The Cult of Service Excellence

In today's business world, change of many kinds - technological, economic, social and environmental - is outpacing the ability of organizations to predict it and manage it. As a result, the single most important capacity any company can develop is the power to adapt to change, and to do so rapidly, intelligently and effectively. In this new paperback edition of Adaptive Capacity, a business consultant and acclaimed professor offers a compelling analysis of the adaptive challenge. Through vivid examples involving organizations ranging from HP and Google to Telefonica and the US Marines, Eichholz provides a set of practical tools and ideas any leader can begin using immediately to succeed in a changing world.

Author: Juan Carlos Eichholz

This book explores and demonstrates the transformative learning experiences that organizations and their leaders can derive from the arts. It is through the arts that we have always explored our humanity: through dance and music; art and sculpture; theatre and poetry. The arts allow us to explore our own selves and our relationship to others and to the world around us. This central role of the arts is commonly accepted in everyday life, but the implications of this are not typically extended to the world of business.The authors argues strongly that, to the contrary, the methodologies and approaches that are fundamental to performing artists of all kinds can provide exactly the kind of inspirational, people-centred and performance-related techniques that are missing from much of the typically mechanistic, systems-based and process-driven training and development of managers and executives. Technical proficiency and expertise are not enough to deliver an award-winning result; what enables a truly outstanding performance is the elusive but entirely recognizable element of artistry – the spark that transforms a technically good performance into something extraordinary.