Organizing Genius

Uncovers the elements of creative collaboration by examining six of the century's most extraordinary groups and distill their successful practices into lessons that virtually any organization can learn and commit to in order to transform its own management into a collaborative and successful group of leaders. Paper. DLC: Organizational effectiveness - Case studies.

"Organizing Genius, the latest insightful and fascinating offering from Bennis and Biederman, reveals how there is rarely only one face to success. What may seem to be independent achievements are almost always a collection of extraordinarily interdependent minds." - Dr. Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Publishers Weekly

University of Southern California business professor Bennis and Los Angeles Times reporter Biederman examine six "Great Groups" whose work affected and sometimes changed the modern world. They are the Disney organization and its animated films; the Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, which designed the first user-friendly computer; the Clinton presidential campaign of 1992 for what the authors deem a remarkable victory; Lockheed's Skunk Works, where the U-2 spy plane and the Stealth bomber were developed; Black Mountain College in the foothills of North Carolina, which lasted only from 1933 to 1956 but attracted many major artists; and the Manhattan Project, whose scientists created the atomic bomb. All of these groups, the authors stress, consisted of enormously talented people with a sense of mission, who worked under a strong leader and were imbued with pragmatic optimism. Each segment is so well told that it has lessons for all. (Feb.)

Warren Bennis is Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California and a consultant to multinational companies and governments around the world. He also chairs the Advisory Board of the Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University. He is author of more than thirty books and dozens of other articles on leadership, including Managing the Dream, Organizing Genius, and Learning to Lead. He lives in Santa Monica, California. Pat Biederman