The Workmanship of Leaders: Systems, Frameworks, and Information Processing - Paperback

by Steve Tendon (Foreword by), Bob Emiliani (Author)

Leaders are never thought of as tradespeople. Yet their work - processing information to make consequential decisions - is a craft, and like any craft it can be done with workmanship or without.

The Workmanship of Leaders delivers a bracing answer: leaders operate inside a self-preserving "negentropic system" that absorbs and neutralizes virtually every attempt to change it. Drawing on systems thinking, the Cynefin framework, and decades of research, the author reframes leadership as a craft - an information-processing trade demanding a kind of workmanship and workmanlike diligence that is rarely cultivated at the top.

This provocative book introduces original concepts that explain countless failed transformations: the cascading systems of preconceptions, the distinction between preconception intelligence and fact-based intelligence, and why individually framed solutions can never resolve system problems.

The book is essential reading for executives, consultants, and anyone who has wondered why leadership everywhere is far more similar than different.