former professor at Harvard Business School, spent the better part of five years researching 46 highly successful initiatives at a broad array of companies and organizations and doing close to 150 interviews. She concluded that these hit projects never spring from conventional thinking or planning. Rather, they are "open-ended, unpredictable and unstoppable," and "spiral up, unlocking new innovations and ongoing improvements."

She found five common themes to these projects: reach beyond your grasp, make space, get it right, energize people and spiral up. Along the way, she offers up examples from major corporations down to nonprofits, among them Cargill, Toyota, Ambient Devices and AirNOW, which...