Leading Beyond the Walls: How High-Performing Organizations Collaborate for Shared Success

"Beyond the walls is a battle cry that mobilizes.... The walls that surround us, protect us, and embrace us can also inhibit movement, limit understanding, restrict engagement, and diminish our relevance in the wider world. I realized that my walls, and the walls of leaders everywhere, were not only the walls of current policy, practice, procedure, and assumption but also the walls of the past-safe, familiar, and secure. This recognition was just the first of several as we worked through a process to take ourselves and our organizations beyond the walls to new levels of performance and positive changes in the lives of people." -from the Introduction by Frances Hesselbein In this first volume of the Wisdom to Action series, twenty-nine of the world2s greatest thinkers explore the need for a new paradigm in leadership. In today2s fast-paced global society, leaders must be adept at establishing diverse partnerships, alliances, and networks by building and maintaining relationships both within and outside their own organizations. They must be comfortable with working with individuals and organizations they cannot control in the traditional sense, but with whom they share core values, purposes, and goals. Ultimately, they must learn to lead through commitment and connection-both of which are rooted in freedom of choice rather than in systems of coercion and control. Leading Beyond the Walls brings together Peter F. Drucker, Stephen R. Covey, Peter M. Senge, Jim Collins, Noel Tichy, Regina E. Herzlinger, C.K. Prahalad, Sally Helgesen, and other thought leaders to describe new ways of building relationships, new approaches to strategy and marketing, new models of employee relations, and other innovative ways of thinking and acting. They share practical insights on the challenge of leading in an age when the old rules and conventional boundaries no longer exist. Their incisive essays herald a world in which new possibilities can come only from leaders and organizations willing to move beyond the walls of inertia and tradition. "There is need for the acceptance of leaders in every single institution and in every single sector that they, as leaders, have two responsibilities. They are responsible and accountable for the performance of their institutions, and that requires them and their institutions to be concentrated, focused, limited. They are responsible also, however, for the community as a whole. This requires commitment. It requires willingness to accept that other institutions have different values, respect for these values, and willingness to learn what these values are. It requires hard work. But above all it requires commitment, conviction, dedication to the common good. Yes, each institution is autonomous and has to do its own work the way each instrument in an orchestra plays only its own part. But there is also the score, the community. And only if each individual instrument contributes to the score is there music. Otherwise there is only noise. "And this book is about the score." -Peter F. Drucker Become Part of the Score with These Thought Leaders: Robert Anthony Jim Belasco William Bridges Christopher Cappy Richard E. Cavanagh Eli Cohen Jim Collins Stephen R. Covey Peter F. Drucker Arun Gandhi Marshall Goldsmith Rita Harmon Sally Helgesen Regina E. Herzlinger Frances Hesselbein Robert Porter Lynch D. Quinn Mills Joseph S. Nye Jr. C.K. Prahalad Charles Roussel Peter M. Senge Stratford Sherman Iain Somerville Roxanne Spillett Noel Tichy Mel Toomey Dave Ulrich Patrick J. Waide Jr. Cathy Walt

FRANCES HESSELBEIN is chairman of the board of governors of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management and editor in chief of its journal, Leader to Leader. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America's highest civilian honor, in 1998.