Future in-Formation
by Ron Carucci & Josh Epperson
Print on Demand Publisher Choosing a Generative Organizational Life
Ordering Information
7.5 x 9.25 paperback
ISBN: 9781432732066
$16.95    
 
 
 
Book Information
Genre:
 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Leadership
Publication:
 Oct 13, 2008
Pages:
 205
As the first decade of the 21st century inches toward a close, the most urgent and persistent questions facing organizations appear to be a more acute version of those that trouble organizations in the final decade of the last century.



They all come down to this: How do we maximize human endeavor?



Grappling with epidemic talent defection and escalating turnover costs, the inability to develop leaders fast enough, straining to eek out greater performance with fewer resouces, building cultures that welcome diverse views to maximize innovation, struggling to be hospitable to ever diversifying demographics, generational values conflicts...and all in the center spotlight in a global stage, enterprise leaders are desparate for answers.



Perhap's it's time to change the questions.



Organizations have gorged on a revolving door of fads to contend with these perplexing challenges and are desparately hunting for the silver bullet that unlocks the mystery of how to let loose the power and passion of human potential.



With a future hurling at us at great speed and with impressive force and uncertainty, perhaps it's time to turn from our fixation with tips and techniques?



In Future in-Formation: Choosing a Generative Organizational Life, more fundamental and transormative questions are explored...ones that have been shown to truly unleash the greatest levels of passion and performance from people organized around any human endeavor. Moving away from quick-fix easy answers toward a holistic set of questions, Passages Consulting explores the deepest questions communities and their memebers have always asked that have led to the breakthroughs and zeal every leader hopes to discover in themselves and those they lead.



Future in-Formation will astound you, surprise you, inspire you, and ultimately enable you to build a generative

organizational life for those with whom you lead...and unlock levels of perormance, passion, and purpose you've never imagined possible.











Praise for Future in Formation





Carucci and Epperson have a lot to say about unleashing talent, engaging passion and creating organizations that really matter. But they’re probably not the most important authors of this book. You are. What they’ve really done is to offer a participatory learning experience that allows you to apply the ideas and examples from the book to the circumstances and reality of your own work place. The result is not just useful principles that will change how you think about leadership and organizational culture. This book will allow you to emerge from it with a vision and action plan that will help you and your colleagues come alive and achieve your most important goals.



Robert Dunn, CEO



Synergos



Are you at a turning point in your growth as a leader? Read this book. Are you at stasis, critical mass, or crisis in the development of your organization or business? Read this book. Passages Consulting is one of the most effective, skilled leadership consulting organizations in the United States. Rather than offer predictable, clichéd formulas in an attempt to fix or rearrange prescribed limits created by past failure, Ron and Josh instead challenge you to think, build, and lead from a unique future — a generative future. You are both privileged and responsible for creating out of your own unique story, desires, and commitments. Transformation is not about fixing the past. What this book will teach you is that it is the art and discipline of facing the future out of intentional, creative, generative choices. Choose well and read this book — life as you’ve known it will not be the same.



Sean Dimond



Director of Marketing and Communications

Agros International







“This is just who I am”… “My job would be so much easier if everyone else just got it”… “If they could only see where they need to change”… Sound familiar? Have you privately – or publicly-expressed such frustrations? If so, then Future in-Formation is for you. Though, if you are unwilling or unable to redefine the “how” you lead, rethink the “who” you lead, or rephrase the “they” into “me”…it will be a waste of time. Future in-Formation is titled as such because leadership…good, sustainable leadership, is defined by constant change and evolution. No matter how good of leader you may be today, tomorrow will be different. No matter how well you lead yourself, your team, or your peers today…tomorrow “they” will be different. This book is not a quick read. It should be a reoccurring read for any leader to continually remind yourself to reassess, readjust, and renew what it is you need to do to be an effective leader at work, in your community, and at home.



Mindy Simon



Vice President, Information Technology

ConAgra Foods





Ron and Josh’s insightful grasp and articulation of what they aptly name “generative leadership” is desperately needed in today’s business climate. Their work is an inviting oasis within today’s corporate world, where relational “heart and soul” are all too often sacrificed on the altar of short term “efficiency”. If you’re a leader aiming to create enduring greatness within your organization, you must engage with the truth Ron & Josh unfold in this book!”





Peter Ash



CEO, NDG Financial Corporation





The book is an inspiration! It will give all those yearning for greater experiences of community and their organizations a stark look into the path toward greater wholeness and health. No leader will walk away from this unchanged. It’s a wonderful invitation to all that your story is meant to become, and a guide for making that story become a reality. Way to go little brother!





