Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

By John King, Dave Logan, Halee Fischer-Wright

Book Overview

"Tribal Leadership gives amazingly insightful perspective on how people interact and succeed. I learned about myself and learned lessons I will carry with me and reflect on for the rest of my life."
--John W. Fanning, Founding Chairman and CEO napster Inc.

"An unusually nuanced view of high-performance cultures."
--Inc.

Within each corporation are anywhere from a few to hundreds of separate tribes. In Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright demonstrate how these corporate tribes develop--and show you how to assess them and lead them to maximize productivity and growth. A business management book like no other, this look into company culture is an essential tool to help managers and business leaders take better control of their organizations by utilizing the unique characteristics of the tribes that exist within.

Based on a ten-year study of twenty-four thousand people, this essential guide to organizational behavior offers a clear roadmap to a new way of leading and managing organizations:

The Five Tribal Stages: Learn to identify the five stages of tribal development, from the despair of "life sucks" to the unified power of "we're great," and how to lead people from one stage to the next.High-Performance Cultures: Discover why the key to success is not a superstar CEO but a series of networked tribes, and how leaders who build the tribe are embraced and create unprecedented success.Leadership Framework: Move beyond individual achievement by leveraging triads--three-person relationships built on shared values--to stabilize your teams and foster innovation.Actionable Strategy: Unstick your teams and upgrade your company by using specific leverage points for each stage, transforming your organization and boosting productivity and growth.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061251321
• ISBN13: 9780061251320
• Release Date: June 2011
• Publisher: Harper Business
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

seminal and influential thinking about organizations and individual career development

i've been leading teams for several years now, starting from an 8-man team to now a 115-person team. i've learned a lot of lessons along the way, read a lot of books, but nothing has crystallized things more clearly than this book. this book gave me a framework that has helped me retrospectively understand what i did that did or didn't work. this book made me understand the inflection points in my and my people's careers, and how to accelerate them. this book made me understand the issues i had with difficult employees, and gave me strategies to apply. this book has helped me formulate and visualize the aspire-to culture for my teams that almost everyone can get behind. the lessons in this book are very fractal, they work at many scales - they apply at the individual level, the team level, the cross-organization level, the company level, the human level. i can't recommend this book enough.

A Recipe Book for High Performance Cultures

After hearing a presentation on the concepts of Tribal Leadership, I immediately saw the clear connection to most business models and the relative ease of implementation. At my company, we motivate our teams by leveraging shared values to build cohesive relationships. Tribal Leadership has given my executives a true systematic approach to raising the performance potential of their teams. It brought instant calibration to our assessment efforts and took the guess work out of selecting tactics to move individuals forward to a state of mind where they are performing well, focusing on team results and obtaining more satisfaction from the workplace. "We're Great!" I highly recommend!!

What stage are you and your company? How do you get to the next level?

The most insightful management book I've read since business school. The book starts with an accessible framework for evaluating corporate cultures, each with instantly recognizable traits -- from the DMV to Apple to your company. Stage 1: Life sucks. Stage 2: My life sucks. Stage 3: I'm great (and you're not). Stage 4: We're great (and they're not). Stage 5: Life is great. While the vast majority of the working world is stuck in stages 2 and 3, Tribal Leadership delivers tools to help individuals and organizations break through to the next evolutionary stage. I found this a powerful, pragmatic and surprisingly fun read.

If you only read one book on organizational culture, this should be it

To all those wondering "Why?" and "How?" certain organizations are more productive than their peers, Logan, King and Fischer-Wright have some concrete answers. In their landmark book, "Tribal Leadership", they explore the essence of organizational culture. What they have uncovered is a dynamic at least 15,000 years in the making, and at the heart of all human organizations: the tribe. We operate in a "tribe"-a group of 20 to 150 people- in which important decisions are made and productivity is determined. Larger organizations are "tribes of tribes". Five stages describe the evolution of the tribe, from savage and dysfunctional to innovative and powerfully inspirational. What sets this work apart is its practical advice on both identifying the stage of the tribe and the means to advance to the next stage. Laced with real-life examples, the book is eminently readable. There is no doubt it will transform the reader, no matter where their own tribe finds itself. They will understand the difference between leading and commanding.