John Pisapia
John Pisapia is a Professor of Leadership Studies at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida,USA; a Fulbright Scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Scholar in Residence at the Chinese-American Center, Hong Kong; The Adam Smith Research Professor at the University of Glasgow; and Founder of the Strategic Leader Network (SLN).
Dr. Pisapia was a teacher, high school principal, state commissioner of education, a tenured professor at West Virginia University and tenured professor and Department Chair at Virginia Commonwealth University where he also served as the Founding Director of the Metropolitan Research Consortium (MERC), He received a distinguished service award for profound leadership in international education by the International Schools Association, and brings 23 years of practical management experience to his academic podium.
John holds memberships in the Strategic Management Society, the Academy of Management, and the International Leadership Association. His work in strategic thinking and execution has received national and international attention. His book, The Strategic Leader describes his all echelons theory of strategic leadership and presents the tactics that lead away from compliance responses and toward engagement, commitment, and self managed organizations.
To support this work, he developed two validated research instruments and the Strategic Leadership Method (SLM). The Strategic Thinking Questionnaire (STQ) measures the leader’s use of systems thinking, reframing and reflection. The Strategic Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ), measures five leader influence actions: managing, transforming, bonding, bartering, and bridging. The SLM enables leaders to help their organizations find the future and make it happen.
John has been called the “global professor,” teaching and consulting with leaders in education and business in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, India, New Zealand, Indonesia, France, Turkey, Croatia, Saudi Arabia, England, Scotland, and across the North and South America. His articles have appeared in the Leadership Review, The American Journal of Business Research, Educational Management and Leadership, School Leadership & Management, Phi Delta Kappan, Government Union Review, New China Frontiers, International Educational Studies, and the NOLPE Law Review.
[email protected]
www.johnpisapia.com
Phone: 561.297.3556
Address: Building #47, Rm 251
Florida Atlantic University
777 Glades Road
Boca Raton, Florida 33431
Dr. Pisapia was a teacher, high school principal, state commissioner of education, a tenured professor at West Virginia University and tenured professor and Department Chair at Virginia Commonwealth University where he also served as the Founding Director of the Metropolitan Research Consortium (MERC), He received a distinguished service award for profound leadership in international education by the International Schools Association, and brings 23 years of practical management experience to his academic podium.
John holds memberships in the Strategic Management Society, the Academy of Management, and the International Leadership Association. His work in strategic thinking and execution has received national and international attention. His book, The Strategic Leader describes his all echelons theory of strategic leadership and presents the tactics that lead away from compliance responses and toward engagement, commitment, and self managed organizations.
To support this work, he developed two validated research instruments and the Strategic Leadership Method (SLM). The Strategic Thinking Questionnaire (STQ) measures the leader’s use of systems thinking, reframing and reflection. The Strategic Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ), measures five leader influence actions: managing, transforming, bonding, bartering, and bridging. The SLM enables leaders to help their organizations find the future and make it happen.
John has been called the “global professor,” teaching and consulting with leaders in education and business in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, India, New Zealand, Indonesia, France, Turkey, Croatia, Saudi Arabia, England, Scotland, and across the North and South America. His articles have appeared in the Leadership Review, The American Journal of Business Research, Educational Management and Leadership, School Leadership & Management, Phi Delta Kappan, Government Union Review, New China Frontiers, International Educational Studies, and the NOLPE Law Review.
[email protected]
www.johnpisapia.com
Phone: 561.297.3556
Address: Building #47, Rm 251
Florida Atlantic University
777 Glades Road
Boca Raton, Florida 33431
less
InterestsView All (27)
Uploads
Books by John Pisapia
Two decades have elapsed since Senge offered his view on vision and reality. Despite some successful efforts, the dilemma still confronts leaders who choose to lead organizations, groups and people. Will reality crush our dreams, or will our dreams create a new reality?
