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Noel Tichy, who ran GE’s Leadership Development Center, is currently director of the Global Leadership Program at the University of Michigan’s Business School. His teaching model posits that CEO’s must be intimately involved in teaching their teams’ leaders. The basic premise is that companies are successful to the extent that they have leaders at all levels of the organization. Any institution that invests in the development of leaders at all levels is going to get ahead of its competition. It is a principal job of the leader to help develop the next generation of leaders. Unfortunately, many leading companies do not build good leadership pipelines because their leaders do not do the teaching of their own managers. An essential element for a leader to develop the next generation is to present a teachable point of view about how he/she believes they should run the organization. Also needed is a clear idea of what your want to teach them: ideas, product services, distribution channels, customer segments, and values. Leadership is about focusing on human capital as the organization’s most important asset. Unfortunately, many companies make only 10 percent of the investment they should make on development of their people and most of it is spent in the wrong ways. A better approach is to make 80 percent of the development investment be on‐the‐job life experiences. The other 20 percent can be potentially leveraged with very high impact development experiences. If you sit around and read business school cases for three weeks, you’re getting about 20 percent of what you could if you engaged people in action learning real projects. Developing leaders requires a rethinking of the leadership pipeline. You look for those career points where you can leverage the 80% with high impact development, and then you have to build teaching into every single management process.

Inside every great business leader—whether CEO or shop steward—is a great teacher. And the leader's job is to develop others throughout the company.

Growth in the maturing mainframe computer market faded in the 1970s. In the early 1980s, growth in the minimarket stopped. The environment facing Honeywell Information Systems was increasingly hostile. Honeywell is now making cultural transformations to revitalize the company.

Organizations often fail to utilize managerial personnel effectively for leadership development and succession planning systems, and many execute these critical practices through separate human resource functions that shift the responsibility for leadership development away from line managers. The purpose of this article is to present a best practices model for optimal development of the leadership pipeline and a series of practical recommendations for organizations.

A group of 30 CEOs and human resource executives across 15 best practice organizations were asked via semi‐structured interviews to describe the content and delivery of their respective organizations' leadership development and succession planning practices.

Analysis of interview data indicated that best practice organizations effectively integrate leadership development and succession planning systems by fully utilizing managerial personnel in developing the organization's mentor network, identifying and codifying high potential employees, developing high potentials via project‐based learning experiences and manager‐facilitated workshops, establishing a flexible and fluid succession planning process, creating organization‐wide forums for exposing high potential employees to multiple stakeholders, and establishing a supportive organizational culture.

The interview data are drawn from a relatively small number of executives and from a single industry, which may limit the overall utility of the findings.

This study offers needed empirical support for the value of integrating leadership development and succession planning practices through utilization of managerial personnel. Management development practitioners will benefit from assessing their respective organizations' current practices vis‐à‐vis those discussed here, while scholars may utilize the best practices model for generating further research on the role of managerial personnel in talent management systems.

The author concludes that what drives men to the top is not helpful in leading and changing organisations. He challenges, however, the notion that solutions start with powerful men withholding good leadership. He advocates that environments which encourage all to act powerfully are a better solution. Leaders need leaders not followers. He suggests that outward facing organisations are better for working against powerlessness. The ability to write your own action programme is a measure, he suggests, that of your personal power in the organisation. The extent to which that is compatible with the objectives of an organisation is a measure of the power of the organisation and the individuals within it. He illustrates his belief with extracts from personal vision, values and action statements published by him in the London Borough of Enfield.

Posits that every enterprise must institutionalize its workplace learning systems and opportunities in such a way that it radiates what it has already achieved and from this moves on to realize its full potential – in short, the enterprise itself is the key. Examines in successive chapters: the individual manager and questioning insights (Q); the major systems which the enterprise uses to capture and structure its learning; a SWOT analysis of the enterprise′s total learning; action learning, its contribution to the achievement of enterprise growth, and the role of programmed knowledge (P); the Enterprise School of Management (ESM) as a phoenix of enlightenment and effectiveness rising from the ashes of traditional, less effective management training initiatives; and, finally, the practical realization of the action learning dream, as evidenced by emerging examples of successful and profitable implementation worldwide. Concludes with a selection of pertinent abstracts.

Most personnel and OD reading audiences, although prominent for their general silence on the subject, are finally becoming aware of the faddish nature of their “profession”. Many are rightfully embarrassed if asked to explain what happened to the great panaceas of Theory Y, Grid Management, Life Cycle Theory, Sensitivity Training, Dual‐Factor Theory, MBO, Theory Z and Quality Circles. And those who lower their profiles when such questions are asked begin to get hostile when pressed for an answer to the question “If they were such wondrous elixirs when introduced, on what bases have they been discarded?” An honest answer would have to be akin to one I was given by a top manager at Union Carbide when his corporation dissolved their nine‐man OD department at corporate headquarters in 1969: “We don't issue news releases highlighting our goof‐ups.”

Organization Distributed Being From “The Death of Hierarchical Organization” by Patrick B. Marren, senior consultant with the Futures Group. Essay to be included in 1997 Handbook of Business Strategy, Faulkner & Gray, New York. The mechanistic model of business assumed that businesses were essentially machines, and people, money, and information, as well as “hard assets,” were the components of the machine. It also assumed that management, as “operator” of the machine, could centrally control its components. These assumptions provided a fairly good approximation of reality for a very long time (indeed, the very idea of “reengineering” depends on them). But now it is apparent that the central assumptions of this model are very questionable. What could replace it?

As in life, chicken and egg situations occur in many aspects of business. So which came first? The chicken or the egg? Who knows? All that is certain is you do not have one without the other. And maybe that is a good enough starting point to argue the benefits of executive education programs to an organization’s profitability.