Chaleff, Ira. The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders. Berrett-Kohler, 1995. No change initiative, whether involving technology or not, can succeed without both leaders and followers. Participants in a change initiative cannot sit by passively while "leaders" "make" the changes. Each must take personal responsibility for active engagement with the requirement of the process. Not only will the process not work otherwise, but we each miss out on creating the best new conditions possible, unless we actively participate.

Leaders cannot exist without followers. Every great leader must, therefore, be surrounded by great followers. This book gives you the insights and tools necessary to partner effectively with your leaders. It is a handbook you can refer to repeatedly when confronted with the challenges of supporting and, at times, correcting a leader.

In this book we learn why it is important to strip away the passive connotations of the role of follower and how best to contribute to group's pursuit of its mission. For anyone who works closely with a leader of any kind, it is a comprehensive guide for positively influencing that relationship and helping the leader use power wisely to accomplish the group's purpose.

DePree, Max. Leadership Jazz. Dell, 1997. Draws a compelling and illuminating parallel between leadership and jazz - both art forms in which freedom and technique, improvisation and rules, inspiration and restraint must be precisely and expertly blended.

Dixon, Nancy M.. Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know. Harvard Business School Press, 2000. "Know-how" that is unique to a specific organziation or group is the stuff of which sustained success and competitive advantage is made. Nancy Dixon, an expert in the field of organizational learning, calls this knowledge borne of experience "common knowledge," and argues that in order to get beyond talking about knowledge management to actually doing it, companies must first recognize that all knowledge is not created-and therefore can't be shared-equally.

Creating successful knowledge transfer systems, Dixon argues, requires matching the type of knowledge to be shared to the method best suited for transferring it effectively. Common Knowledge reveals groundbreaking insights into how organizational knowledge is created, how it can be effectively shared-and why transfer systems work when they do. This book gets to the heart of one of the most difficult questions in knowledge transfer today: What makes a system work effectively in one organization but fail miserably in another? Going beyond "one-size-fits-all" approaches and simple generalities like upper management involvement and cultural issues, this important book will help organizations of every kind construct knowledge transfer systems tailored to their unique forms of "common knowledge."

Jones, Sue. Developing a Learning Culture: Empowering People to Deliver Quality, Innovation, and Long-Term Success. McGraw-Hill, 1998. Highly accessible and practical. Shows how a low priority on learning and widespread wasteful training has stemmed from the hierarchical organization and been reinforced by short term funding concerns. Using examples from all sizes of organizations, this book shows that the only way organizations can counteract the resulting low performance is to develop a genuine team working culture. Team skills are dissected down to the basic interpersonal skills and attitudes neglected or marginalized by Western Total Qualtiy philosophy. These are identified as the core skills of learning and collaborative relationships between leaders and followers, employers and employees. Traditional barriers to trainers' effectiveness are listed followed by suggestions for strategies that gain top management commitment to culture change for overcoming these barriers.

Pinchot, Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot.. The Intelligent Organization: Engaging the Talent & Initiative of Everyone in the Workplace. Berrett-Kohler, 1996. Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot confront head-on the key organizational issues that are threatening the very existence of today's corporations. The authors assert that "bureaucracy is no more appropriate to the information age than serfdom was to the industrial era. Only freedom and community will work."

This book shows how to replace bureaucracy with more humane and effective systems for organizing and coordinating work. Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot show how, by developing and engaging the intelligence, business judgment, and wide-system responsibility of all its members, an organization can respond more effectively to customers, partners, and competitors. They support the sweeping changes they propose with numerous examples of how these changes are already being implemented in such diverse organizations as AT&T, the Canadian National Railroad, DuPont, Russian entrepreneurial firms, Hewlett-Packard, and the U.S. Forest Service

Senge, Peter.The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organizatoin. Doubleday, 1994. Peter Senge, founder of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management, experienced an epiphany while meditating one morning back in the fall of 1987. That was the day he first saw the possibilities of a "learning organization" that used "systems thinking" as the primary tenet of a revolutionary management philosophy. He advanced the concept into this primer, originally released in 1990, written for those interested in integrating his philosophy into their corporate culture.

The Fifth Discipline has turned many readers into true believers in the learning organization as the best approach to knowledge management. This book remains the ideal introduction to the carefully integrated corporate framework, which is structured around "personal mastery," "mental models," "shared vision," and "team learning." Using ideas that originate in fields from science to spirituality, Senge explains why the learning organization matters, provides an unvarnished summary of his management principals, offers some basic tools for practicing it, and shows what it's like to operate under this system. The book's concepts remain stimulating and relevant as ever.

Senge, Peter with Art Kleiner, Bryan Smith. The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization  Bantam Doubleday, 1994. 

Peter Senge's national bestseller, The Fifth Discipline, revolutionized the practice of management by introducing the theory of learning organizations. This secon volume moves from the philosophical to the practical by answering the first question all learning organization practitioners ask: What do we do at work on Monday morning?

The Fieldbook is an intensely pragmatic guide. It shows how to create an organization of learners where memories are brought to life, where collaboration is the lifeblood of every endeavor, and where the tough questions are fearlessly asked. The stories here show that companies, businesses, schools, agencies, and even communities can undo their "learning disabilities" and achieve superior performance. If ever a work gave meaning to the phrase hands-on, this is it. Senge and his four co-authors cover it all including: reinventing relationships, being loyal to the truth, building a shared vision, building community within an organization, and designing an organization's governing ideas.

