Joni A. Graen – författare

This book employs a network-centric approach to the new field of multinational leadership and network sharing. Networks go beyond teams but may include teams of various types from homogeneous project teams to multinational strategy teams and every type of team between. Conventional wisdom was that nothing larger than a relatively small team could be led effectively because the number of relationships between people is about one half of the square of the size of the team. For a team in which every member depends on every other member, the number of interdependent relationships becomes overwhelming with relatively small team sizes. Fortunately, recent technical advances in network analysis and multicultural cooperation have been developed to rescue us from mind boggling bombardments of everyone trying to communicate over all others at once. Merely thinking about such a Kafkaesque situation hurts our heads. Armed with these two breakthroughs fairly large networks, both national and multinational, can be led effectively with appropriate selection and training. This book furthers our attempts to make functional networks perform their promise of becoming “superteams.”

This book is about preparing our thinking, feeling, and acting for the rapidly expanding “knowledge era.” We discuss the following queries in the chapters. We begin with a discussion of what an appropriate knowledge-driven corporation (KDC) is. Next, we explore a number of design issues about this transformed charter company and present two examples of new knowledgedriven corporations that are described in strategic and tactical terms. At this point, the questions of management and leadership selections and development for the KDC are discussed in the next two chapters. These are followed by two chapters discussing the “political side” of human KDC in terms of “fit” or “no fit.” Following this discussion of our frail interpersonal habits, project teams’ research shows how an orderly process of team leadership development unfoldsover the project life cycle. Finally, the last chapter discusses where we are concerning emergent response leadership in building real knowledge-driven corporations. This book is dedicated to survival of the best of the best of our corporations in the knowledge era through complex creative destruction.