Glow

by Lynda Gratton

Published 1 January 2009

"Destined to be one of the most talked about business books of the decade." Marc Silvester, Chief Technology Officer & Head of Service Innovation, Fujitsu

"Churchill once said that we are all worms but some of us are glow worms. This readable and invaluable book teaches us how we can all glow, which means to me success at work and success at life"
Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business, University of Southern California and author of On Becoming a Leader

"Glow is a lively, entertaining, and solidly researched blueprint for career success."
Gary Hamel, author of Leading the Revolution and Competing for the Future

"I encourage everyone to read it who wants a more meaningful life, or to help others to achieve it"
Hallstein Moerk, Executive Vice President, Human Resources, Nokia

HOW WILL YOU STAY AHEAD OF THE CURVE?

LEARN TO GLOW

Some people just Glow. They radiate enthusiasm, positive energy and inspiration in their own work and they excite and ignite other people. These are the people who get to work on the exciting projects, who are always in demand, who stay ahead of the curve and create real added value in today's increasingly competitive world.

Wouldn't you like to Glow too? Well, now you can! In this engagingly written and highly practical book, Lynda Gratton shows you the three core principles that will enable you to become indispensable in your job. And she gives you nine concrete actions that you can start today to help you develop the key skills, habits and choices you need to Glow. Once you're glowing, things start happening.

In this beguilingly straightforward but insightful book, Lynda Gratton reveals the secrets of people who Glow at work and shows you how you can Glow too. She guides you through the three core principles, showing you how:

you can develop a co-operative mindset

you can reach across traditional boundaries and build valuable networks in new, constructive ways

you can ignite inspiration, innovation and energy in yourself and others

Glow shows you how to be more innovative, more collaborative, better connected in other words, more valuable in what you do and, as a result, more sought after without working yourself into the ground.

To help you hone in on exactly where you should focus your efforts, throughout the book Glow coaches you through a simple diagnostic profile to help you understand your own capabilities and those of your team and your organisation. It also includes handy checklists and tools to measure your progress and to help you Glow.

GLOW BECAUSE YOU DON'T WANT TO BE STUCK IN THE BIG FREEZE

About the author

Lynda serves as Professor of Management Practice at the London Business School and is the founder of the Hot Spot Movement. She has written six books and many academic articles. Her books have been translated into over 15 languages and are seen as seminal pieces in the field of corporate and individual development.

Over the last decade Lynda has been profiled in numerous magazines including Personnel Today, The Guardian and the Financial Times. In 2007 Human Resources Magazine ranked her as one of the top two most influential people of the profession and she has twice been named by The Times as one of the world's top business thinkers. Over the last five years Lynda has taken her message about energy and innovation to conferences around the world including Australia, Austria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the USA.

Lynda lives in London and Spain with her two sons. To learn more about Glow and the profiles and tools that support it go to www.hotspotsmovement.com.


The Democratic Enterprise

by Lynda Gratton

Published 27 November 2003
"Gratton's book is timely and important. She is one of a small but influential band of business academics who have begun to question the "ideological gloomy paradigm" - the overwhelmingly negative assumptions about human nature that historically underpin management theorising.   The Democratic Enterprise is one of the first interventions to crystallise these dissatisfactions and offer steps to a positive alternative model...The revolution is democracy and it starts here."

The Observer

 

"One of Britain's leading lights in human resource strategy"

Financial Times

 

Liberating your Business with Freedom, Flexibility and Commitment

The Democratic Enterprise delivers the blueprint for a business built on choice and commitment.  A business made fast through freedom and purposeful through meaning.  This is a business people would choose to work for.  



These days individuals matter more than their roles, so how can we change the way we manage and organise people to make the most of their talent and energy? The free to choose are fast to act for an enterprise they believe in, but they're also the first to leave an organisation that fails them. In The Democratic Enterprise HR guru Lynda Gratton sets out a practical blueprint for designing smarter working relationships based on free choice and shared purpose - where autonomy, choice and trust breed speed, flexibility and commitment. This is the business we'd choose to work for, even if we have the talent and ability to leave.

Smart people want a more grown-up relationship with their employers these days. And most businesses too, realise that they can get more from people through flexible and intelligent working relationships. So imagine a company where people have more freedom in how, where and when they work. Where they have more personal choice in their work, but also share more commitment with their colleagues to a bigger purpose. This is a business we would choose to work with.

The Democratic Enterprise explores, from the perspective of the individual and the organization what it means to craft choice, and shows us how to use some of the basic principles of democracy to build organizations of which we can be proud. 

The book examines eight companies which have pioneered choice and democracy, and shows how:



the oil giant BP has created transparent internal markets for jobs enabling every employee to develop a breadth and depth of competencies
McKinsey & Co. has brought an unprecedented level of transparency to the ways in which associates can choose the projects to work on
Sony have created a ground-breaking digital system by creating a context in which engineers have real freedom to create worthwhile and meaningful jobs
Unisys has enabled every employee to access an enormous range of training opportunities to ensure they are truly becoming ‘the best they can be’.
Goldman Sachs builds choice around the development relationships which are so crucial to personal and organizational development
AstraZeneca has brought complete transparency to employee access to pay and benefits.
BT has enabled many tens of thousands of employees to make locational choice
and finally,  how HP has built discretion around time.

Learn how each of these companies have pioneered the tenets of democracy and choice and by doing so have created strong, agile enterprises powered by employee engagement and collaboration.

The Democratic Enterprise concludes by building a mandate for choice and democracy through focusing on the four building blocks: supporting individual autono