BOOK REVIEWS
Hieke Burch and Sumantra Goshal, A Bias For
Action: How Effective Leaders Harness Willpower,
Achieve Results and Stop Wasting Time. New Delhi:
Viking/Penguin Books, in arrangement with
Harvard Business School Press, 2004, 209 pp. Price
Rs. 595 hard.
The managerial zest of the magic leader and the change
maker (Kanter, Stein and Jick, 1992) echoes clear and,
the way the leader manager triumphs fire-fighting
monotony and emerges a winner of change is the soul of
the book under review. It alters the frame of reference to
embrace emotional energy, focus and willpower.
Based on ten years (1993-2003) of research on
managerial behaviour in industries from banking,
software, consulting etc., the authors present their
eclectic findings in two sections and nine chapters. The
individual level action taking behaviour was researched
at Lufthansa, the German based aviation group, when it
was restructuring. Of special mention is the climb 99
program that looked at the middle-level talent pool,
while at Conoco, U.S. Oil company the study was
replicated. The issue of marshalling willpower which is
a decisive driver of implementation of change was
further researched at : Goldman Sachs, Sun
Microsystems and Oracle in North America; British
Petroleum, Hilti Group, McKinsey, Micro mobility
systems, namics, Siemens Nixdorf informations
systems (SNI), and Swissair in Europe; LG group, Sony
and Infosys in Asia; and Natura and WEG in Latin
America. Sometimes similar to Argyris’ (1991),
Teaching smart people how to learn, the authors
question how talented executive loose valuable time and
speed, get lost into the stream of their action-non-action.
Part one of the book unveils with the section on
harnessing your will power to achieve results. This
section has six chapters enumerating the journey of
change, which turns around action non-action to
decisive action. Energy a vigour fuelled by intense
personal commitment and involvement is illustrated
through powerful stories. Energy requires meaningful
action, initiative from within and exceptional efforts
when tackling heavy workload. It speaks of issues under
the employee skin as well as intrinsically controlled
employee engagement, and like Arjun the protagonist of
Mahabharata- the Indian Epic, a laser like focus. Yet a
strategic personal focus is not enough, linkage with
strategic business objectives, patience, and dogged
determination has to be present, according to the
authors. Determination, though is different from
motivation, and has more to do with a strong willpower
in negating circumstances. The authors though build a
note of caution, and point out the loopholes of
determination, which may degenerate into
stubbornness, inflexibility and mental inertia. The
authors exemplify four kinds of managerial behaviour,
namely the detached, who have high focus low energy,
and may actually exhibit defensive avoidance, which
allows mangers to perpetuate patterns of behaviour,
refined over time. The procrastinator, low energy and
low focus individual, who maybe using learned
helplessness as a tool. The frenzied manager—a high
energy and low focus manager—essentially a thematic
grasshopper with no clear sense of priority. The reader
is reminded of Senge’s myopic vision and disability to
learn. The last of course is the Purposeful manager, high
on focus and energy, anchored in a strong sense of
personal significance and responsibility towards the
organizational goals, has a flair to thrive on chaos and
possesses a refined ability to step back and reflect. Self-
aware individuals pick their battles carefully and do not
evade but face the challenge and slowly change the
landscape with decisiveness and patience. Tolerant to
ambiguity and flexible the purposeful manager is an
amalgamation of the emotionally intelligent manager.
The authors further relate stories of how to make a
journey from detached to purposeful. Compellingly
illustrated by the Swiss air collapse, where the manager
engages his willpower, integrity, time, energy and
manages skilfully his inner emotions to act
purposefully, and thrives on chaos leading to a
successful take over by Crossair which results in a new
airline-Swiss. The last chapter of this section deals with
the trap of overwhelming demand and unbearable
78 ● Book Reviews
constraints which reflect how the web of expectations
absorb a manager completely, leaving little room for
doing things which make a significant difference.
