Summer Reading List – Part V

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER

Title: Center for Effective Organizations

Competencies: talent management, leadership, change management, driving change, financial leadership, judgment, decision-making

Who benefits: readers interested in current business literature

Consultant Usage: executive coaches, organizational consultants, leadership trainers, HR professionals

What’s it about? This week I am enhancing my Summer Reading List by exploring new books coming from the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California (disclaimer: my old stomping grounds and I still root for their sports teams!).

If you are not familiar with the Center, here is what they have to say about themselves: “Since its founding in 1979, the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) has conducted cutting-edge research on a broad range of organizational effectiveness issues. The leading university-based action-research center, CEO, has conducted research that influences how organizations are managed while also making important contributions to academic research and theory from its inception. The Center for Effective Organization’s pioneering research in the areas of organizational design and effectiveness has earned it an international reputation for research that bridges the gap between academic theory and management practice.”

The CEO of CEO is Dr. Ed Lawler.  The man is major writer of books!  He must write while the rest of us sleep.  Or he has a 30 hour day…not sure which. 

His latest is Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage (2008).  This book goes way past just the management of people.  He argues for something I too have pushed for during my working years.  It is not enough to hire, train, and retain excellent people; you need to implement organizational structures, processes and systems that will help manage and support the performance of an organization’s human capital.  This book goes to the top of my reading list!

While not quite as new, his 2006 book co-authored by James O’Toole (another of my favorite authors) The New American Workplace is a very important and worthy read.

Another exceptional book that came out from CEO in 2006 was The Practice of Leadership:  Developing the Next Generation of Leaders.  Edited by Jay A. Conger and Ronald E. Riggio, what I especially liked about this book is that each chapter ends with specific “take aways” that applies to the practice of leadership.  The book is a little on the expensive side, but rich in content.

Investing in People: Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives (2008) by Wayne Cascio and John Boudreau shows “how to choose, implement, and use metrics to improve decision-making, optimize organizational effectiveness, and maximize the value of HR investments.”  Very important book for HR professionals.

Another important and related book that is especially valuable to the HR professional is Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital (2007) by John W. Boudreau and Peter M. Ramstad.  It is all about talent strategy and how it can impact an organization.

And for you fans of Built to Last, Ed Lawler (I’m telling you he is a writing machine) and Chris Worley teamed up to write Built to Change (2006), which focuses on identifying practices and designs that organizations can adopt so that they are able to change.

And finally for this week, not long ago I wrote a post about Noel Tichy and  USC’s Warren Bennis joint effort: Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls (2007).  Several of you expressed great satisfaction with the book.  Well, staying at the USC campus but moving away from CEO, I though you might like to know of a book of similar theme but more narrowly focused: Judgment and Decision Making in Accounting (2007) by Sarah E. Bonner.  This book is more of a “serious read” than a “summer read”, but what the heck!

Next week I will make a (virtual) stop at the UCLA campus for my final installment of Summer Reading Lists.  Meanwhile, happy reading!

 
[tags]ed lawler, human capital, talent management, organizational structure, American workplace, leadership practices, ethics, workplace culture, culture at work, human resource metrics, judgment, decision-making, accounting, finance, bill bradley, william bradley,  bradley[/tags]

 

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.