The Strategic Leader reveals the art and science of resolving the vision-reality dilemma in an increasingly complex world. It exposes the habits, actions, and tactics that leaders use to invent or reinvent their organizations for high performance. This book is the distilled product of my 23 years of management practice and 22 years of listening to and teaching both aspiring and accomplished leaders who have successfully, and sometimes unsuccessfully, answered the following questions.
Do I need to think differently? What is the environment telling me? Where are we going and where do we need to go? How do I position myself and/or my organization, team and individuals to take advantage of opportunities presented by the environment? How do I multiply myself though other people? How do I find and turn talent into performance? How do I ignite the soul of followers to achieve greatness beyond what anyone imagined possible? How do I know if we are succeeding? How do we continually adapt to change and maintain profitability and our competitive advantage?
The Strategic Leader answers those questions by framing leadership around six habits – Artistry, Agility, Anticipating, Articulating, Aligning, and Assuring - which enable the strategic leader to create direction, establish alignment and commitment and produced results in dynamic and complex environments.
Who Should Read This Book
The Strategic Leader is not limited to those at the top of organizations - it is geared to a wider audience at all levels who want to create a high performance life, team or organization. The book offers new insights that are applicable, with some nuances and/or emphases, to leaders in complex leadership settings. It is equally applicable to the principal and the academic leader, the corporate leader, the consultant, the human resource manager, community leaders.
For novice leaders, the book offers a prescription that can be employed early in their leadership journey. For middle managers, the book provides a set of strategies, actions and tactics that can further their rise up the organizational ladder. For accomplished managers, the book provides a new way to understand their role in the strategic functions of leadership beyond what they were taught in strategic management classes. For professors and consultants, the book provides a valuable introduction to the principles of strategic leadership for their own teaching (seminars and classes), and for researchers it provides new knowledge in the application of strategic leadership.
Overall Objectives of the Book
My years of practice led me to conclude that something important was missing from the bi-polar models of leadership (e.g., transactional-transformational and/or task behavior - relationships) particularly at the management and executive levels. My years of teaching practitioner students from education, business, nursing, community organizations, university administration, and medicine helped me understand their need for practical guidance rather than generalizations.
The Strategic Leader fills the gap between the need for new theory and the need for practicality by providing a prescriptive set of six habits that readers can apply to the development of a high performing organization across a variety of contexts. The Strategic Leader marries management with leadership and politics with ethics in a model that focuses on personal mastery and a holistic learning approach to building a high performing organization.
Through The Strategic Leader I challenge both the novice and the master to discover new ways of seeing and responding to themselves, individuals, teams, and their organizations. The book offers the following major innovative contributions to leadership thinking: the habits of the Leadership Wheel; how to use artistic actions and agile thinking; the importance of viewing followers as colleagues; the value of a generative approach to developing strategic intent using minimum specifications; how to make planning flexible, the development of social capital to mobilize followers; and the importance of anchoring strategic intent by creating self managed teams of followers.
My tone in this book is conversational to encourage the reflection and wisdom necessary to lead in challenging environments. I use terminology that is broad enough to cover the many different situations in which leadership occurs including corporations, government agencies, schools, non profits, churches, and even country clubs. Vignettes and stories gathered from public, business, educational, community, political and historical leadership, are used to illustrate the concepts. The coverage is readable without sacrificing scholarly depth. I use endnotes to attribute seminal ideas and support important conclusions and/or themes.
Themes Found in the Book
Three central themes are highlighted in this book. First, leadership is almost always situated within an environmental context and leaders must be trained to understand and address strategic themes emanating from that context. Complex modern environments present leaders with the twin challenges of leading for stability and change, and for what is possible and what is thought to be right. While strategic leaders foster a mindset of change for themselves and their colleagues, they do so with a clear understanding of the necessity of maintaining a level of stability in order for change to be successful.
Second, strategic leaders employ a holistic individual, team and organizational learning process that I characterize as the Leadership Wheel to keep their organization positioned within its environment. They use the four habits of the Leadership Wheel: anticipating, articulating, aligning, and assuring. Strategic leaders use these habits to develop consensus on direction, build the capacity of the organization to accomplish the direction, and connect it to power sources in their internal and external environments.
