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For decades, leaders in business, medicine, education, and countless other professions have striven to "revolutionize" their industries. Some pay consulting firms millions of dollars to design strategic plans and breakthrough solutions. Plans are created. They are ratified by corporate leadership. Yet, more often than not, very little significant change actually occurs. Individually, we make countless sincere pledges to ourselves and to others to change in some important way. We may even temporarily accomplish the change, but we often return to the status quo. In How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation, Harvard Graduate School of Education psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey explain that most individuals and organizations are actually immune to deep and lasting change in spite of their best intentions to the contrary. If we want a more adequate understanding of the prospect of change, Kegan and Lahey suggest, we must first understand our own powerful inclination not to change. Deeming every workplace a language community, Kegan and Lahey illustrate how our aspirations for change are poorly served by the ordinary language forms we use to communicate with others and to think matters through in our own heads. By actively engaging the reader in an illuminating series of personal explorations and case studies, they introduce a new complement of language forms we can use to overcome our own immunity to change. Through their work with many businesspeople, doctors, educators, and consultants, Kegan and Lahey have discovered compelling ways to diagnose and overcome this immunity. Their book shares a new "learning technology," enabling readers to make the same discoveries for themselves. The result is an unleashing of fresh energies and behaviors that truly foster growth and transformation in both individuals and organizations Overcoming Your "Immune System" How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work shows us how to transform the familiar work languages of:
An Outward Bound ropes course for the mind, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work offers important insight into the complex subject of how we can achieve what we conceive. About the Authors Robert Kegan is the first William and Miriam Meehan Professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The author and lead researcher of a theory of the evolution of adult competencies, his books, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development and In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, have been translated and published throughout the world. Lisa Laskow Lahey is research director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and cofounder and senior consultant at Minds at Work, a developmentally oriented consulting firm that works with businesses and schools to turn workplace problems and issues into opportunities for transformational learning. For More Information Respond to this press release with an e-mail to the editor HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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