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

by Noel M. Tichy

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 how they in turn learn and receive business ideas/knowledge from the employees they are teaching. Calling this exchange a virtuous teaching cycle, Professor Tichy shows how business builders from Jack Welch at GE to Joe Liemandt at Trilogy create organizations that foster this knowledge exchange and how their efforts result in smarter, more agile companies, and winning results. Some of these ideas were showcased in Tichy's recent Harvard Business Review article entitled, "No Ordinary Boot Camp." Using examples from GE, Ford, Dell, Southwest Airlines and many others, Tichy presents and analyzes these principles in action and shows how managers can begin to transform their own businesses into teaching organizations and, consequently, better-performing companies.

Genres: Leadership, Business, Management

464 pages, Hardcover

First published August 8, 2002

About the author

Noel M. Tichy is an American management consultant, author and educator. He has co-authored, edited or contributed to over 30 books.

Reviews

[Claudia Garrido Martins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Re-read it.

[KV LeSuer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read the first chapter. Good points. If you know them and understand them, you have completed the book. The rest is rinse and repeat.

[Casey Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good ideas, but very repetitive book...almost to the point of being unreadable. The main idea is "create a teachable organization where all can learn and also be taught," but then it's repeated ad nauseam until you're so tired of hearing about the success that GE, Yum! Brands and Home Depot have had that you wonder whether any other company could possibly ever be as functional.

Good message, but man, what a drag going through the rest of the stuff. Best probably to just read the handbook at the end of the book and skip all the other chapters. You'll get what you need out of those 80-odd pages just fine.

[Macoreyes]

Susan Chambers

[Lori Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A should-read book on leadership for knowledge workers, managers, directors, C-levels, and entrepreneurs.