Finally, strategic leaders are involved in a constant cycle of leading and managing, sometimes simultaneously. They also juggle the political realities required to mobilize support for the organization’s strategic intent by following the values identified as important by themselves, their colleagues, and the organization. Their ability to use two foundational habits; agility of the mind, and an artistic palette of managing, transforming, political, and ethical actions, determine how successfully they will be able to turn the Leadership Wheel and guide the organization on its journey to high performance.
A Guide to Leading Strategically
Think of the Strategic Leader as a guide to refer to on your leadership journey. It is designed to describe the six habits strategic leaders use and it provides examples from leaders who have performed the habits in the real world.
The first chapter introduces you to my point of view about leadership in complex times. In this chapter I describe the need for strategic leadership and how it differs from strategic management. You will be introduced to the Leadership Wheel, and the six habits that lead to high performance.
In chapters two through seven you will discover the six habits that enable you to turn the Leadership Wheel - acquiring an agile mindset, artistry, anticipating, articulating, aligning and assuring. In chapters two and three you will learn cognitive and behavioral actions to lay the foundation within you to leader strategically. As the remaining four chapters unfold you will see the Leadership Wheel come to life.
Guidance for future growth is offered through three tools. First, a set of Cliff Notes at the end of each chapter serve as a one page "tear-out" which is both a distillation of the content, and a diagnostic tool you can use to start a peer discussion on inventing or reinventing your organization. Second, a set of chapter questions is found in the appendices for reflection and furthering your understanding of the habits. Finally, your path to discovering new habits is aided by two original self assessment tools: The Strategic Thinking Questionnaire (STQ) and the Strategic Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ) which are described the appendices where an electronic link is provided for your own self assessment.
Papers by John Pisapia
Individual entrepreneurial orientation is measured by the construct developed by Bolton and Lane’s (2012) individual entrepreneurial orientation instrument. The instrument is grounded in the seminal work of Miller (1983), Covin and Slevin (1986; 1988; 1989), Lumpkin and Dess (1996) and Covin and Wales (2011); consisting of three dimensions – risk-taking, innovation, and proactiveness. Strategic thinking was measured by Pisapia’s (2009) Strategic thinking questionnaire (STQ). The STQ asked respondents to rate how often they use systems thinking, reframing, and reflecting skills.
Within the framework of individual entrepreneurial orientation the following demographic variables shape the trends: age, gender, education abroad and previous experience. Entrepreneurs between 40-60 years old are less prone to risk, female entrepreneurs are more proactive than men, education abroad provides with the additional proactiveness and the entrepreneur with previous experience is prone to higher risk, proactiveness and innovativeness.
Within the framework of strategic thinking capability the following demographic variables shape the trends: age, gender, education and experience. Entrepreneurs older than 60 score high on system thinking as well as females, females also score higher on reframing. Entrepreneurs with PhD degree score lower on reframing, while managers working more than 20 years score high on reframing.
All the relevant demographic variables can be introduced later on as moderators investigating individual entrepreneurial orientation and strategic thinking capability relation.
A non-experimental quantitative analysis of the behavioral skills identified through Pisapia and Reyes-Guerra’s (2009) Strategic Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ), and the level of commitment through Mowday et al.’s (1979) Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) instruments was used to collect the data. The empirical results from this study were based on ratings of 40 student leaders who occupy leadership positions in service organizations by their organizational members in their respective college or university.
In this study, behavioral agility (the use of the 5 leader influence actions) predicted 36% of the variance in organizational commitment. However, Bridging and Transforming influence actions accounted for 25% of that variance. Student work experience, training, age or gender did not moderate the relationship between behavioral agility and organizational commitment.
The descriptive results showed that in both public and private schools, the school principals use ethical actions most frequently. The findings also illustrated that there were positive and significant relations among the variables of SLA and OL. Transforming, political and ethical leadership actions were the significant predictors of OL. However, managing actions were not found to be a significant predictor.
