By: Troy Rappold on March 2, 2023
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World was written by Ronal Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky in 2009. Published by Harvard Business Press, all three authors have impressive academic pedigrees and work experience. Their book falls into categories of Leadership-Management-Business Analytics. We have read numerous books…
By: Nicole Richardson on March 2, 2023
In 1994 Ronald Heifetz set the leadership field afire with his theory of “Adaptive Leadership” in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers. Since then, adaptive change vs technical change has been the focus of many a leadership conference. Wrapping one’s brain around the applicable differences between adaptive and technical can be an exhausting task. In…
By: David Beavis on March 2, 2023
Five years ago, my wife, Laura, and I moved from Southern California to Oregon. This was a dream come true. For years I had the vision of pastoring in the Pacific Northwest. An opportunity presented itself, we packed, and drove north. Dream come true. It wasn’t long after we arrived that the dream became…
By: Tim Clark on March 2, 2023
Think fast: You’re the pastor. You walk out of a church service and are confronted by a member who is yelling at you and causing a scene. You aren’t sure why, and can’t tell if she’s having a psychotic breakdown, is high on drugs, is demonized, or is just angry. A crowd of congregants has…
By: Jenny Dooley on March 1, 2023
Reading two books back-to-back, one by a family therapist and one by a psychologist has been a surprisingly challenging experience. On the one hand, because I work in the field of counseling the general concepts are not new. On the other hand, what is being discussed feels foreign to me. The confusion is that both…
By: Michael Simmons on March 1, 2023
The paradigm shifting book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, attempts to provide a model that scales leadership across a broad spectrum from family systems to national and international governments. The book addresses the problems associated with organizational change. Though it was written well before the…
By: Cathy Glei on March 1, 2023
Leaders make a lot of decisions. After reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by the economist, psychologist and professor, Dr. David Kahneman, not only are a lot of decisions made on a daily basis but my decision making process involves the interplay of two systems. System one is the automatic system that acts without conscious…
By: Kally Elliott on March 1, 2023
A recent reply sent to a friend via text: “Yes, I did receive your email and I read it while sitting in my car waiting for my son but then he got in the car and asked if I could stop at the grocery store for his favorite meal and then my phone actually rang…
By: Becca Hald on March 1, 2023
My husband majored in Business Economics in college and later went on to earn his Master of Business Administration. He loves learning about the concepts in economics and we have talked about these concepts our entire marriage. I understand some of it, but most of it goes over my head and is not exactly one…
By: Roy Gruber on March 1, 2023
I cannot remember the podcast’s name, but I do remember the statement: “Your church is perfectly designed to achieve its current results.” Ouch. Whoever said that piercing comment to church leaders got that idea from a trio of leadership consultants named Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky. Classified under general management, this leadership…
By: Eric Basye on March 1, 2023
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, written by leadership gurus Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linksy, is an incredibly practical book for those seeking to better understand and apply organizational leadership principles to any context. We first see this practicality in the book’s subtitle, “Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World.” This…
By: Kristy Newport on March 1, 2023
Polanyi’s summary In my education, I have not taken a course in economics, so I found Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time to be arduous reading. It wasn’t until the twenty-first chapter on ‘Freedom in a Complex Society,’ Polanyi’s final words in his historical account, when my mind began…
By: Becca Hald on February 28, 2023
I do not often have the best sense of direction. I grew up in a part of Southern California where the North/South bound 101 freeway travels East to West. I went to college in Santa Barbara where the ocean was to the South messed with my sense of direction. I am eternally grateful for Apple…
By: Elmarie Parker on February 28, 2023
Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky are each leadership experts in their own right, each with long pedigrees. But in “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World,”[1] they combine their sixty-plus years of experience and learning to provide a leadership “field book”[2] that offers “…practical steps…
By: Pam Lau on February 28, 2023
In his memoir, A Thousand Days, former Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger reproached himself for not objecting during the planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion: “I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one’s impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by…
By: Andy Hale on February 28, 2023
Occasionally, a book hits the zeitgeist at just the right time with the right words. Over the last several years, Tod Bolsinger’s Canoeing the Mountain and Tempered Resilience have been those books for church leaders. But if you talk to Tod, which I have on two occasions for the CBF Conversations Podcast (first interview and second interview), he’d tell you that…
By: Kayli Hillebrand on February 27, 2023
Ronald Heifetz and his co-authors Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky had me at the subtitle of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: “Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World.” Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky all lead Cambridge Leadership Associates, a leadership development firm that spans international borders and sectors of industry. Having additional experience…
By: Scott Dickie on February 27, 2023
We might be able to get through life, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (1) but there’s only one way to read Kahneman’s book: slow. I found this book full of interesting facts buried in an over-abundance of words—often descriptions of various research experiments—which made the book difficult to read. Having said that, the overall assertion—that we…
By: Travis Vaughn on February 27, 2023
If I’m truthful, I think I’d say I really like working alone. Not all the time, of course. But a lot of the time. In fact, I’m pretty happy running a small business as my side hustle, in partnership with my wife, with no other employees. Wait. Pause. That might be my “remembering self,”[1] taking…
By: Jennifer Vernam on February 27, 2023
I was struck by the continuation of a theme from last week’s reading of Edwin Friedman[1] to this week in David Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.[2] I am going to try to show how I wove the concepts of Friedman’s non-anxious leadership and Kahneman’s System 1 and 2 thinking together. Last week, in the online…
