The main point: Fear, facts and force are the favored approach for those who want to facilitate change, but they never work. Doctors know that even the threat of death is not enough to influence eight out of nine heart attack patients to change their lifestyles. Instead, successful change agents rely on a mixture of:

• Relate – Establish a new, emotional connection with a person or community that fosters hope.
• Repeat – Use this new relationship to learn and practice the new skills and behaviors you need to sustain change.
• Reframe – Allow this new relationship to help you see your situation and the world in a new light.

Good doctors have the first one down. To reframe, they need to help patients see the benefits of healthy changes today – healthy food can be delicious, exercise can give them more energy, meditation can reduce their stress symptoms. And they need to help them savor short-term wins so that they will repeat the behavior over and over until it becomes their new habit.

Best part about this book: The writing. Deutschman is a magazine writer (Fortune, GQ, Fast Company) and book author (The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) who has a raft of stories at his disposal. He never tells, he shows. He has spent quality time with the change leaders he profiles — so much so that you find out, for example, that 35 years into her successful program to rehabilitate criminals at San Francisco’s Delancy Street, Mimi Silbert still has days when she doesn’t have that fire in the belly. Her solution: act “as if” she does, and eventually the fire comes back.

Favorite quote:

I don’t think a leader can accomplish major change without being willing to slice yourself open and become part of the change. I say, ‘You guys force me to be my best self because I live in a glass house.’ — Mimi Silbert

Bits that stuck:

• Quick wins reward the hard work of change, nourish the faith and keep critics at bay.
• When stuck with a problem I haven’t been able to solve myself, the first step is to seek out a new relationship with someone or some group that has had success in this area.
• When the spirit flags, “fake it until you make it.” Act “as if” you have the spirit and it will come to you.

Sid Garfield’s plan for health care reform was so far ahead of its time that the organization he founded — Kaiser Permanente — still drives toward the vision, years after his death. (Disclosure: I am senior director of communications and brand management for Kaiser Permanente’s Colorado region).

This biography puts today’s health care discussion into historical context. As early as the 1930s, reform proposals that threatened the status quo were called “socialized medicine.” Garfield and uber-capitalist Henry Kaiser were “socialists” because they came up with a financing system that brought quality health care to working Americans. Workers and their employers “pre-paid” a few cents a day for full coverage. Garfield and his doctors and nurses were thus assured of a predictable revenue stream that enabled them to open clinics and hospitals close to work sites, such as the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, the California Aqueduct in the Mojavi Desert and the WW II shipyards in Oakland.

The financing mechanism also encouraged Garfield’s team to reduce injuries and prevent illness. Workplace safety and the country’s earliest screening and vaccination programs blossomed under the arrangement. The smoking cessation, stress reduction and nutrition classes offered by Kaiser Permanente today have their roots in this core emphasis on what Garfield called “Total Health.”

Garfield’s approach brought doctors of all specialties together under one roof.  This “group practice” model is the environment in which doctors train, and it only made sense to continue it in day-to-day practice. Today, 60 percent of J.D. Power’s top 20 health care systems are group practice models, such as Kaiser Permanente, Mayo and Harvard Pilgrim.

I was surprised to learn that Garfield created hospital designs. His put the medical team closer to patients and segregated sterile hallways from public ones. He installed pneumatic tubes so that “medical records will get to the doctor before the patient does.”

Garfield championed computer-assisted medicine in the 1960s, recognizing that information is the currency of health care. With medical information collected and analyzed, doctors get granular about each patient’s needs and they get the big picture about diseases and effectiveness of treatments.

Garfield’s vision still unfolds today, as Kaiser Permanente recently completed an electronic medical records system that serves more than 8 million patients. But implementation of an EMR is only the first step toward Garfield’s vision of a coordinated system of health care rather than sick care. In the next steps, patients use the online access to their records to become more engaged in their health care, physicians and their teams use the information to tailor care precisely to the patient need, and researchers compare the effectiveness of treatment protocols.

Ironically, Garfield, who believed his health care model would “keep medicine out of the hands of government bureaucrats,” was called a socialist. President Obama, who has said the Kaiser Permanente model is one the nation should emulate, also is called a socialist. Perhaps we need to change the definition of socialist to: One who threatens the status quo.

Favorite Garfield quotes:

National health insurance, an attractive idea to many Americans, can only make things worse. Medicare and Medicaid — equivalents of national health insurance for segments of our population — have largely failed because the surge of demand they created only dramatized and exacerbated the inadequacies of the existing delivery system and its painful shortages of manpower and facilities.

It’s really time for us to revitalize our plan. I suggest a radical new idea — that we stop building hospitals and clinics for sick people. Let’s concentrate on a brand new type of facility — a new first in the world. Let us conceive a building for health — designed, streamlined, and geared to serve our healthy members.

This change from episodic crisis sick care to programmed total health care forces a new look at the recording and processing of medical information … Continuing total health care requires a continuing life record for each individual … The content of that life record, now made possible by computer information technology, will chart the course to be taken by each individual for optimal health.”

When you stop to think of the resources an organization invests in meetings, you realize what a tremendous return is needed to justify them. Unfortunately, very little attention is paid to the conduct of a meeting and this valuable tool is largely wasted. Lencioni’s fictional leadership team wrestles with meetings that run too long and fail to address important matters. A new team member watches for awhile and offers observations that put the team on track for more efficient use of meeting time.