We concluded that the teachers’ perceptions of OL increase as the school principals use SLA more frequently. On the theoretical side, this research makes a significant contribution to the sparse but conflicting leadership and organizational learning literature in educational contexts. On the practical side, given the importance of organizational learning in today’s environment, the findings provide specific leader actions that principals can use to increase organizational learning in their schools and transform their schools into learning organizations.
Key Words – strategic change, social and structural networks, vertical and horizontal leadership 4700 words
The study employed a descriptive mixed method case study approach to collecting and analysing the data used to draw its conclusions. One hundred and twenty-seven academic staff responded to the survey. The results of the survey were verified by 25 interviews with heads of colleges, heads of schools, research coordinators, research team leaders, and team members. These interviews were supported by document review to support the findings.
Leadership is important at the college and university levels if interdisciplinarity is to thrive. According to the data, this
seems to have not yet occurred at this particular institution.
The university has done well with most of the big structures that enrich and support interdisciplinarity. However, ‘small’ structures such as clarity of meaning, motivation of staff, misalignment of old structures, time and workload, and loss of identify have impeded the move to university wide interdisciplinarity.
A series of three recommendations are made to move the interdisciplinary project forward: stay clear on focus, extend the benefits of serendipity to more people, and remember that one size does not fit all.
The concepts framing this study are leader influence actions, societal, and local culture. The analysis was conducted with data from two independent studies conducted in each country using the strategic leadership questionnaire (SLQTM).
The data suggest that (1) managing and transforming actions are universal, (2) relationship influence actions (bonding, bridging, and bartering) are culturally sensitive, and (3) societal values are less important than local values in determining which influence actions principals employ.
The findings indicate that the restructuring of The Great Western University to support interdisciplinary research began on less than firm footing. While scholars seem to have clarified the definitions of interdisciplinary approaches, in practice there still is a lack of clarity in sectors which are less familiar with interdisciplinary approaches to solving major problems facing society.
We identified issues of clarity of terminology and mission, flexibility of implementation, and alignment of faculty incentives as involving necessary but unmet conditions for fostering and promoting interdisciplinarity throughout the university.
The cognitive and behavioral complexity data was collected from 356 Hong Kong school leaders. The data were analyzed through descriptive and multivariate analyses. The first major finding was that cognitive complexity is moderated by the position held, age, and education level of the leader. School principals displayed greater cognitive complexity than vice principals or senior masters. Older school leaders, and those with advance academic degrees were more cognitively complex. The second major finding is that while behavioral complexity is also influenced by position the leader holds, it is not associated with higher academic degrees. Finally, we also found that more highly cognitively complex leaders were prone to be more behaviorally complex. We concluded that cognitive complexity can be influenced by education while behavioral complexity may be more associated with experience on the job; even though higher levels of cognitive complexity do related to higher levels of behavioral complexity.
This research makes a significant contribution to the literature on cognition and behavior. This study has both theoretical and practical significance. On the theoretical side, notions of leader cognition and behavior have traveled on mostly parallel paths empirically. This study joints them to test a commonly held believe that in today’s turbulent environment leaders who are cognitively and behaviorally complex will be more effective school leaders. On the practical side, the study produces implications for the selection and succession of school leaders as well as for the need for advanced cognitive and behavioral training and university academic programs.
Two decades have elapsed since Senge offered his view on vision and reality. Despite some successful efforts, the dilemma still confronts leaders who choose to lead organizations, groups and people. Will reality crush our dreams, or will our dreams create a new reality?
The Strategic Leader reveals the art and science of resolving the vision-reality dilemma in an increasingly complex world. It exposes the habits, actions, and tactics that leaders use to invent or reinvent their organizations for high performance. This book is the distilled product of my 23 years of management practice and 22 years of listening to and teaching both aspiring and accomplished leaders who have successfully, and sometimes unsuccessfully, answered the following questions.
