The Leader's Edge

The tasks faced by organizations today are increasingly complex, and leaders find themselves faced with challenges from all sides: accelerating technology, deregulation, mergers and acquisitions, shifting demographics, new business models, and an uncertain economy. Indeed, to many these challenges seem insurmountable, because traditional management skills are simply not enough to cope with them. The Leader's Edge offers a breakthrough approach to dealing with such situations, showing how to tap into a set of unique creative competencies that are necessary to survive and thrive in this turbulent environment. Based on seven years of research on several hundred individual leaders and teams from a variety of industries and disciplines, The Leader's Edge identifies the insight, skills, techniques, and wisdom that separate true leaders from merely effective managers. The key to truly creative and successful leadership, say Charles J. Palus and David M. Horth, lies in adding six key competencies to traditional leadership skills: paying attention, personalizing, imaging, serious play, collaborative inquiry, and crafting. The authors reveal how any leader can access and use these sensibilities and skills to make sense of rapid change and complexity-and thus provide an invaluable leader's edge. The Leader's Edge will help managers recognize the competencies they already have and develop them further. It will give them a practical understanding of how the creative competencies, when integrated with traditional skills, are vital to the essential process of making sense. And it will show them how to help their organizations and communities develop and use these competencies to create shared understanding, and so better navigate and resolve complex challenges.