Popular titles on organizational development and leadership.
Learning goes hand-in-hand with leadership and innovation. As an organizational leader at any level, it is important to stay aware and on top of trends and resources in order to help you grow your bottom line and move your company forward. Books provide an immense toolkit to help you accomplish all of your business goals. Here are some top organizational learning books about development and leadership to check out today. Many are classics that still resonate.
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
This classic will help you understand the vital importance of learning in organizations and for organization growth. As the book teaches, the only sustainable competitive advantage will be your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. These are the five disciplines of a learning organization.
- Personal mastery is a discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.
- Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.
- Building shared vision – a practice of unearthing shared pictures of the future that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance.
- Team learning starts with ‘dialogue’, the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into genuine ‘thinking together’.
- Systems thinking – The Fifth Discipline that integrates the other four.
Find this classic book by Peter Senge here.
Leadership and the New Science
We live in a fast-paced, chaotic society, and this book attempts to bridge science with business and the human mind. Margaret Wheatley’s book will provide powerful insights into how to lead in the modern world and how to “create work and lives rich in meaning”. Find it here.
Reinventing Organizations
The workforce is falling apart, and Frederic Laloux’s book has something to say about it. Organizations are out of date, with employee engagement dismal. This revolutionary book provides insights into how we can change our organizations from the inside-out to improve employee welfare and customer satisfaction and develop a culture of innovation and purposeful work. As a leader in your organization, reading this book is a must. Find it here.
Leading Change
John Kotter’s book details his eight-step process for managing change in organizations. The book provides tools and strategies to achieve your business goals and how to make change work for you. If you are charged with innovation in your organization, this book is for you. Find it here.
The Design of Everyday Things
Why not apply the general principles of design to organizations? A thorough discussion about why some products fail us and why some succeed, Don Norman’s book covers what makes good, usable design and how to build products the user needs at the right place and the right time. Find it here. See what you can learn about the design of products and apply to your organization (as the product).
Hopefully this list of organizational learning books about development and leadership provides a place to find resources and tools to help your company grow. For more tips and tools, check out our innovation and design thinking resources blog.