Putting Hope to Work: Five Principles to Activate Your Organization's Most Powerful Resource

One of the pioneers of the Total Quality movement, W. Edwards Deming, famously proclaimed, Drive out fear so that everyone may work more effectively for the company. But after attending a quality conference in the 1990s devoted to Deming's proposition, the authors felt somehow drained; talking about fear seemed to have sucked the life out of the entire audience. They began to wonder if it was a vicious circle; what if focusing on fear, even in an effort to drive it out, actually kept you in fear? What if the conversation were shifted to hope―not to negate or invalidate fear but to bring energy to the more life-enhancing side of the equation?

Putting Hope to Work is their response to these questions. Drawing upon the authors' many years of research and management consulting, it presents a pragmatic approach to identifying, supporting, and sustaining hope and channeling it toward productive ends to create more vibrant, creative, collaborative―and successful―workplaces. Integrating insights from fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and biology, Hutson and Perry identify the five key principles of hope―possibility, agency, worth, openness, and connection―and demonstrate how they can be developed in any type of organization. Featuring dozens of in-depth examples and personal experiences from a wide variety of organizations, as well as tools for applying hope toward effective leadership, decision making, problem solving, and communication, the authors offer a multi-dimensional approach to leadership that is both inspiring and practical, tapping into a universal desire to produce work that is as meaningful as it is profitable.

Harry Hutson is a business advisor and executive coach, specializing in career development, change management, communication, and conflict resolution. He consults to a wide variety of corporations, nonprofits, and educational institutions. For over 20 years he was a leader in human resource management at Cummins, Avery Dennison, and Global Knowledge Network, and he is the Vice Chairman of the New England Center for Children. He has written articles on human resources and organizational development for a variety of business and professional publications and delivered numerous presentations and workshops to colleagues. He is coauthor of Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations.

Barbara Perry is a cultural anthropologist, management consultant, and teacher. In her twenty-five years of consulting to Fortune 500 companies, her emphasis has been on facilitating development of customer-focused, innovative cultures. She pioneered the use of team-based ethnographic methods both internally (for managing change) and externally (to develop customer-relevant product and marketing strategies). She is a frequent speaker at trend, market research, innovation, and product development conferences and also runs a leadership workshop for women. Her articles on organizational culture and learning, as well as on the use of team-based ethnographic research methods, have appeared in a variety of publications.