Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time

by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Overview

One of the leading business thinkers in the world offers a bold, new theory of advanced leadership for tackling the world's complex, messy, and recalcitrant social and environmental problems.

Over a decade ago, renowned innovation expert Rosabeth Moss Kanter co-founded and then directed Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative. Her breakthrough work with hundreds of successful professionals and executives, as well as aspiring young entrepreneurs, identifies the leadership paradigm of the future: the ability to "think outside the building" to overcome establishment paralysis and produce significant innovation for a better world.

Kanter provides extraordinary accounts of the successes and near-stumbles of purpose-driven men and women from diverse backgrounds united in their conviction that positive change is possible.

A former Trader Joe's executive, for example, navigated across business, government, and community sectors to deal with poor nutrition in inner cities while reducing food waste. A concerned European banker used the power of persuasion, not position, to find novel financing for improving the health of the oceans. A Washington couple enticed global partners to join an Uber-like platform to match skilled refugees with talent-hungry companies. A visionary journalist-turned-entrepreneur closed social divides by giving fifty million social media users access to free local education and culture.

When traditional approaches are inadequate or resisted, advanced leadership skills are essential. In this book, Kanter shows how people everywhere can unleash their creativity and entrepreneurial adroitness to mobilize partners across challenging cultural, social, and political situations and innovate for a brighter future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541742710
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	01/28/2020
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	367,604
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is an influential and well-known professor at Harvard Business School (holding the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship), specializing in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change. She is also chair and director of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative, a Harvard-wide innovation she co-founded in 2008, to build a growing international model that helps successful leaders at the top of their fields apply their skills to national and global challenges and build a new leadership force for the world.

Table of Contents

Prologue: How to Attack a Castle 1

Introduction: Taking Leadership to a New Place 4

Part I Demand and Supply

1 Up from the Depths: Big Problems and the Need for Advanced Leadership 17

2 Who Will Lead? Hierarchy to Hustle, Careers to Causes 45

Part II Skills and Sensibilities

3 Dreaming Big and Seeing More: Random Walks, Kaleidoscopes, and Other First Steps 83

4 Revisiting the Past to Create the Future: Telling the Right Story 122

5 Light a Spark and Keep Them Fired Up: Activating Allies, Crafting Coalitions 157

6 Crossing the Desert to the Next Oasis: Mastering the Miserable Middles 198

7 Good to Grow: The Road to Impact 229

Conclusion: An Army for Change: The Call to Lead 265

Acknowledgments 285

Notes 291

Index 311

Editorial Reviews

10/07/2019

As this stimulating treatise reveals, Kanter (Move: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead), a Harvard Business School professor and cofounder of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative, believes exciting new ideas can result when leaders get out of their own institutional headspace and venture into new fields. Kanter focuses on successful businesspeople near the end of their primary careers, but not yet ready to retire and play golf; in her view, they have the needed skills and connections to help drive positive social, political, and environmental change. Through accounts of those who have done so, such as John Dubinsky, a former banking executive now dedicated to easing the construction business’s racial disparities, she walks readers through such subjects as reforming institutions; forging relationships, alliances, and coalitions; avoiding the “seven perverse traps of career success” (such as “insulation from disagreement”); and developing a “new definition of what it means to have a successful career and a successful life.” Buoyed by strong writing and an encouraging tone, Kanter’s thorough and thought-provoking guide will be a boon for veteran leaders who want to put their well-tested skills to new—and socially constructive—use. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Winner of the getAbstract International Book Award—getAbstract

"Striking...This realistic and hopeful manual shows how accomplished individuals can tackle problems whose victims often lack resources to take action."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Stimulating...Buoyed by strong writing and an encouraging tone, Kanter's thorough and thought-provoking guide will be a boon for veteran leaders who want to put their well-tested skills to new-and socially constructive-use."—Publishers Weekly

"I feel so strongly about this book and its message that I want everyone who aspires to make a difference to read it. It is the quintessential guide for answering the question we all eventually ask: Have I accomplished my purpose in life? As a graduate of West Point and an Airborne Ranger infantry officer I learned to ask, 'If not me, who?' Here are the personal tools for getting it done, showing us how small pebbles can make big waves."—Robert A. McDonald, 8th US Secretary of Veterans Affairs; retired chairman, president & CEO of Procter & Gamble