The solutions achieved by this fictional team provide excellent tactics from which a leader may pick and choose. There should be different kinds of meetings for different purposes, Lencioni argues. There are meetings in which short-term, tactical issues are handled, and there are meetings in which quality time is devoted to strategic issues. Participants are more engaged and the follow-through is more likely when meetings follow a routine familiar to the group.

As a knowledge management leader at the World Bank, Denning gained influence by gathering and using the organization’s success stories. He went on to study the historical and anthropological roots of storytelling and he joined a storyteller group. The result is a scholarly analysis of the use of storytelling in organizational communication. He suggests that  storytelling may fit Senge’s definition of another “discipline.”

Denning’s is a practical guide for selecting and performing stories and using them in specific strategic instances. Of course, he uses anecdotes to illustrate his points.

Denning deconstructs the elements of well-told story. One detailed chapter is devoted to the elements of practicing and performing the story. The second half of the book describes several instances in which stories can be used strategically: to build trust, to convey values, to impart knowledge, and to encourage collaboration, for example.

During his career as a theoretical physicist, David Bohm’s writings and lectures took side trips into dialogue and collective thought. In this book, editor Lee Nichol compiles Bohm’s ideas to suggest a coherent theory of co-creation of meaning.

There is a flavor of quantum physics in Bohm’s take on dialogue. He sees dialogue as the antithesis of debate and discussion in that it is organic, chaotic, and evolving. The process of dialogue is itself the whole meaning, while debate and discussion breaks topics down to constituent parts that in themselves have no meaning. Dialogue is the ticking clock and all that it portends; discussion and debate is the clock smashed to pieces.

The ideas in this book invite a leader to view the rituals of organizational communication in light of co-creation of meaning. He or she will notice the vast amount of energy spent talking without achieving a shared meaning. He or she also will notice that dialogue often happens in spite of the organizational rituals. A leader who witnesses such flashes also will notice the leaps in understanding that accompany them. The leader may discover ways to encourage more dialogue, and also may notice that the organizational culture and the path it takes is itself a process of dialogue that encompasses individuals, work groups, group interactions, and the organization’s interface with its environment.

The authors urge leaders to shed “scarcity thinking” and embrace possibility. It is the difference between plugging away within confines and exploring boundless possibilities. Stone Zander, a family therapist, and Zander, the music director of the Boston Philharmonic, argue that we place limits on ourselves, constrained by custom, convention, and insecurities. They suggest that we first determine the limits we have constructed in our minds, to question those, and to imagine how our situation might look if we let go of the self-imposed limits.

Zander uses poignant anecdotes from his years conducting musicians of all skill levels around the world. His departure from the traditional hierarchical orchestra structure elicits new energy and insight from musicians and opens new avenues for Zander as a leader. Each idea the authors present is accompanied by a “practice” to help readers apply the concept. The book is an excellent antidote to burnout and is sure to appeal to your inner optimist.

Senge started a movement with this book, which outlines the first five disciplines (there may be more, he says) that are required to create a “learning organization.” Members of a learning organization understand how they create their reality and how they can influence it. Such an organization is more likely to have generative, creative thinking that advances the organization, its community, and the world.

Four of the disciplines are separate practices: getting a grasp of your personal vision, building a shared vision, fostering team learning, and understanding the effect of our own mental models. These disciplines would be business-book gimmicks if they were not integrated by the fifth discipline: systems thinking. With systems thinking, the leader seeks to find the patterns that underlie an organization’s results.

Senge describes several patterns that usually are not detected unless the leader stands back from strict cause-effect thinking and perceives the influences and delays that are at play on the entire system. This perception will help the leader identify behaviors that contribute to dysfunction and to identify interventions that have greater influence on the system.

Senge’s framework is applicable to the workplace and to society in general. Indeed, he and his fans have created an international group dedicated to fostering systems thinking in all aspects of society (Society of Organizational Learning, solevolution.ning.com).

Team building in organizations too often attends to the interrelationships of individuals and neglects performance. Organizations that create a culture that monitors and values group achievement are more flexible, innovative and efficient, Katzenbach and Smith say.

They lay out the fundamentals of high-performing teams, discovered through comparisons of several groups that have achieved much more than the individuals alone could have achieved. These teams bucked corporate culture, overcame insurmountable odds, introduced new products, or fashioned new niches in old industries. The common elements they discovered were that high-performing teams were small in number of members, skill sets were complementary, teams were committed to a common purpose and performance goals, they were committed to a common approach, and team members held each other mutually accountable.

This book is most useful for a leader who has a good team that is ready to go to the next level. Leaders of dysfunctional teams would be too distant from this roadmap to find it useful. But even a leader in that situation may apply the principles to any special task force or work group they participate in. Most of the successful teams profiled in this book were cross-disciplinary groups put together to tackle a specific problem or informally convened to circumvent organizational roadblocks. This book has been so popular that it has been revised several times. A new revision is in order, as the 2002 version still has a glowing account of a high-performing team at Enron.

Dreher, an educator, aikido practitioner, and student of the Tao organizes passages from the Tao Te Ching to guide leaders to awareness, centeredness, honor, and humility. The first section of the book addresses inner processes that help leaders achieve personal confidence in their role. The second section discusses ways a leader puts the Tao into action.

The book may be read front-to-back or its well-marked passages scanned for specific purposes. I randomly choose a passage to ponder at the start of each day.