The Six Secrets of Change by Michael Fullan

Michael Fullan is an academician from Ontario whose specialty is education. This book does not limit itself to school districts; instead it describes his theoretical framework for organizational change. It's a quick read- six 15 page chapters- one chapter for each "secret". But it is not a quick fix. Fullan enjoys nuance and paradox and reasons that leaders who manage positive systemic organizational change must be able to hold opposing ideas in tandem and allow the tensions between them to clash until a creative innovative compromise emerges. My favorite line from the book is: "Paradoxes must be finessed." My second favorite line is: "Riddle: When is a revealed secret still a secret? Answer: When it is heavily nuanced." His recipe for large scale organizational change involves caring for all the constituents well; motivating peer driven mentoring and friendly competition; building capacity; tracking, sharing and systematizing the learning that occurs on the job; a culture of transparency; and what he calls the "metasecret": the system "learns" or incorporates the best results. I will be thinking about this book for a long time. It probably is one to buy and revisit as the ideas percolate past the little grey matter into the place where true understanding happens.

Michael Fullan, The Six Secrets of Change, c. 2008, Jossey-Bass

The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil

If you don't understand the bloggisphere this book will introduce you to its history and how it works. This is a practical introduction, somewhat repetitious but helpful.

Debbie Weil, The Corporate Blogging Book, c. 2006 Portfolio Books

Managing the Dragon by Jack Perkowski

After a decade of building a globally competitive company in China, Jack Perkowski shares his journey in the exceptionally readable book, Managing the Dragon (c) 2008 and published by Crown Business. His honest reflections are well illustrated with stories that don't even try to disguise his misconceptions and mistakes and so the reader is informed about the real challenges and rewards of working in China. While Perkowski has not learned to speak the language, he has paid careful attention to the culture and the way business relationships work in China. This is a must read for anyone who is involved in cross-cultural work.

The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan

For anyone who is fascinated by how smart people continue to grow their creative analytical skills, this book is a treasure. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, for much of his career details how his mind developed from an intuition for details to the ability to generalize, adjust economics on a global scale, and make reliable predictions for how economic conditions would unfold. It happened because he was willing to engage and have his pre-suppositions challenged by people from other perspectives and persuasions. Not only does his memoir, The Age of Turbulence, package the world since I have been alive, (He started in business in 1948 and I was born fewer than ten years later) it gives the economics' ingenue a way to start thinking and understanding the current news. His keys to economic growth assume a legal system that protects the rights of individuals to own property, a culture of trust where people honor their words and contracts, and a process of on-going "creative destruction". "Creative destruction" presupposes that when products become obsolete, they are replaced by new ones instead of being maintained in perpetuity. I highly recommend reading this book for a picture of the past 50 years of American economics and political decision makers on the world stage.