Do I need to think differently? What is the environment telling me? Where are we going and where do we need to go? How do I position myself and/or my organization, team and individuals to take advantage of opportunities presented by the environment? How do I multiply myself though other people? How do I find and turn talent into performance? How do I ignite the soul of followers to achieve greatness beyond what anyone imagined possible? How do I know if we are succeeding? How do we continually adapt to change and maintain profitability and our competitive advantage?
The Strategic Leader answers those questions by framing leadership around six habits – Artistry, Agility, Anticipating, Articulating, Aligning, and Assuring - which enable the strategic leader to create direction, establish alignment and commitment and produced results in dynamic and complex environments.
Who Should Read This Book
The Strategic Leader is not limited to those at the top of organizations - it is geared to a wider audience at all levels who want to create a high performance life, team or organization. The book offers new insights that are applicable, with some nuances and/or emphases, to leaders in complex leadership settings. It is equally applicable to the principal and the academic leader, the corporate leader, the consultant, the human resource manager, community leaders.
For novice leaders, the book offers a prescription that can be employed early in their leadership journey. For middle managers, the book provides a set of strategies, actions and tactics that can further their rise up the organizational ladder. For accomplished managers, the book provides a new way to understand their role in the strategic functions of leadership beyond what they were taught in strategic management classes. For professors and consultants, the book provides a valuable introduction to the principles of strategic leadership for their own teaching (seminars and classes), and for researchers it provides new knowledge in the application of strategic leadership.
Overall Objectives of the Book
My years of practice led me to conclude that something important was missing from the bi-polar models of leadership (e.g., transactional-transformational and/or task behavior - relationships) particularly at the management and executive levels. My years of teaching practitioner students from education, business, nursing, community organizations, university administration, and medicine helped me understand their need for practical guidance rather than generalizations.
The Strategic Leader fills the gap between the need for new theory and the need for practicality by providing a prescriptive set of six habits that readers can apply to the development of a high performing organization across a variety of contexts. The Strategic Leader marries management with leadership and politics with ethics in a model that focuses on personal mastery and a holistic learning approach to building a high performing organization.
Through The Strategic Leader I challenge both the novice and the master to discover new ways of seeing and responding to themselves, individuals, teams, and their organizations. The book offers the following major innovative contributions to leadership thinking: the habits of the Leadership Wheel; how to use artistic actions and agile thinking; the importance of viewing followers as colleagues; the value of a generative approach to developing strategic intent using minimum specifications; how to make planning flexible, the development of social capital to mobilize followers; and the importance of anchoring strategic intent by creating self managed teams of followers.
My tone in this book is conversational to encourage the reflection and wisdom necessary to lead in challenging environments. I use terminology that is broad enough to cover the many different situations in which leadership occurs including corporations, government agencies, schools, non profits, churches, and even country clubs. Vignettes and stories gathered from public, business, educational, community, political and historical leadership, are used to illustrate the concepts. The coverage is readable without sacrificing scholarly depth. I use endnotes to attribute seminal ideas and support important conclusions and/or themes.
Themes Found in the Book
Three central themes are highlighted in this book. First, leadership is almost always situated within an environmental context and leaders must be trained to understand and address strategic themes emanating from that context. Complex modern environments present leaders with the twin challenges of leading for stability and change, and for what is possible and what is thought to be right. While strategic leaders foster a mindset of change for themselves and their colleagues, they do so with a clear understanding of the necessity of maintaining a level of stability in order for change to be successful.
Second, strategic leaders employ a holistic individual, team and organizational learning process that I characterize as the Leadership Wheel to keep their organization positioned within its environment. They use the four habits of the Leadership Wheel: anticipating, articulating, aligning, and assuring. Strategic leaders use these habits to develop consensus on direction, build the capacity of the organization to accomplish the direction, and connect it to power sources in their internal and external environments.
