Positive Leadership

Prescriptions for leading organizational success are plentiful, often provided by well-known senior executives, political candidates, and consultants. The objective of this book is different. It aims to explain strategies that can help leaders reach beyond ordinary success to achieve extraordinary effectiveness, spectacular results, and positively deviant performance. It does so by relying on validated findings from empirical research. The book is based on analyses of organizations that have achieved exceptional levels of success. One such study, for example, chronicles the cleanup and closure of a nuclear weapons production facility (Cameron & Lavine, 2006). The company receiving the contract to dismantle and clean up the Rocky Flats Nuclear Arsenal completed the assignment 60 years ahead of schedule, $30 billion under budget, and 13 times cleaner than required by federal standards. This company's achievement far exceeded every knowledgeable expert's predictions of performance, and it represents what I refer to as positive deviance. Carefully examining organizations such as this one has helped uncover some atypical leadership strategies that enable levels of performance that dramatically exceed expectations and reach extraordinary levels of excellence. ----Preface...Kim Cameron is the William Russell Kelly Professor of Management and Organizations in the Ross School of Business and Professor of Higher Education in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. He has served as Dean of the Weather-head School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, as associate dean in the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University, and as a department chair at the University of Michigan. Kim is one of the cofounders of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan - a research center focused on the investigation of positively deviant performance, virtuousness, strengths, and practices in organizations that lead to thriving and extraordinary outcomes. He received BS and MS degrees from Brigham Young University and MA and PhD degrees from Yale University. His research on organizational virtuousness, effectiveness, quality culture, downsizing, and the development of leadership skills has been published in more than 100 scholarly articles and 10 books. They include: Coffin Nails and Corporate Strategies (with Robert Miles, Prentice Hall); Organizational Effectiveness (with David Whetten, Academic Press); Paradox and Transformation (with Robert Quinn, Ballinger Publishing); Organizational Decline (with David Whetten & Robert Sutton, Ballinger Publishing); Positive Organizational Scholarship (with Jane Dutton & Robert Quinn, Berrett-Koehler); Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture (with Robert Quinn, Jossey Bass); Leading with Values (with Edward Hess, Cambridge University Press); Competing Values Leadership (with Robert Quinn, Jeff DeGraff, & Anjan Thakor, Edward Elgar); Making the Impossible Possible (with Marc Lavine, Berrett-Koehler); and Developing Management Skills, 7th Ed. (with David Whetten, Prentice Hall). Kim is married to the former Melinda Cummings and has seven children.