Gretchen M. Spreitzer

Two leaders of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship (Robert Quinn and Gretchen Spreitzer) combine with two leaders of Battelle for Kids (Katherine Heynoski and Mike Thomas) to offer a powerful new understanding of the mindsets, behaviors, and change processes of highly effective teachers. What these experts found in their research and their work with teachers and students upends our normal expectations about how to engage students and what learning is. They show how great teachers embrace and dance with the tensions in schools, students, and learning that hinder other teachers. They reveal how great teachers transform their own identities and the identities of their students so everyone becomes a lifelong learner. And they provide vivid examples and inspiring stories of practical ways to accelerate learning among children, youth, and adults.

Positive leaders are able to dramatically expand their people's - and their own - capacity for excellence. And they accomplish this without enormous expenditures or huge heroic gestures. Here leading scholars - including Adam Grant, author of the bestselling Give and Take; positive organizational scholarship movement cofounders Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn; and thirteen more - describe how this is being done at companies such as Wells Fargo, Ford, Kelly Services, Burt's Bees, Connecticut's Griffin Hospital, the Michigan - based Zingerman's Community of Businesses, and many others. They show that, like the butterfly in Brazil whose flapping wings create a typhoon in Texas, you can create profound positive change in your organization through simple actions and attitude shifts.

To be successful in today's business environment, organizations need the knowledge, ideas, energy, and creativity of every employee. The best companies accomplish this by turning themselves into a company of leaders--an organization in which employees at every level take the initiative and act as though the business where their own. Gretchen M. Spreitzer and Robert E. Quinn draw on ten years of empirical research to show how employee empowerment can transform a workforce and create a very real competitive advantage. They describe five key disciplines that help empower employees to take initiative, be more innovative, engage in transformational change, and act as leaders. And they provide real-life examples specific tools and strategies that will help you to put those disciplines to work in your own organization. A Book in the University of Michigan Business School Series