Ratings11
Average rating4.4
It's a fact of life: birds flock, fish school, people "tribe."Every company, indeed every organization, is a tribe, or if it's large enough, a network of tribes—groups of 20 to 150 people in which everyone knows everyone else, or at least knows of everyone else. Tribes are more powerful than teams, companies, or even CEOs, and yet their key leverage points have not been mapped—until now. In Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright show leaders how to assess their organization's tribal culture on a scale from one to five and then implement specific tools to elevate the stage to the next. The result is unprecedented success.In a rigorous eight-year study of approximately 24,000 people in over two dozen corporations, Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright refine and define a common theme: the success of a company depends on its tribes, the strength of its tribes is determined by the tribal culture, and a thriving corporate culture can be established by an effective tribal leader. Tribal Leadership will show leaders how to employ their companies' tribes to maximize productivity and profit: the authors' research, backed up with interviews ranging from Brian France (CEO of NASCAR) to "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams, shows that over three quarters of the organizations they've studied have tribal cultures that are merely adequate, no better than the third of five tribal stages.Leaders, managers, and organizations that fail to understand, motivate, and grow their tribes will find it impossible to succeed in an increasingly fragmented world of business. The often counterintuitive findings of Tribal Leadership will help leaders at today's major corporations, small businesses, and nonprofits learn how to take the people in their organization from adequate to outstanding, to discover the secrets that have led the highest-level tribes (like the team at Apple that designed the iPod) to remarkable heights, and to find new ways to succeed where others have failed.
Reviews with the most likes.
A solid business book. I found this to be most impactful for its information on level 1. There are many folks that have never been a part of level 1, and to educate those folks on what it is like to be there may be actually life changing.
I would have never read this book had it not been for the free audio version I found through Zappos.com. I was't looking for yet another business book, much less a management book, but this one really surprised me and hit me hard. The book in a nutshell talks about 5 stages that organizations and the members of organizations go through:
1 - Life sucks.
2 - My life sucks (but maybe there's something better).
3 - I'm in it for me.
4 - We're in it as a group with a core set of values; there is a higher purpose. We're great.
5 - Our values are everything. We're not fighting competition, we're fighting for a cause.
Admittedly, this list sounds pretty straightforward, possibly even obvious, but reading the examples of what kind of thoughts people in each of the five stages think was like having my mind read. It became clear to me what stage I've been in (3) and what stage my company is in (mostly 3, possibly occasionally dipping into 4).
It's one thing to find out exactly where you are, it's another thing altogether to know exactly where you could go next and have a good idea how to get there. This book gave as clear an indication of that as I've ever seen. I feel like after having read this it will be much easier to recognize the next “stage” when I see it and to consciously move in that direction. Great read, and since the audio is free and relatively short (6 hours), there's really no reason not to give it a try.