Diane Van De Ven



U.S. Federal Government, and Ron’s sister





I love this book! The human work of organizational leadership turns out to be the heart and soul of leaders who unleash generativity through healthy relationships in their organizations. And they are usually the ones who get the results. The ideas in this book need to get under your skin where they can incubate and grow. Carucci and Epperson tell moving stories, set forth powerful concepts of leadership, and walk leaders through a series of inquiries and self-reflections that can take you to new levels of generative leadership. Every page has nuggets of wisdom and launching pads for transformation.



Brian K. Rice,



President

Leadership ConneXtions International







This is a very timely book on a timely topic. After working with Ron and Josh the past couple of years, I’m convinced that they have their fingers on the pulse of helping organizations become more generative – and realizing the environments and results we all say we want. I heartily endorse this book and hope that you will find their insights as helpful as I have.





Kevin McCuistion,

Director

Microsoft





At first glance, this book appears to be a powerful tool for leaders of organizations. But really, its use is universal . The principles are relevant to everyone who is committed to transformational change in their personal and professional world--from the custodian/janitor to the CEO (sometimes the same person). It starts with the power of one and demonstrates how to gather and harness the synergy of the collective. I highly recommend this book to anyone who aspires to lead sustainable change.

Stacey Easterling

Program Executive, The Atlantic Philanthropies







Brilliant work by Epperson and Carucci. This book skillfully takes a deep understanding of relationships and applies it to business practices and systems. In so doing, it allows us all to see a new way forward – one that includes you and I as the important piece in the ever-changing business puzzle.



Joel VandenBrink



Good friend, and Founding Brewmaster Two Beers Brewing Co.





Carucci and Epperson's philosophy, frameworks , and questions accurately position the meaning of organizations in a personal context, and then boldly challenge each of us to be accountable to live generatively for those we lead. You can’t read this material and remain indifferent to how you lead. This book is a must for anyone, but leaders in particular, with the courage and desire to (happily) live.



Lawler Kang,



Speaker, and best-selling author, “Passion at Work: How to find work you love and live the time of your life”







Great job! My read on the book is very positive. At first, I thought, “Why so much build up and reminders of the past, and of the need to change?” I was impatient and eager to get to the meat of the book. Then I realized the build up actually opened my mind, and made me crave the need to see and understand differently. Practical and relevant examples and thorough explanations make this book great for a visual learner and busy executives responsible for leading change in their organizations. We need to make changes in our organizational patterns to invoke significant change in our leadership and in our society. To settle for the alternatives would be disaster. This book can help us all get the job done.”



James R. Jackson



Plant Manager, MillerCoors





How uplifting to read a book about organizations that uses words like “belief,” “hope,” “openness,” “humility” and “accountability.” The sustainability of the projects we support in developing nations is dependent upon our understanding the motivations of individuals that benefit from them. The same can be said for any organization looking to operate sustainably. We recognize that as an organization, we are successful because of the combination of contributions by our staff, board and volunteers – individuals who each have unique talents and motivations. Anyone who wonders about just how that works needs to read this book. And if you doubt that it works that way, read it slowly, and read it twice.



Marla Smith-Nilson



Executive Director, Water 1st









The breadth and richness of your future is determined by your willingness to name and understand the effects of degenerative patterns in your life and organization. Ron and Josh are a coalescing force in Future in-Formation, summoning us to journey into new patterns of thinking and behavior that offer a generative resonance of transformation. This is a compelling, succinct, and provocative book worth reading and applying to our places of influence and leadership—basically everywhere.



Jon DeWaal,



Good friend, and Jonathan DeWaal Painting





Ron Carucci and Josh Epperson's thought provoking book provides a blueprint for leading and becoming a positive force within our own lives and within our organizations. A cautionary note: the tasks proposed in this book are not for the weak. Future in-Formation first invites the reader to think along with the authors, but then presents a series of challenging questions which can only be answered through hard work and soul searching. Having watched Ron Carucci and Josh Epperson at work, I am convinced that the readers' own unique answers to these questions can transform those who have the courage to face them.





Melodie Blacklidge, M.D.

President, Medical Staff

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital





Part analysis, part workbook, and part story, Future In-Formation is a multi-faceted, slightly-in-your-face dare to its readers to lead organizations of great generativity. If you know either Ron or Josh, then you are well aware that you couldn’t have finer guides for this journey. If you don’t know Ron or Josh, then you truly must read this book to find out why I’m overjoyed to call them friends and colleagues in seeking generative change.



