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First and second order learning lie at the center of an organization's ability to exploit its core competencies or explore for new opportunities. Strategic leadership lies at the center of this learning process. Strategic leaders enable organizations to learn by telling stories about what the organization is, what the organization does, and what the organization can become. They also enable competence carriers to come together to solve current and future problems by networking. These processes are explored.

This chapter focuses on “healthy-sick” organizations. We define them as those organizations that appear to be healthy to the outside world but are sick at their core. We identify and discuss, in detail, singular attributes of healthy-sick organizations and their path to failure. As senior organizational leaders are responsible for creating and maintaining the set of interactions that creates the healthy-sick phenomenon, our elaboration will necessarily focus on these leader(s). We conclude with a set of recommendations to mitigate the probability of organizations falling into the healthy-sick trap.

In this chapter we discuss the “Nestlé on the Move” program. The program focuses especially on the areas of leadership and people development and finding ways to better align people with the organization, gain their insights, engage them cooperatively, and stimulate initiative.

While there is growing recognition of the role of leaders as managers of meanings, leadership theories have so far focused primarily on the articulation of a positive vision, the framing of organizational issues as opportunities, and emphasizing potential gains and benefits for the organization and its members. However, these positive frames may not be equally valid under all circumstances and with respect to all issues. This chapter concentrates on exploring leadership as management of meanings in times of crisis and recovery, when leaders attempt to stop deterioration, turn the organization around, and lead it to recovery. We label this leadership approach prevention-oriented leadership. On the basis of an analysis of a series of weekly e-mail letters sent by the CEO of a large company to all organizational members over a period of 22 months we suggest that prevention-oriented leaders may use three related ways to manage meanings, namely (1) generating a clear picture of the negative challenge, (2) strengthening the organizational members’ self-efficacy and confidence in the organization's resources available for coping with the crisis, and (3) creating a sense of progress.

This chapter describes an approach to leadership development that focuses on enhancing an organization's capacity for “connected leadership.” The framework is based on the idea that, in the face of complex challenges, three organizational-level leadership tasks must be accomplished: (1) direction must be set not once and for all, but in a way that is recurring and iterative; (2) alignment must be created among aspects of a work flow, among people and groups, and among organizational systems and processes; and (3) commitment must be generated and maintained throughout times of change. We describe four features of our approach and illustrate using examples from an organization in the midst of significant transformation.

Most of the literature on strategic management portrays the strategic leader as a planner, decision formulator, and implementer of structure and processes. Theories of strategic management have not paid much attention to the essence of all leadership roles, namely the role of influencing others, and have not been much informed by leadership theories in this regard. In this chapter, I argue that the existing gap between the field of leadership and the field of strategic management can be bridged by paying closer attention to the fundamentally social and interpretative nature of the strategy formation and implementation, and in particular to the role of strategic leaders as managers of meanings. The chapter presents the idea of leadership as the management of meanings, applies this idea to the role of strategic leaders, offers a set of meanings to focus on when we consider strategic leaders as managers of meanings, discusses the link between meaning making and organizational performance, and attends to some potential dangers involved in viewing leaders as managers of meanings.

It is proposed that the desirable goal of structuring the organization for leadership development has less to do with formal hierarchical structure than with the informal norms and networks that support organizational systems and processes. In this manner, strategic leaders need to think of themselves as social architects in helping to generate the kinds of normative conditions that facilitate leadership development. In particular, priority concerns for leadership development are issues such as what are the culture and climate for learning and development? and how healthy is the interpersonal context in which the shared work of the organization takes place?

Sharp Corporation, established in 1912, has always tried to identify unique niches that its competitors do not enter, while at the same time continuing to pursue innovation and knowledge creation in those niches. The liquid crystal display (LCD) business is a typical example of Sharp's strategy and innovation. Sharp developed the first successful LCD product – a pocket calculator with a small black and white LCD in 1973 – and since then the company has released a series of unique products with LCDs, including PDAs and camcorders. In 1998, in the face of increasing competition in the traditional cathode-ray tube (CRT) TV market, Katsuhiko Machida, the company's new president and strategic leader, announced his vision of upgrading all bulky CRT televisions sold in the domestic market to flat screen LCD sets by 2005. This vision was bold, since Sharp was the first producer of color CRT TVs and its business was still profitable at the time. However, Machida as strategic leader, predicted tough price competition in the CRT business in the future and began to mobilize Sharp's employees to gain and sustain competitive advantage in the new market.

We review the literature to determine how discretion, defined as the freedom to make decisions, moderates the relationship between leader personality and organizational performance. Discretion increases with level in organizations so that top executives have the most discretion and the greatest opportunity to impact organizational performance. We describe how personality drives executive actions and decision making, which then impacts organizational performance; the more discretion a leader has, the more leeway there is for his or her personality to operate. Finally, using research and contemporary business examples, we illustrate the dynamics linking personality, discretionary freedom, and destructive leadership in and of organizations.

The current strategic leadership literature tends to advocate a leader-centric (upper-echelon) approach to strategy, one in which the leader positions the organization competitively within an environment. Based on complexity theory, we argue that strategic leadership in a fast-paced environment works to organize both the environment and the organization in ways that enhance the firm's adaptability, innovativeness, and fitness. We propose a two-pronged strategy: Foster cooperative relationships with the organization's environment, and enable adaptive organizations that are “partners” in the strategic leadership function.