"Kanter's book lays out the next big step in innovation: the bold leadership to imagine new solutions to big problems of communities and the world. Her brilliant new book is a compelling read, full of fascinating stories and breakthrough ideas."—Indra Nooyi, former chairman and CEO of Pepsico

"In this season of public appetite for big solutions to big problems, Kanter's Think Outside the Building is both a clarion call and a map for new leaders to step up."—Deval Patrick, former governor of Massachusetts

"Rosabeth Moss Kanter has done it again! This is the best book on leadership written in this century. It may change the world—at the least make it better."—Congresswoman Donna Shalala, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services

"Think Outside the Building is an excellent and inspiring guide for anybody who is trying to make change in the world. Drawing on the stories of dozens of effective efforts, Rosabeth Moss Kanter has created a guidebook that, with wisdom and optimism, extracts the essential techniques for success—especially for new initiatives with a mission to improve society."
—Nicholas Lemann, Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus of Columbia University School of Journalism

"Drawing on fifty detailed case studies and hundreds of interviews, Rosabeth Moss Kanter distills her experiences with Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative in this informative and fascinating volume. Both an 'inspiration and a guide to action,' this book challenges the reader with narratives describing extraordinary new approaches to old institutional and societal problems; Kanter has penned essential reading for twenty-first century leaders."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

From the Publisher

01/01/2020

Kanter's (Harvard Business Sch.) latest book deals with what she calls advanced leadership, involving experienced business leaders addressing intractable systemic problems—social, environmental, or institutional—by forming coalitions across organizational boundaries and providing innovative solutions. As Kanter notes, this is a complex task that involves attempting to make long-term systemic changes. The author is quite clear that advanced leadership is demanding, and requires great skill and persistence. This guidebook combines concrete advice with real-life examples. A strength of the book is the refusal to oversimplify real-world problems. For example, Kanter advises, anyone launching a pilot project should start small and only do what's necessary to get the project under way. While this is sensible advice, it is not always easy to stick to manage goals. VERDICT A useful book for those aspiring to lead organizations, especially managers wishing to enact social change.—Shmuel Ben-Gad, Gelman Lib., George Washington Univ., Washington, DC

Library Journal

★ 2019-09-25
How experienced leaders in business and other professions can act on their "youthful idealism" and make a difference in addressing complex societal problems.

Harvard Business School professor Kanter (Move: Putting America's Infrastructure Back in the Lead, 2015, etc.) directs Harvard's Advanced Leadership Institute, which, since 2008, has helped some 500 retired CEOs and others gain the "outside-the-building, silo-busting" skills needed to take on "messy, complex systems problems" ranging from income inequality to human trafficking. In this striking book, the author distills the lessons learned in the program, in which successful men and women, eager to do good measured in lives improved rather than income earned, explore societal issues of interest, take classes on relevant topics outside their own area of expertise, and use their "capabilities, connections, and cash" (the latter not necessarily their own) to create cross-sector coalitions in pursuit of social change. Drawing on 50 case studies and hundreds of interviews, Kanter tells riveting stories of "bold, imaginative" leadership: A Trader Joe's CEO fights hunger, an Anheuser-Busch CEO confronts educational disparities in St. Louis, a European banker creates partnerships to finance improved ocean health, and a Hong Kong investment banker helps women work in Southeast Asia. In each case, the societal issue is rife with ambiguity and conflict, with no single organization in charge, and the challenge is to find fresh, convention-defying approaches engaging many stakeholders. The author stresses the care with which participants must approach an issue, how they develop the ability to conduct "multiple efforts on multiple fronts," and the challenges of working "across disciplines and institutional silos." She is sometimes repetitious, but mainly to emphasize the powerful potential of her approach. Time alone will reveal the outcomes of these projects, she writes, but they hold much promise and could well serve as models for others.

This realistic and hopeful manual shows how accomplished individuals can tackle problems whose victims often lack resources to take action.

Kirkus Reviews

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