Tim Soerens

Good friend and pastor of Dust Church in Seattle
 
Averting the Plague of Defection





Everywhere we go, we hear executives complain about turnover and wanting better retention of their employees–the “people are our most valuable asset” mantra.



HR executives are completely confounded by the mass exodus they are facing in their corporations from the trigger-happy employees who seem to leave at the slightest unforeseen speed bump. Could it be that employees are arriving in organizations expecting to jettison at the first hint of discontent?



Younger employees are especially prone to jump ship when they feel their voices are unwelcome or they are told to “wait their turn” to play. Intolerance for organizational nonsense is escalating rapidly and so is the bill for replenishing the supply of increasingly difficult-to-find employees.





Have you become intolerant enough of the nonsense that is driving people out of your organization? Or worse than those quitting and leaving, have you become intolerant enough of the performance deficit being gouged by those who have quit and stayed? We hope so.





Generative organizational life is vital to the people in your organization, and if you ask them, you know they will verify it. In our work with clients, we repeatedly see the impact of degenerative behaviors and actions on human beings. People work ridiculously long hours at great personal cost, are frustrated by reward decisions that don’t make sense to them, and are demoralized by curt communications that overlook their contributions and focus instead on minutia. As Gary Hamel points out, the biggest obsession of managers in the past hundred years has been to get more out of people, but the way in which this has been done has been so soul-killing that companies virtually guarantee they will never get what they’re looking for. Hamel puts it eloquently when he says, “Vassals and conscripts may work hard, but they don’t work willingly.”





We have seen that, to a large extent, managers have played a parental role in regard to their employees, employing a variety of controls and withholding information. Hamel points it out as do we in our recent book, Leadership Divided, and we all know that children eventually tire of their parents’ tutelage and leave the nest. The metaphor is apt: many younger employees and junior leaders are impatient with the old structures they find, and they respond to degenerative behaviors by actively seeking generative environments elsewhere. Here is a very telling posting to a Yahoo answer board in reply to the question “Why did you leave your job?”





Tomorrow is my last day at my current job. I’m moving from a company of 1,000+ people to one of less than 100. The pay will be the same so it’s not about money. I’m leaving for a variety of reasons, though. Here’s my list:





1) I don't have much faith in the direction of the company. We’re in a fiercely competitive market, and I don’t see much of anything new to differentiate our upcoming new products.





2) The chain of command in my particular group is not providing any direction for the group. We’re floundering. Communication is practically nonexistent, and the whole direction is not to identify and solve problems but to cover up and hope it goes away.





3) I’m bored. I’ve been doing similar tasks for eight years now, and it’s getting repetitive. I want to do something different that I will find stimulating for my mind.





4) Moving to a smaller company will have its challenges, but everyone there will have to produce. No one can hide. This happens a lot in a larger company in my experience, and it’s frustrating to see how many people produce absolutely nothing. Also there will be less bureaucracy in a smaller company, which should make it easier to get things done.





The disenchantment of employees, especially younger ones, threatens companies with a plague of defections, as talent literally refuses to accept degenerative environments and leaves. Most of these defections are completely preventable. The old adage is true that “Employees don’t quit their companies, they quit their bosses.” A recent survey of more than 1,000 respondents found that the following:



 30% left their jobs to seek new challenges or opportunities that were lacking with their previous employers





 25% left because of ineffective leadership





 22% cited poor relationships with their managers





 21% said their contributions were not valued







What’s the price tag for replacing disgruntled employees with new ones? According to the U.S. Department of Labor Turnover Worksheet , which calculates both the direct and indirect costs of unwanted turnover, looking only at voluntary turnover, the invoice in 2007 to American corporations was in the neighborhood of $386 billion.





Pause for a moment of silence and let that staggering number sink in.







In one midsize professional-services firm we know with annual revenues of about $3B, it calculated its annual turnover costs at about $195 million. That’s 6.5% of its profits down the drain. In a 2002 study, KPMG estimated that annual turnover costs in the supermarket industry were $5.8 billion, where hourly workers’ average tenure is less than a year. Most experts estimate the turnover cost to be around 150% of an exiting professional’s annual salary. For long-tenured and highly skilled professionals, it can range as high as 180%. This means that for a company with 100,000 employees and a turnover rate of 10%, conservatively assuming an average annual salary of $40,000, the cost of turnover is $400 million.





You do the math.