Senge, Peter and Richard B. Ross, Charlotte Roberts, George Roth, Bryan Smith and Art Kleiner. The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in a Learning Organization. Doubleday, 1999. Since its release in 1990, the bestselling Fifth Discipline has promoted the innovative business principles of the "learning organization," personal mastery, and systems thinking. Published nearly a decade later, Dance of Change provides a formidable response to businesspeople wondering how to make his programs stick. The authors outline potential obstacles (such as initiating transformation, personal fear and anxiety, and measuring the unmeasurable) and propose ways to turn these obstacles into sources of improvement. This volume presents an insider's account of long-term maintenance efforts at General Electric, Harley-Davidson, the U.S. Army, and other learning organizations, along with experience-based suggestions and exercises for individuals and teams. "We are seeking to understand how people nurture the reinforcing growth processes that naturally enable an organization to evolve and change," lead author Senge explains, "and how they tend to the limiting processes that can impede or stop that growth."

Senge, Peter and Bryan Smith, Timothy Lucas, Janis Dutton, Art Kleiner, Nelda H. Cambron-McCabe. Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education Doubleday, 2000. Created by a team of educators and organizational change leaders, this new addition to the Fifth Discipline Resource Book series offers practical advice for educators, administrators, and parents on how to strengthen and rebuild our schools.

Few would argue that schools today are in trouble. The problems are sparking a national debate as educators, school boards, administrators, and parents search for ways to strengthen our school system at all levels, more effectively respond to the rapidly changing world around us, and better educate our children.

The authors have written Schools That Learn because educators--who have made up a sizable percentage of the audience for the popular Fifth Discipline books--have asked for a book that focuses specifically on schools and education, to help reclaim schools even in economically depressed or turbulent districts. One of the great strengths of Schools That Learn is its description of practices that are meeting success across the country and around the world, as schools attempt to learn, grow, and reinvent themselves using the principles of organizational learning. Featuring articles, case studies, and anecdotes from prominent educators such as Howard Gardner, Jay Forrester, and 1999 U.S. Superintendent of the Year Gerry House, as well as from impassioned teachers, administrators, parents, and students, the book offers a wealth of practical tools, anecdotes, and advice that people can use to help schools (and the classrooms in them and communities around them) learn to learn.

You'll read about schools, for instance, where principals introduce themselves to parents new to the school as "entering a nine-year conversation" about their children's education; where teachers use computer modeling to galvanize student insight into everything from Romeo and Juliet to the extinction of the mammoths; and where teachers' training is not just bureaucratic ritual but an opportunity to recharge and rethink the classroom.

In a fast-changing world where school violence is a growing concern, where standardized tests are applied as simplistic "quick fixes," where rapid advances in science and technology threaten to outpace schools' effectiveness, where the average tenure of a school district superintendent is less than three years, and where students, parents, and teachers feel weighed down by increasing pressures, Schools That Learn offers much-needed material for the dialogue about the educating of children in the twenty-first century.

Von Krogh, Georg, Kasua Ichijo, Ikujiro Nonnaka. Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation. Oxford University Press, 2000. Weaving together lessons from such international leaders as Siemens, Unilever, Skandia, and Sony, along with their own firsthand consulting experiences, the authors introduce knowledge enabling--the overall set of organizational activities that promote knowledge creation--and demonstrate its power to transform an organization's knowledge into value-creating actions. They describe the five key "knowledge enablers" and outline what it takes to instill a knowledge vision, manage conversations, mobilize knowledge activists, create the right context for knowledge creation , and globalize local knowledge. Provides new concepts about how knowledge in organizations can be created and used for competitive advantage by describing knowledge-enabling conditions. Discusses 'practical approach' approaches to the amorphous, constantly evolving human realm of knowledge.

Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Learning is becoming an urgent topic. Nations worry about the learning of their citizens, companies about the learning of their workers, schools about the learning of their students. But it is not always easy to think about how to foster learning in innovative ways. This book presents a framework for doing that, with a social theory of learning that is ground-breaking yet accessible, with profound implications not only for research, but also for all those who have to foster learning as part of their responsibilites at work, at home, at school.

Wenger, Etienne C., Richard McDermott, and William Snyder. Cultivating Communities of Practice. Harvard Business School Press, 2002. From the time our ancestors lived in caves to that day in the late '80s when Chrysler sanctioned unofficial "tech clubs" to promote the flow of information between teams working on different vehicle platforms, bands of like-minded individuals had been gathering in a wide variety of settings to recount their experiences and share their expertise. Few paid much attention until a number of possible benefits to business were identified, but many are watching more closely now that definitive links have been established. In Cultivating Communities of Practice, consultants Etienne C. Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William Snyder take the concept to another level by describing how these groups might be purposely developed as a key driver of organizational performance in the knowledge age. Building on the 1998 book described above, by Wenger, that framed the theory for an academic audience, Cultivating Communities of Practice targets practitioners with pragmatic advice based on the accumulating track records of firms such as the World Bank, Shell Oil, and McKinsey & Company. Starting with a detailed explanation of what these groups really are and why they can prove so useful in managing knowledge within an organization, the authors discuss development from initial design through subsequent evolution. They also address the potential "dark side"--arrogance, cliquishness, rigidity, and fragmentation among participants, for example--as well as measurement issues and the challenges inherent in initiating these groups company-wide.