The New Ecology of Leadership
Business Mastery in a Chaotic World
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
David Hurst has a unique knowledge of organizations—their function and their failure—both in theory and in practice. He has spent twenty-five years as an operating manager, often in crises and turnaround conditions, and is also a widely experienced consultant, teacher, and writer on business. This book is his innovative integration of management practice and theory, using a systems perspective and analogies drawn from nature to illustrate groundbreaking ideas and their practical application. It is designed for readers unfamiliar with sophisticated management concepts and for active practitioners seeking to advance their management and leadership skills.
Hurst's objective is to help readers make meaning from their own management experience and education, and to encourage improvement in their practical judgment and wisdom. His approach takes an expansive view of organizations, connecting their development to humankind's evolutionary heritage and cultural history. It locates the origins of organizations in communities of trust and follows their development and maturation. He also crucially tracks the decline of organizations as they age and shows how their strengths become weaknesses in changing circumstances.
Hurst's core argument is that the human mind is rational in an ecological, rather than a logical, sense. In other words, it has evolved to extract cues to action from the specific situations in which it finds itself. Therefore contexts matter, and Hurst shows how passion, reason, and power can be used to change and sustain organizations for good and ill. The result is an inspirational synthesis of management theory and practice that will resonate with every reader's experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Management educator and former operations manager Hurst (Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change) takes a leisurely stroll through "ecological" business thought the contextual relationship between businesspeople and their surroundings. Using his own experiences and examples of successful businesses (including Wal-Mart, GM, and Apple), Hurst discusses how thought is changed by action and experience, and how organizations and their internal contexts change as a result of individual action. Aimed at readers with unformed management concepts who are looking for a guide, and at active practitioners trying to make sense of what is happening every day, Hurst hopes to provide a management toolbox that allows users to store organizational experiences and employ them in taking effective action. While Hurst's emphasis on contextual thought and the importance of navigating change is admirable, the ideas are overblown and the writing needlessly convoluted and long-winded; wisdom-seekers would do best consulting the book's "key concepts" section, which presents Hurst's ideas without drowning them in a swamp of unnecessary verbiage.