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Written by Charles J. Meltzer Ph.D., President of SyntecGroup, CEO of Innerview Concepts Inc.

Sitting and talking with John, a senior division director at a large Canadian corporation, you would get the impression that his team of senior managers were all on the same page and that they worked exceedingly well together. According to John, they challenged each other and provided pointed feedback to decisions that he and the team needed to make. John felt this was true for all managers on the team, except for one manager who he saw as a "trouble maker". His perception was that this manager consistently disagreed with the team and him and, as a result, she was a negative influence.

The team, however, had a very different picture of the situation. They viewed their leader as highly dictatorial and not open to ideas or disagreement. One might describe him as being somewhat right of Attila the Hun. If you risked disagreement with his ideas, decisions or directions, the consistent result was a harsh verbal attack in the presence of the rest of the team. The team did not view each other as supportive and generally lacked confidence in their individual and collective ability to make decisions and to lead.

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Book Review...

Written by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber. St. Martin's Press (2005).
137 pages.
Reviewed by Diane Byington, Ph.D.

When was the last time a business book made you smile? I believe this book will put a smile on the face of even the most discouraged business person. It's a fable about a group of penguins whose iceberg may or may not be melting. If it melts it will break apart and leave the group homeless, and many penguins would die. Only Fred can see the potential disaster, but he's a nobody in the penguin colony. Fred finally gets an audience with Alice, one of the leaders, and he shows her the fissures and other symptoms of melting. Alice is amazed that she had managed to ignore the signs, and she takes the problem to the leadership council.

The leaders have a variety of reactions, like leaders in all organizations. Some of them debate the validity of Fred's statistics. One falls asleep. Another nods at everything because he is uncomfortable with numbers, but doesn't understand a thing. In desperation, Fred constructs a model of their iceberg that shows the problem, but even he cannot guarantee 100% that the iceberg is melting...

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