Preface A book emerges as an author attempts to meet the challenges of life. This book takes root in many contextual patterns but two are of particular note. The first concerns my experiences at the University of Michigan. During the past few years at the Michigan Business School, I have been involved in a movement. My colleagues Kim Cameron, Jane Dutton, and Gretchen Spreitzer and I have been facilitating the emergence of a new field that we call positive organizational scholarship. This field brings together scholars who focus their research on that which is unusually positive in organizational life. They seek to understand not ordinary patterns of organizing but patterns of positive deviance, that is, behavior at the far right of the normal curve. It is behavior of extraordinary positive impact. The Positive Organizational Scholarship group meets regularly to discuss key questions, and we participate in research presentations and in larger conferences. Recently we finished the first book on the topic (Cameron, Dutton, and Quinn, 2003). We have also organized a research center. In all of this activity, we have been focused on the question, What gives rise to extraordinary patterns of positive organizing? The question consumes my interest. During this time, another contextual pattern was also unfolding. For thirty years, I have maintained one foot in the world of research and one foot in the world of action. During this time, I have been trying to both study and create more positive patterns of organizing, and as I have done so, it has become clear that some notions are more important than others. One key notion is the fact that entropy-the dissipation of energy, slow death-operates on both the human ego and the organizational culture. Individuals and organizations are continually pulled toward entropy. This happens while individuals and organizations deny that their decisions are taking them individually and collectively toward slow death. Denial takes place because people are terrified of remedy. The remedy is to make deep change. No one ever wants to make deep change because that means letting go of control. This book is about how real people find the courage to make deep change. This book is the third in a trilogy on the process of helping individuals and organizations to make deep change. The first book was Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within (1996). The second book was Change the World: How Ordinary People Can Accomplish Extraordinary Results (2000). When I published Deep Change, the book started slowly and then took off. It very gradually became one of the publisher's all-time best-sellers. This meant that Deep Change was a word-of-mouth book: people read it and then recommended it to others. Some of the readers wrote to me. They liked the book because it helped them in engaging in the very difficult process of making personal and organizational change. They told me how they used the concepts to navigate a personal crisis or to lead the transformation of their organization. These were usually potent episodes. The publication of Change the World in 2000 stimulated still more readers to share their reactions. In 2002, the publisher asked me to update and revise Deep Change. I agreed and began the revision project. Then a surprise occurred: the revision became an entirely new book. The new book emerged because I ended up listening to some very special people. I contacted the people who had written me those original letters, and I asked them to write a full account of what happened when they used Deep Change to make deep change. They shared cases ranging from very personal transformations to the transformation of major organizations. Every case was intimate, candid, rich, inspiring, and instructive. Each person spoke of significant outcomes. One example comes from a man you will meet later. For four years, he worked at the head of his organization and thought of himself as a leader. Then he experienced a crisis that led him to make a deep personal change. Afterward he wrote of the impact on his organization: "I have a critical mass of individuals from both the staff and board who are willing to look at our challenges in a new way and work on solutions together. At our meetings, new energy is present. What previously seemed unimaginable now seems to happen with ease. I sometimes wonder why it seems so easy, why we now have such a positive culture." He wonders why his organization that was once quite ordinary is now extraordinary. Then he goes on to answer his own question. The answer defies what is written in almost all textbooks on management and leadership. It defies common understanding and practice. It is a promising answer in that it suggests that every one of us has the capacity to transform our organizations into more positive, productive communities like his. Yet it is a painful answer that almost no one wants to hear. That is why it is not in the books on management and leadership. Painful answers have no market. The man states: "I know it all happened because I confronted my own insecurity, selfishness, and lack of courage." In that seemingly illogical and impossible sentence is the essence of this book. From the many people who read and applied Deep Change, we learned many lessons, but this one is most central. We can transform our organizations by transforming ourselves. This is one of the central answers to the question asked among my colleagues: What gives rise to patterns of positive organizing?

A NEW APPROACH TO LEADERSHIP

This book provides an approach to leadership that is derived from the reports of people like the man I referred to. The central argument is that most of us, no matter how high or low our position, spend most of our time in the normal life state. In this state, we tend to be comfort centered, externally driven, self-focused, and internally closed. Yet it is possible for anyone, no matter how high or low their position, to enter the extraordinary state which I call the fundamental state of leadership. In this state, we become results centered, internally directed, other-focused, and externally open. When we enter the fundamental state of leadership, we become a distortion to the social system in which we reside. We are a new signal to which others must respond. In this sense, we become creators of a new order. We become a stimulant of positive organizing or the emergence of a more productive community. The man who thought he was a leader captures the phenomenon. He entered the fundamental state of leadership, and his organization changed. It was at that point that he became a leader indeed. His personal transformation gave rise to positive organizing, to a more productive community. He suddenly had a critical mass of people who saw things in a new way. They were more willing to join together and produce innovative initiatives. They were more energized. Seemingly impossible accomplishments began to happen in an effortless way. Leading suddenly became easy. That effortless accomplishment was born of agonizing change. In this book, you will learn how to enter the fundamental state of leadership.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book presents a radical, inductive, and applied theory of leadership. Radical means returning to the root or foundations of a thing. The foundation of leadership is not thinking, behavior, competencies, techniques, or position. The foundation of leadership is who we are-our identity or foundational state. When people alter their interior world, they also alter their exterior world. As we come to understand this fundamental framework, our understanding of leadership is radically altered. Inductive means we build the theory not from abstract numbers but from the actual observation of people who are transforming. These are not normal people living in the middle of the normal curve. These are people who are temporarily at the far right end of the curve. These are positive deviants. A theory derived from such observation will not be a normal theory of leadership but a unique theory that does not derive from the identification of normal patterns. Applied means we are focusing on the how. We are providing an approach that tells people what they can do if they want to radically alter and improve the groups within which they reside. The book is divided into three parts. Part One introduces the stories of some of the people who read Deep Change and then made deep change themselves. The stories are intimate, compelling, and transformational. To read them is to be inspired. Across the stories, we see important patterns. The stories help us to come to an alternative view of leadership. I thank these incredible people for their marvelous contributions. In Part Two, we journey even further from the realm of normal leadership thinking and move to a more dynamic and complex view of leadership. In doing so, we explore eight unusual concepts that are presented as practices that can help us enter the fundamental state of leadership. To illustrate the eight disciplines, I have drawn cases from Change the World: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Results and Letters to Garrett: Stories of Change Power and Possibility. In this sense, this book contains the best of three books. In Part Three, we turn from the emphasis on changing ourselves to how we can best learn to help others change. We approach the question from the point of view of helping others that we associate with entering the fundamental state of leadership. We then approach the...