Sublime

Create an organizational system whose foundation is managers-as-teachers who apply and teach lean thinking, manage to improve, promote stop-and-fix, and who practice Go See. Add the two pillars of respect for people and continuous challenge-the-status-quo improvement mindset.

a director in a theater production must exercise both the functions of authority—maintaining equilibrium within the social group—and the practice of leadership—mobilizing the social system to create a new reality.

Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.

Schein defined culture, and how it is formed, in these terms: Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.

Heiligenfeld has developed a simple practice of team supervision. The company works with four external coaches who each have their domain of expertise (relationships, organizational development, system thinking, leadership).

It involves looking at the ways social phenomena

The process is key to making self-management work on a large scale. It is actually so critical that, at AES and other self-managing organizations, colleagues know that forgetting to uphold the advice process is one of the few things that can get them fired (we’ll touch later on the topic of how someone can be dismissed in the absence of hierarchy).

A manager’s authority, she concludes, “emerges only as the manager establishes credibility with subordinates, peers, and superiors.”