C. Otto Scharmer (2009)  Theory U, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

This book is a monster at over 500 pages and hard to read as well.  Otto creates his own language about leadership that somehow comes together.  I encourage the reader to stay with it. I put it down many times but kept coming back because I was intrigued and I’m thankful I did because the section on “listening” is outstanding and the book opened my eyes to the following ideas:

• Operating from one’s highest future potential is the state each of us can experience when we open not just our minds but our hearts and will – our impetus to act – in order to deal.
• Real job of leadership is to enhance the individual and organization’s capacity to see, to deeply attend to the reality that people face and enact.
• The pathology of a corporate crisis:  Ignorance, Arrogance, Absencing, Anomie, and Sclerosis.