Leadership and the Art of Change: A Practical Guide to Organizational Transformation

Most books on leadership and organizational change focus on descriptive theory and research, simplistic and questionable gimmicks, or biographical sketches of successful leaders whose character and exploits students are encouraged to emulate. Leadership and the Art of Change avoids pedantry, gimmicks, and hero worship while addressing the complex issues involved in trying to lead an organization. It does not bury the reader in abstractions, nor does it offer quick fixes.  

Leadership and the Art of Change is a unique book in that it focuses on a leader′s central and most daunting task―achieving organizational change that successfully addresses external and internal threats and opportunities. Author Lee R. Beach uses six prime responsibilities as the framework for discussing change leadership: external and internal environmental assessment to identify required changes, organizational culture as a constraint on change, vision for motivating change; plans as a map for change, implementation to produce change, and follow-through for institutionalizing achieved changes and making ongoing change a part of the culture.   

Key Features:

• Defines leadership as the art of producing changes in an organization′s environment, its culture, and its practices in pursuit of survival and prosperity
• Explains the importance of organizational culture as the key to facilitating or inhibiting change
• Examines methods for building a vision and leveraging culture in order to move the organization toward the vision with implementation strategies
• Offers self-summary exercises as well as a new episode of an ongoing vignette in each chapter that helps readers understand the issues under consideration
• Includes appendices that provide students with hands-on tools to do marketing research, survey an organization′s culture, and perform decision analyses  

Written in a conversational manner, Leadership and the Art of Change is an engaging textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying management in a variety of programs including Business, Public Administration, Health Care Management, and Social Work. It will also be of interest to professional managers looking for a unique perspective on organizational change.

Lee Roy Beach is McClelland Professor of Management and Policy, and Professor of Psychology in the College of business and Public Administration at the University of Arizona. Previously, he served as Vice Dean, Eller College of Business and Public Administration at the University of Arizona. Professor Beach received his PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Colorado and began his professional career as a human factors researcher for the U.S. Navy, followed by service at the Office of Naval Research. After leaving the Navy, he completed two years of postdoctoral work at the University of Michigan before taking a position in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington, where he moved from assistant to full professor and served as Chair. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge and Leiden Universities and a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of over 125 scholarly articles and three books on organizational behavior and human decision making:

Beach, L.R. (1998). Image Theory: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Beach, L.R. (1997). The Psychology of Decision Making: People in Organizations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. [FOS series, Second edition in preparation]