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Increasingly, schools are embracing action research as an innovative strategy to develop collective teacher efficacy and expertise in a bid to improve learner outcomes. In this chapter, what follows is an exploration of the challenges frequently faced by middle leaders implementing and facilitating action research in schools. These include low levels of collective autonomy, clouded evaluative thinking, and the siloing of success. To support middle leaders in overcoming these challenges, Sarah and Pamela offer an array of practical solutions they have witnessed working successfully in varying contexts. In doing so, they spotlight the work of educational thought leaders, Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus Helen Timperley, Dr Kaye Twyford, and Simon Breakspear.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

This chapter analyzes and considers from the perspective of business models and holistic leadership strategic knowledge creation for leading internal ventures in large corporations to success. The case study takes a close-up look at the games business, focusing chiefly on Sony’s PlayStation.

One lesson learned from the case study was that the elements of productive friction and creative abrasion among practitioners at the knowledge boundaries between project teams, existing organizations, and external partners encouraged creative strategic collaboration among practitioners. Another lesson was that practitioners at all management levels of top management, project leaders, and project staff established distributed business community networks within and outside the company through strategic collaboration based on holistic leadership.

Furthermore, the existence of “community networks (networked knowledge boundaries)” inside and outside the company enabled the integration of different kinds of knowledge and achieved technological innovation (incremental innovation, architectural innovation) in the development of PlayStation as a new product.

Quality empowering management is to the future of renewed worldwide competitiveness what quality control, participative management programmes and zero defects were to quality improvement. Empowerment holds that promoting employee involvement empowers workers to perform as whole, thinking human beings. Empowerment is the glue by which the elements of customer focus, quality process and products, continuous improvements, self‐managing teams, quality measurement, and utilization of the total workforce abilities are held together. Self‐managing teams are one of the major keys in the innovative organization to solving complex problems, increasing productivity, and heightening creativity. For most organizations and managers, quality empowering management is a new responsibility and a radical change in style of management and change in culture requiring new methods and systems.

Our chapter examines the ways national developments in Australia and New Zealand over the past two decades reflect distinctively antipodean understandings of educational leadership and management. Our interest is twofold. We are concerned about the extent to which these understandings are reflected in strategies designed to enhance the quality of school leadership. We are also concerned about the extent to which these strategies represent progress towards achieving ‘sustainable’ school leadership. We define sustainable leadership in terms of both building leadership capacity within the organisation and embedding lasting organisational change (Fink & Brayman, 2006; Hargreaves & Fink, 2006; Spillane, 2006). The concept used here implies both models of distributed or shared leadership and leadership succession.

The innumerable accounts of successful implementation of kaizen in Japan during more than 40 years has led to the expectation that continuous improvement (CI) might offer companies a means to gain and maintain a competitive advantage in the turbulent 1980s and 1990s. However, the majority of CI initiatives within the US and Europe died within a few years. While explanations as to why these efforts have not been successful can be found in the literature, methods for rejuvenating stagnant CI programs are still lacking. In this paper, experiences from a longitudinal action research project with a middle management group are presented to illustrate how a process of facilitated self‐assessment was used to identify and address barriers to CI implementation. Through this process, a better understanding of CI implementation issues was gained and CI implementation within the company revitalized.

To identify the characteristic features of humanistic leadership in the Tata group in India, and to explicate the key facilitating factors.

Narrative case-study inquiry via semi-structured interviews with top management leaders and middle managers, and secondary sources of information.

The top leaders of the Tata companies emphasised the following values and leadership experience: (1) Adherence to the founder's philosophy and the basic core values, (2) Leadership with Trust, (3) Community as the key purpose of the enterprise, (4) Senior leaders as mentors and role-models, (5) Abiding by the ethical code of conduct, (6) Employee-focus and (7) Tacit alignment with Indian cultural values. These resonated with the humanistic leadership tenets. Based on the literature the authors also identified that in Tata leadership, there is an amalgamation of personal values (humata, hukhta, hvarshta: good thought, word and deed) and national cultural ethos (dharma, karma and jnana: emphasis on duty-bound action and knowledge). These leadership values are conveyed and institutionalised in the organisation via strategic initiatives such as the Tata Trusts, Tata Business Excellence Model, Tata Code of Conduct. This synergy of personal values, national cultural ethos and organisational strategy makes Tata group realise the humanistic leadership objectives, while achieving business targets.

The thematic analysis of interview data provides a contextualised understanding of how humanistic leadership gets realised at both the individual behavioural level, as well as at the broader organisational strategic level. This provides inputs to building the theory of humanistic leadership.

By unravelling the factors that facilitate the realisation of humanistic leadership in the Tata group, the authors provide an exemplar for other organisations and business leaders to draw insights from.

Humanistic leadership, oriented towards upliftment of community and society, and not just profit maximisation, is critical to creating a more sustainable and peaceful world.

This is one of first studies that conceptualises the Tata leadership from the humanistic perspective. The theoretical insights are of basic and applied use.