The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century

“This masterful book is a delight to read—articulate, provocative and illuminating. It isn’t merely radical, it’s revolutionary!”

Peter Guber
CEO, Mandalay Entertainment Group

How can established organizations become as good at game-changing innovation as they have been at disciplined execution? Instead of innovation being the responsibility of a few courageous individuals or departments, how can innovation become an organization-wide capability – a part of the firm’s DNA?

In THE LEADER’S GUIDE TO RADICAL MANAGEMENT (Jossey-Bass; hardcover; November 2010), award-winning author Stephen Denning shows that meeting these challenges requires a radically different kind of management. The workplace needs more than tweaking. Rather, management needs to be re-invented. Managers must change how they think, speak and act in the workplace. Denning calls it radical management, because it goes to the root of what’s involved in getting things done in today’s workplace.

The need is urgent. The rate of return on assets for US firms is one-quarter of 1965 levels. Customers are frustrated. Brands are unraveling. Executive turnover is accelerating. Workers are disgruntled. The workplace often resembles a Dilbert cartoon.

As Denning sees it, four major changes have contributed to the crisis:

• Work has shifted from semiskilled to knowledge work
• The organization needs the commitment (engagement) of the workforce
• The customer takes charge – they know they have choices now, and we as companies should delight them
• The system has stopped delivering

 Most suggestions for improving management enhance one facet of the organization at the expense of others. In this book, Denning, who has authored seven previous books including the award-winning The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling (Jossey-Bass, 2005) and The Secret Language of Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2007), describes an emerging way of managing that simultaneously creates a positive culture of challenge and achievement for workers, delight for the customers and a steady growth in profit and revenue. Work becomes both productive and fun.

Radical management is comprised of seven key principles:

• Focus work on delighting the client
• Do work through self-organizing teams
• Do work in client-driven iterations
• Deliver value to clients with each iteration
• Be totally open about impediments to improvement
• Create a context for continuous self-improvement by the team
• Communicate interactively with stories, questions and conversations

THE LEADER’S GUIDE TO RADICAL MANAGEMENT also elaborates more than 70 practices that support the seven guiding principles.

This is not another book about teams, or innovation or even leadership storytelling for which Denning is best-known. Radical management is a fundamental re-think of what’s involved in creating a workplace where those doing the work are enabled to contribute their best on a daily basis so as to add a stream of continuous new value for clients.

A long time executive at World Bank, Denning now works with Fortune 500 companies in the US, Europe, Asia and his native Australia on leadership, innovation, storytelling and organizational change.  

THE LEADER’S GUIDE TO RADICAL MANAGEMENT is a practical primer that offers prescriptive advice and compelling insight to help today’s leaders meet the challenges of the 21^st century.