Finally, strategic leaders are involved in a constant cycle of leading and managing, sometimes simultaneously. They also juggle the political realities required to mobilize support for the organization’s strategic intent by following the values identified as important by themselves, their colleagues, and the organization. Their ability to use two foundational habits; agility of the mind, and an artistic palette of managing, transforming, political, and ethical actions, determine how successfully they will be able to turn the Leadership Wheel and guide the organization on its journey to high performance.
A Guide to Leading Strategically
Think of the Strategic Leader as a guide to refer to on your leadership journey. It is designed to describe the six habits strategic leaders use and it provides examples from leaders who have performed the habits in the real world.
The first chapter introduces you to my point of view about leadership in complex times. In this chapter I describe the need for strategic leadership and how it differs from strategic management. You will be introduced to the Leadership Wheel, and the six habits that lead to high performance.
In chapters two through seven you will discover the six habits that enable you to turn the Leadership Wheel - acquiring an agile mindset, artistry, anticipating, articulating, aligning and assuring. In chapters two and three you will learn cognitive and behavioral actions to lay the foundation within you to leader strategically. As the remaining four chapters unfold you will see the Leadership Wheel come to life.
Guidance for future growth is offered through three tools. First, a set of Cliff Notes at the end of each chapter serve as a one page "tear-out" which is both a distillation of the content, and a diagnostic tool you can use to start a peer discussion on inventing or reinventing your organization. Second, a set of chapter questions is found in the appendices for reflection and furthering your understanding of the habits. Finally, your path to discovering new habits is aided by two original self assessment tools: The Strategic Thinking Questionnaire (STQ) and the Strategic Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ) which are described the appendices where an electronic link is provided for your own self assessment.
Individual entrepreneurial orientation is measured by the construct developed by Bolton and Lane’s (2012) individual entrepreneurial orientation instrument. The instrument is grounded in the seminal work of Miller (1983), Covin and Slevin (1986; 1988; 1989), Lumpkin and Dess (1996) and Covin and Wales (2011); consisting of three dimensions – risk-taking, innovation, and proactiveness. Strategic thinking was measured by Pisapia’s (2009) Strategic thinking questionnaire (STQ). The STQ asked respondents to rate how often they use systems thinking, reframing, and reflecting skills.
Within the framework of individual entrepreneurial orientation the following demographic variables shape the trends: age, gender, education abroad and previous experience. Entrepreneurs between 40-60 years old are less prone to risk, female entrepreneurs are more proactive than men, education abroad provides with the additional proactiveness and the entrepreneur with previous experience is prone to higher risk, proactiveness and innovativeness.
Within the framework of strategic thinking capability the following demographic variables shape the trends: age, gender, education and experience. Entrepreneurs older than 60 score high on system thinking as well as females, females also score higher on reframing. Entrepreneurs with PhD degree score lower on reframing, while managers working more than 20 years score high on reframing.
All the relevant demographic variables can be introduced later on as moderators investigating individual entrepreneurial orientation and strategic thinking capability relation.
A non-experimental quantitative analysis of the behavioral skills identified through Pisapia and Reyes-Guerra’s (2009) Strategic Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ), and the level of commitment through Mowday et al.’s (1979) Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) instruments was used to collect the data. The empirical results from this study were based on ratings of 40 student leaders who occupy leadership positions in service organizations by their organizational members in their respective college or university.
In this study, behavioral agility (the use of the 5 leader influence actions) predicted 36% of the variance in organizational commitment. However, Bridging and Transforming influence actions accounted for 25% of that variance. Student work experience, training, age or gender did not moderate the relationship between behavioral agility and organizational commitment.
The descriptive results showed that in both public and private schools, the school principals use ethical actions most frequently. The findings also illustrated that there were positive and significant relations among the variables of SLA and OL. Transforming, political and ethical leadership actions were the significant predictors of OL. However, managing actions were not found to be a significant predictor.
We concluded that the teachers’ perceptions of OL increase as the school principals use SLA more frequently. On the theoretical side, this research makes a significant contribution to the sparse but conflicting leadership and organizational learning literature in educational contexts. On the practical side, given the importance of organizational learning in today’s environment, the findings provide specific leader actions that principals can use to increase organizational learning in their schools and transform their schools into learning organizations.
