Tuesday 10 November 2009

Aristotle, leadership, communication, self-seduction, story-telling and transparency in the postmodern organisation

"The leader of tomorrow will be the communicating leader," says one of the reviews of the final book of my recent orders for my leadership diploma which arrived today - not a moment too soon. There is even more food for thought in this than in the previous books. The Expressive Organization seems in many ways to be about using imagination as a tool to unlock multi-disciplinary and holistic approaches to understanding the problems and potential answers facing contemporary organizations.
In the final part there is even a bit about using Aristotle's "on Rhetoric" to forge links between strategy and communication (Not sure what JK Gayle over on Aristotle's feminist subject would make of that).
The opening chapter in the Rethinking Identity section is called "Scaling the tower of Babel: relational differences between identity, image and culture in organisations". Some of the other sections are: The symbolic marketplace, Reputation as strategy, Organisations as brands, the Value of storytelling and Communicating Organizations.
The two chapters I'm most looking forward to reading are: "Valuing expressive organizations: intellectual capital and the visualisation of value creation" and "Identity lost or identity found? Celebration and Lamentation over the Postmodern view of identity in social science and fiction". That last one almost sounds like one of my more pretentious attempts to find a title for one of my sermons - or maybe a crime novel!
Now I just need to decide which chapter to read on the bus tomorrow morning as a preparation for morning prayer hmmm... perhaps "Organisational identity as moral philosophy: competitive implications for diversified corporations."

2 Comments:

J. K. Gayle said...

Jane,
Thanks for posting. Enjoy your bus ride, especially if you read "Organisational identity as moral philosophy: competitive implications for diversified corporations." I'd love to hear more on using Aristotle's Rhetoric for developing links between strategy and communication! We have to read Aristotle for all he's worth, but he'll try to tell us exactly what we're worth if we're not too careful. :) (Thanks for the link. Bon voyage).

Stephen said...

Looking forward to reading this. Enjoy it on the bus.