Rather than becoming prisoners of their own routines,
and responding to what is thrown at them, the managers
develop a bias for action. They develop an explicit
agenda, practice slow management, structure contact
time, shape demands and manage expectations. Shaping
demands and managing expectations emphasises the
need to build personal networks. Purposeful action
takers adopt strategies to undo the trap of unbearable
constraints, by mapping relevant constraints, accepting
trade-offs, selectively breaking rules and tolerating
conflicts and ambiguity.
The second part of the book under review comprises
of three chapters. The authors expound on how to
cultivate a company of Action takers and the leadership
role of a facilitator of purposeful action taking. The unit
of analysis here shifts to the organization, and the
manager is faced with building a context for purposeful
action. The authors touch the familiar realm of shared
vision and building a winning culture. Reverberation of
the resource-based view to gain competitive advantage
is clear and strong. Value, rareness, inimitability and
organization form the terrain of the winning landscape,
giving space, support, building a winning network and
the reinforcement of a positive cycle of purposeful
action shapes this idea. The entire book is sprinkled with
stories from the organizations mentioned earlier, which
make the reader touch ground realities.
The authors then move on to the four organizational
energy zones. This is a fresh approach. The first one is
the comfort zone which is positive quality and of low
intensity, in terms of organizational energy. Typical of
weak emotions, calm and contented, leading to
complacence, sitting on past glories and victories,
lacking alertness and emotional tension necessary for
organizational change. The second is the resignation
zone –low on intensity and of negative quality, here the
managers suffer from low levels of emotional
commitment and effort, this may be typical of
organizations where change interventions have failed.
The third is the corrosion zone, which is high on
emotional energy intensity, but is of low or negative
emotional quality. The organization is trapped in
internal conflicts and politics and energy of managers is
frittered away, leaving little room/scope for productive
work. The fourth one is the productive zone that is high
on emotional-energy intensity and the quality of
organizational energy is high and positive. Managers are
driven by enthusiasm, positive excitement, sense of joy
VISION—The Journal of Business Perspective ● Vol. 9 ● No. 1 ● April–June 2005
and pride. Commitment as a result is volitional and there
is a positive sense of urgency and focus, alignment
towards business critical activities. Examples from the
industry follow here in abundance. The metaphor,
‘slaying the dragon and winning the princess’,
embodies the movement to this zone. It reflects on how
to mobilize intolerable emotions and transforming it into
productive energy. The last section talks of freedom, of
space given to the managers by their leaders.
Theoretically empowerment, simplistically, space and a
sense of unlimited freedom when working in an
organization, which makes the projects more difficult,
as building volitional commitment is not easy. Within
the unlimited space are accepted legitimate boundaries
and limitations. Strategies discussed are: help managers
visualize, prepare them for obstacles, encourage
managers to confront ambivalence and complacence,
develop a climate of choice, build a self regulating
system and create a desire for the sea. The last strategy is
built upon the story of the pilot and philosopher,
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, that if you want your men to
build a ship, do not lead them in the forest to cut trees,
gather wood and saw it and make planks for the ship but
instead take them to the sea, let them experience the
beauty. The ships to be built will be driven by the purity
of that experience itself. Essentially take them to ground
reality, build a desire to dream and dream big, and then
give them a context in terms of an organizational culture
and will power to make their dreams a reality. The book
draws to an end with an exhortation to build willpower
and imagination by leaders into their organizational
context.
A Bias for Action is engrossing and is peppered with
real organizational stories, which dovetail the ideas that
the authors exemplify. The book will be very useful for
the high potential manager leaders, who comprise the
high end of the talent matrix of many organizations.
CEOs, Change mavericks, turnaround leaders and
thought leaders on change including frontline managers
are advised to action-reflection cycle, and move away
from action non-action, degenerative cycle. Helpful to
Indian managers who are awakening to the kind of
challenges and strategies discussed in the book. The
hands on approach is invigorating, specially the stories
which carry an engrossing message with them. For
young managers it will be a lesson to learn and be
prepared for, will build an excitement for issues to watch
against and strategies to hone in their career landscape.
