Lateral Leadership: Getting It Done When You Are Not The Boss

by Roger Fisher

Spine may show signs of wear. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting.Text is still easily readable. Gently used may contain ex-library markings, possibly has some light highlighting, textual notations, and or underlining. Fast shipping from USA!!!

Genres: Leadership, Business, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 30, 1998

About the author

Roger D. Fisher was Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

Reviews

[Melchor Moro-Oliveros]

I have read five years ago, in 2016, the book “Getting to Yes”, by the same author, which handles the topic of negotiation and which I liked quite a lot (you can read my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). As for “Lateral Leadership”, I got trapped by the tittle and I must say that the tittle is misleading. I thought the book would be about how to lead in terms of influencing the organization, including your boss, to follow you and apply your ideas when you don’t have the autohority in the organigram of the company. However, the book is in my opinion more about self-management. It is about how to be more productive.
The patterns in the book are ok, however nothing new that I hadn’t read already in many other books: formulate a purpose, keep your purpose always in mind (do not get off the path), set your goals in terms of results, think systematically (be structured, apply ‘the circle chart’: Data, Diagnostic, Direction, What to do next), engage others, ask for feedback, keep learning from yourself and from others …

Some quotes I liked from the book:

“Inspire people: the successful use of lateral leadership is demonstrated when those with whom you work become more skillful”; “ A good leader must know when to be a good follower”; “people rely on self-steem and standing”; “the biggest mistake the management does is not to expalin why the company is changing a procedure”. “Think about roles as others may see them”; “practice what you preach”; “The easiest conduct to change is your own”; “The efforts you make over time should be cumulative”.

[Vytas]

A change managers handbook. It so cool that it writes about importance of thinking and especially systematic thinking.

[Steve Whiting]

Recently, I seem to have had a bit of a run of books which sounded good in their description, but turned out to be really poor on actually reading them, and to start with, this book looked like it was going to be another depressing addition to that sequence.

It doesn't begin terribly promisingly, as the first couple of chapters are a bit generic, and illustrated by some pretty unbelievable scenarios. However, the further I got into the book, the more concrete the advice and examples got, and the more usable the advice became - much of it well worth capturing in notes for further reference.

It's sometimes a little over-optimistic. For example, I'm not sure that telling a peer that "I'd like to offer some suggestions about what I have seen of your work, and see whether they make sense to you - would that be useful?" would be received with as quite much enthusiasm as the authors think.

That being said, I am happy to be able to say that, not only is this not another one of the "promises much/delivers very little" run of books, but is actually a real gem, and well worth anyone's time to read.

[Chad]

This is one of those books that has a lot of really useful concepts and tools, but seems to labor through extraneous text to illustrate them. I feel like the book could easily have been a pamphlet. Nevertheless, the tools in the book are more powerful in practice than they seem when just reading through them.