Bolman, L. G., and Deal, T. E. How Great Leaders Think: The Art of Reframing. (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 2014). How Great Leaders Think: the Art of Reframing, is available in print, digital and audio book formats at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookshop.org. It has a simple message:
- Good thinking is the starting point for good leadership.
- Leaders who can reframe—look at the same thing from multiple perspectives—think better. They create a lucid portrait of what’s going on around them and have a clearer vision of what’s needed to achieve desired results.
- Leaders can see and do more when they know how to negotiate four key areas of the leadership terrain: structural, human resource, political, and symbolic.
The book answers a request we’ve often heard from readers and fans of our work for a shorter, more applied version of Reframing Organizations. This new work is a compact overview of our ideas about reframing and our four-frame model, with a focus on leadership. Because storytelling is often the best form of teaching, we use cases and examples, many of them from iconic leaders, to provide realistic lessons about how great leaders think and act. Harvey Schachter wrote a thoughtful review for The Globe and Mail (click here), and Michael Sales’ review provides a great overview of the key ideas and themes (click here). A capsule review appears at leadershipandmanagementbooks.com.