The book sometimes presents the ideas of Senge and
Argyris and tinkles with Kanter’s ideas, along with
cultural nuances. Sometimes one feels that the

originality is compromised. The reviewer agrees
though, that without these foundation stones of earlier
academicians one cannot present fresh ideas. The
uniqueness of the book is in combining emotional
energy and willpower together to move the
organizations into high-energy zones. In terms of
emotional energy at the individual level and the
organizational level, combining the two to get a
powerful, alert and urgent sense of action is
groundbreaking. Managers and leaders will learn the
how and the why of managing active non-action, and
douse day-to-day fires and spark the fire within and
manage that fire to get things done and dream big
dreams and most importantly make them come true,
with purposeful action and reflection.
Jyotsna Bhatnagar (Dr.)
Faculty, Human Resource Management Area
Management Development Institute
Mehrauli Gurgaon road, Gurugram
Gurgaon-122 001, Haryana
Louis Carter, David Ulrich, Marshall Goldsmith
(Eds.), Best Practices in Leadership Development and
Organization Change: How the Best Companies
Ensure Meaningful Change and Sustainable
Leadership. San Francisco: Pfeiffer/John Wiley,
2004, 512 pp. Price $ 75 Hard.
Leading the change in the contemporary economic
environment, which is surcharged with chaotic
competition, is becoming perhaps one of the most
serious challenges for business as well as social
organizations. Change issues are increasingly taking an
increasingly complex shape due to rapid changes in
economy, polity and society that are resulting from
globalization. Economies in the new era are largely
driven by venture capitalists, large companies, and
global consulting firms. Mergers and acquisitions are
taking place at a phenomenal scale as devices to
counteract competition. Virtualization is also being
resorted to in a big way to help promote more effective
organizational survival. These realities are spreading to
the developing world as well, including Asia. The
aspirations of the new-generation employee, whose
working style and value choices have been considerably
influenced by the globalization realities, are significantly
influencing the structuring of the workplace. New
paradigms are emerging in management so as to respond
to the emergent new realities.
VISION—The Journal of Business Perspective ● Vol. 9 ● No. 1 ● April–June 2005
Book Reviews ● 79
The incidence of customization in manufacturing as
well as services sectors operations is increasing. This
has put added pressure for competitive performance
excellence on organizations of different sizes and types.
Thus, there is greater need for designing and leading
change in organizations. So far as management of
human resource is concerned, new dimensions are being
added to yesterday’s issues related to competitive
performance. The workplace is witnessing the
emergence of a new psychological contract, with
collectives like unions seeing their strengths and
adversarial approach to employee relations issues
considerably diluted. Globalization has been facilitating
the emergence of convergence theory in management,
thus emphasizing the need for studying comparative
contexts in which management concepts can be made to
work with a greater degree of similarity of results. With
the increasing influence of globalization, the
distinctiveness of cross-cultural specifications is getting
somewhat diluted. So as to serve the rapidly-growing
economies, the urgency to globalize will get manifested
in different spheres of economic functioning. There will
be greater pressure on organizations towards
re-packaging people-management and change-
management models closer to those adopted by
multinational organizations and other professionally-
run organizations at global and local levels.
In the above scenario, Best Practices in Leadership
Development and Organizational Change is a
significant contribution towards designing and
implementing change efforts in variegated situations.
The book is part of a case studies research undertaken by
the first editor’s (Louis Carter’s) Best Practices
Institute, USA, which involved studying trends and
practices in leadership development and organization
change. The study illustrates strategies, structures and
processes of leading change management through case
examples of some of the best performing global
organizations. David Norton of the Balanced Scorecard
fame had rightly pointed out that “managing strategy is,
in essence, managing change.” A majority of the best
organizations chosen for this study described leadership
development and organizational change as “the real
work of the organization” which contributed to their
strategic advantage. The 18 organizations studied
include: Agilent Technologies, Corning, Delnor
Hospital, Emmis Communications, First Consulting
Group, GE Capital, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lockheed
Martin, Mattel, McDonald, MIT, Motorola, Praxir, St.
Luke Hospital and Health Network, Storage Tek, and
Windber Medical Center. This research shows that