Key Words – strategic change, social and structural networks, vertical and horizontal leadership 4700 words
The study employed a descriptive mixed method case study approach to collecting and analysing the data used to draw its conclusions. One hundred and twenty-seven academic staff responded to the survey. The results of the survey were verified by 25 interviews with heads of colleges, heads of schools, research coordinators, research team leaders, and team members. These interviews were supported by document review to support the findings.
Leadership is important at the college and university levels if interdisciplinarity is to thrive. According to the data, this
seems to have not yet occurred at this particular institution.
The university has done well with most of the big structures that enrich and support interdisciplinarity. However, ‘small’ structures such as clarity of meaning, motivation of staff, misalignment of old structures, time and workload, and loss of identify have impeded the move to university wide interdisciplinarity.
A series of three recommendations are made to move the interdisciplinary project forward: stay clear on focus, extend the benefits of serendipity to more people, and remember that one size does not fit all.
The concepts framing this study are leader influence actions, societal, and local culture. The analysis was conducted with data from two independent studies conducted in each country using the strategic leadership questionnaire (SLQTM).
The data suggest that (1) managing and transforming actions are universal, (2) relationship influence actions (bonding, bridging, and bartering) are culturally sensitive, and (3) societal values are less important than local values in determining which influence actions principals employ.
The findings indicate that the restructuring of The Great Western University to support interdisciplinary research began on less than firm footing. While scholars seem to have clarified the definitions of interdisciplinary approaches, in practice there still is a lack of clarity in sectors which are less familiar with interdisciplinary approaches to solving major problems facing society.
We identified issues of clarity of terminology and mission, flexibility of implementation, and alignment of faculty incentives as involving necessary but unmet conditions for fostering and promoting interdisciplinarity throughout the university.
The cognitive and behavioral complexity data was collected from 356 Hong Kong school leaders. The data were analyzed through descriptive and multivariate analyses. The first major finding was that cognitive complexity is moderated by the position held, age, and education level of the leader. School principals displayed greater cognitive complexity than vice principals or senior masters. Older school leaders, and those with advance academic degrees were more cognitively complex. The second major finding is that while behavioral complexity is also influenced by position the leader holds, it is not associated with higher academic degrees. Finally, we also found that more highly cognitively complex leaders were prone to be more behaviorally complex. We concluded that cognitive complexity can be influenced by education while behavioral complexity may be more associated with experience on the job; even though higher levels of cognitive complexity do related to higher levels of behavioral complexity.
This research makes a significant contribution to the literature on cognition and behavior. This study has both theoretical and practical significance. On the theoretical side, notions of leader cognition and behavior have traveled on mostly parallel paths empirically. This study joints them to test a commonly held believe that in today’s turbulent environment leaders who are cognitively and behaviorally complex will be more effective school leaders. On the practical side, the study produces implications for the selection and succession of school leaders as well as for the need for advanced cognitive and behavioral training and university academic programs.
In the first part, a case of a lostopportunity is presented and the thinking that led to two companies missing the future is dissected.The notions of the sigmoid curve, exploitation and exploration, and think different and thinking differently are discussed.
In the second part, the type of mind needed to think different is described. It is describedas a mind that enables leaders to recognize variation in their environment, create innovative responses to those variations, and sense when it’s time to “time to “jump the curve.”
Thecomponents of the strategic mind - curiosity, adaptability and wisdom –
which enable leaders tolearn, change and sense are introduced and described. The section ends with a discussion that demonstrates why it’s difficult to create curious, adaptable and wise minds in the current environment.
In the final section, three cognitive skills –
systems thinking – reframing – reflection -that enable leaders to think differently are introduced and described, and research from 15 studiesare used to discuss the proposition that in times of complexity, high cognitive complex leaders aremore effective than low cognitive complex leaders