Cross-Enterprise Leadership

In today's world of business where organizational boundaries are blurry, intense competition dictates rapid change, and complex issues and relationships cut across departments, business units, and even companies, the old hierarchical command-and-control management approach is no longer sufficient. Distributed leadership approaches are necessary and no one individual can do it all.

In fact, an enterprise is more than just the traditional organization. Value today is often created not just within a company, but also across a network of companies. Being able to connect the various components and to work collaboratively within the network is essential to maintaining competitive advantage. Leaders today must be capable of identifying potential partners, initiating and maintaining relationships, resolving conflicts, and reconfiguring their relationships. Cross-Enterprise Leadership is a new model for success in today's world of complexity and ambiguity. Leaders who adopt this approach will be more comfortable dealing with ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity and time pressures, and with creating value through networks of relationships.

Small, domestic, entrepreneurial companies are, by their very nature, cross-enterprise focused. Entrepreneurs will tell you that they live in a world of uncertainty and ambiguity and that they constantly need to adjust on the fly. Equally, large multi-national companies like Wal-Mart, Nestle, or Coca-Cola are inherently complex and issues and relationships cut across functions, levels, geographies, and companies.

Cross-Enterprise Leadership goes beyond a functional perspective to understanding the complexity of business issues from all angles and how they can be integrated, how leaders can rely almost entirely on influence when they may be operating without power or authority, and how they can develop the capacity to make decisions and implement them in an environment filled with uncertainty and complexity.
Most managers operate like the traditional orchestra-waiting to do their written part. But there is no tidy score for business today. CEL enables today's leaders to be more like a jazz band, improvising and building off of one another, creating music in real time and in relationship to one another.

Auteur

THE RICHARD IVEY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS is widely acknowledged
as Canada's top business school, and it's consistently ranked as a
leading international business school by the Financial
Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Wall Street
Journal. Affiliated with the University of Western Ontario,
where its main campus is located, Ivey also has executive teaching
facilities in London, Toronto, and Hong Kong. Renowned for its case
study method, Ivey is the second-largest producer of business cases
in the world (after Harvard Business School) and the world's
leading producer of Asian case studies.

CAROL STEPHENSON, O.C., is Dean of the Richard Ivey
School of Business at the University of Western Ontario and holds
the Lawrence G. Tapp Chair in Leadership. She is a former CEO with
more than 30 years' experience in the private sector. Since joining
Ivey as Dean in 2003, she has led the drive to re-shape business
education for the 21st century.

DR. MARY CROSSAN is a Professor of Strategic Management
and the Taylor/Mingay Chair in Business Policy at the Richard Ivey
School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. Her
research on leadership, organizational learning, and improvisation
is published in the top management journals including the
Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal,
and Organization Science.

DR. JEFFREY GANDZ is Managing Director, Program
Design-Executive Development and a Professor in the General
Management area at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the
University of Western Ontario. He designs and delivers executive
programs for corporations and public sector organizations.

DR. GERARD SEIJTS is an Associate Professor of
Organizational Behaviour and the Ivey Alumni Association/Toronto
Faculty Fellow in Business Leadership at the Richard Ivey School of
Business at the University of Western Ontario. He also heads the
Leading Cross-Enterprise Research Centre.

Contenu

Contributors.

Foreword: The Urgent Need for Cross-Enterprise Leadership
(Dean Carol Stephenson, Richard Ivey School of
Business).

Chapter 1: A New Approach for the 21st Century (Mary
Crossan and Fernando Olivera).

Chapter 2: What Cross-Enterprise Leaders DO! (Jeffrey
Gandz).

Chapter 3: The Cross-Enterprise Leader (Mary Crossan,
Jeffrey Gandz and Gerard Seijts).

Chapter 4: Cross-Enterprise Leadership in Practice: An
Interview with Turnaround Expert William Aziz (Gerard Seijts and
Mary Crossan with Bill Aziz).

Chapter 5: Driving Growth through Entrepreneurship and
Innovation (Simon C. Parker).

Chapter 6: Developing the Cross-Enterprise Leader
(Mary Crossan, Jim Hatch and Gerard Seijts with Ashleigh
Nimigan).

Chapter 7: Engaging the Chinese Market (Paul W.
Beamish).

Chapter 8: Greed Is Never Good: Cross-Enterprise
Leadership and the Social Responsibilities of Business (Jeffrey
Gandz).

Chapter 9: Building Sustainable Value through
Cross-Enterprise Leadership (Tima Bansal and Michael
Wood).

Chapter 10: Leadership on Trial (Jeffrey Gandz, Mary
Crossan, Gerard Seijts, Stephen Sapp and Mark Vandenbosch).

Conclusion: Cross-Enterprise Leadership: The Way Forward
(Mary Crossan).

Index.