The Cycle of Leadership: How Great Leaders Teach Their Companies to Win

by Noel M. Tichy

Book Overview

In The Leadership Engine, Noel Tichy showed how great companies strive to create leaders at all levels of the organization, and how those leaders actively develop future generations of leaders. In this new book, he takes the theme further, showing how great companies and their leaders develop their business knowledge into "teachable points of view," spend a great portion of their time giving their learnings to others, sharing best practices, and...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0066620562
• ISBN13: 9780066620565
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: Harper Business
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

All Leadership "students" should read this.

Noel Tichy ties together concepts of Action Sciences, Trust, and Accountability together in a method that can be duplicated in many leadership roles. His Virtuous Teaching Cycle may not be a quick fix, but is a culture changing concept that has served many business units well. Most examples are based on work at GE, but that is simply where Tichy's expereince allows him to describe reality, not theory.

A New "Business Classic"

Those who are familiar with my reviews of other business books already know that on several dozen occasions, I have strongly recommended The Leadership Engine (1997) which Tichy wrote with Eli Cohen and Nancy Cardwell. He teams up with her again in this book, expanding and enriching his concept of leadership development at all levels throughout any organization, regardless of its size or nature. Hence the importance of what Tichy calls a "Virtuous Teaching Cycle": Everybody teaches and everybody learns; all practices, processes, and values promotion teaching; all teaching is interactive to generate the effective exchange of knowledge; thereby, maximum use is made of everyone's skills and talents to ensure all-level alignment for smart and rapid response to needs, problems, opportunities, etc. Tichy asserts (and I agree) that hypertransformation (in established organizations) and hypergrowth (in start-ups) are essential to business success. The challenge in established organizations is to overcome what Jim O'Toole characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." For start-ups, the challenge is to achieve appropriate scale while ensuring that new employees are brought on line and up to speed ASAP. In ten chapters, and with prevision as well as eloquence, Tichy explains how various organizations (notably GE) have met those and other challenges.Unlike other authors who address many of the same issues, Tichy also includes a substantial Handbook (pages 285-394) which consists of ten Sections: The Teaching Organization, The Hand You have Been Dealt, Building Your Teachable Point of View, Pulling It All Together, Building a Team Timetable Point of View, Architecting the Leadership Pipeline, Scaling the Teaching Organization, Building Teaching into the DNA, Global Citizenship, and finally, Start the Journey. In the Handbook, Tichy explains provides decision-makers with with just about everything their need to know to design, implement, and then strengthen their own Teaching Organization, one within which the Virtuous Teaching Cycle sustains leadership development at all levels.In his Introduction to the Handbook, Tichy quotes a brief statement from Thomas Stewart's most recent book, The Wealth of Knowledge:"The knowledge economy stands on three pillars. The first: Knowledge has become what we buy, sell, and do. It is the most important factor of production. The second pillar is a mate, a corollary to the first: Knowledge assets -- that is, intellectual capital -- have become more important to companies than financial and physical assets. The third pillar is this: To prosper in this new economy and exploit these newly vital assets, we need new vocabularies, new management techniques, and new strategies. On these three pillars rest all the new economy's laws and its profits."Tichy includes this brief statement because it is directly relevant to his own objectives in The Cycle of Leadership but also because, unless and until an organizat

Great Team Building Ideas

After hearing about all the corporations with failing management, my business team went looking for some guidance. I learned a lot from this book about building and teaching teamwork, leadership skills and trust within a team. I really enjoyed the business case examples from other corporations. Our team is now going through the exercises in the leadership handbook in the back of the book and know it will help us all be better leaders. I highly recommend this book for any business team looking for some leadership training.

Walking the talk and openness to change

I found this a wonderful book, so much so that I read it in one sitting, all 435 pages. I have also adopted it as the main text for my graduate class in "Leadership of Organizational Change." The most compelling imagery is what I call (a) walking the talk (that is, leading) and (b) openness to change (that is, learning). I am a professor of adult education and to see a book for business readers with a teaching-learning dynamic built into its fabric was very heart-warming. The book's emphasis on a "Virtuous Teaching Cycle" and a "Teachable Point of View" were beautifully presented. The details of the different business examples, while helpful, were not of key importance for me as the philosophy of a leader who must be both a teacher and a learner: walk the talk and be open to change. If business leaders would follow through on Tichy's philosphical thrust that leaders teach and learn, just think how incredibly more creative, life-giving, and profitable organizations could be. A wonderful read.