If you aren’t wondering about the hundreds of better ways to spend that money, you should be. Creating generative environments that value contributions, foster healthy relationships, meaningfully engage people in ways that inspire and provoke passion, and realize the highest levels of achievement and satisfaction ultimately is the result of intentional choice. To us, that means all of the problems cited above that contribute to the plague of defection are avoidable. Corporately, we can create communities that vanquish such destruction, and frankly, we must do so with all due speed.





Continuing to export a cadre of increasingly dissatisfied and despaired people from our organizations will only perpetuate the dilution of gifts and capabilities within our communities, but our trans-organizational capacity will weaken as well. If we are already losing competitive ground in the West as it is, the trending plague of defection will only accelerate our competitive decline and, more tragically, our societal and relational decline.





We simply must stem the tide and reverse the hollowing out of our organization’s hearts by regenerating life and meaning into our workplaces. We hope this book will both provoke you to want the same, but also give you some compass headings for where and how to begin.





Now that we’ve set the stage, let’s get going. We hope that your time with this material is wildly transformative for you and those with whom you share the experience of organizational and community life. Wrestle well. Struggle mightily. Hope hard. Desire deeply. Act courageously. And dream big. Your future and the future of your organization are worth it.





Your story’s next chapter is about to begin.





Make it good.





Anticipating with you,



Josh & Ron

About Ron Carucci & Josh Epperson

 Josh Epperson is a Consultant at Passages Consulting, LLC where he works with both small community-based NGOs and large multi-national corporations in a variety of industries. His work consists of large-scale organization and culture change, organization architecture, and leadership development. Some of his clients have included: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, McDonalds, Phase 2 Consulting, Gates Corporation, Cadbury Schweppes, Golden Key, Starbucks Coffee Company, TriHealth, Everett Washington USA, Microsoft, The CIA, The Atlantic Philanthropies, and MillerCoors.

Josh helps create and facilitate major simulation-based leadership interventions such as The Leadership Crucible (www.theleadershipcrucible.com). This is a 3-day in-depth immersion where participants, by assuming the leadership roles in several fictitious organizations in a fictitious city, are able to try on new leadership behaviors in a low-risk environment and get feedback on their styles of relating and leadership performance.

Josh holds an MS in Organizational Development from Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. His current research is focused on an organization’s ability to create systemic interdependence and how to leverage that interdependence toward greater performance. Josh enjoys working in organizations, communities, and other groups that find themselves highly fragmented, stuck, and needing to create a common path forward. He is proud to be publishing this book as his first in which his beliefs about organizations and interdependence can be further explored.

Josh also holds an MA in Counseling Psychology from Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, WA, and an MA in Christian Studies. Previously he worked as a therapist helping clients with severe mental health disorders. His work and study in the field of behavioral sciences has greatly contributed to his life and profession in pursuit of individual and systemic transformation.









Ron Carucci is a seasoned consultant with more than 25 years of experience working with CEOs and senior executives of organizations ranging from Fortune 50 to start-up in pursuit of transformational change. Ron has worked extensively in the health sciences, bio tech, and healthcare provider sectors, and in the technology, financial services and retail food and beverage industries. He has led work on numerous large-scale merger integrations and subsequent culture change initiatives, and enterprise level global organizational redesigns.

Ron specializes in the areas of strategy formulation, global organization design, large-scale organization and culture change organizational change and executive leadership development, with a particular passion for developing emerging leaders within organizations. He has helped CEO’s, their executive teams, and their enterprises re-design themselves, build appropriate talent strategies to ensure the current and next generation of leaders have the capabilities required by the organization, and help leaders and leadership teams architect and lead major transformations. He has been chief architect of several major leadership development simulations for organizations, including The Leadership Crucible.

Ron is a former faculty member at Fordham University Graduate School as an associate professor of organizational behavior. He serves as Chief Operating Officer and Graduate Professor of Leadership at Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, WA. He has also served as an adjunct at the Center for Creative Leadership. He is co-author of several books, including most recently Relationships that Enable Enterprise Change (Jossey-Bass 2002), and most recently the best selling, Leadership Divided, What Emerging Leaders Need and What you Might be Missing (Jossey Bass 2006) and has authored numerous articles and book chapters on the issues of organizational change. His clients have included CitiBank, MillerCoors, Corning, Inc, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Amgen, Deutche Bank, Gates Corporation, ConAgra, TriHealth, OhioHealth, McDonald’s Corporation, Starbucks, Microsoft, Sojourners, National Asian Pacific Center on Aging, Kliener Perkins Caufield & Byers, Cadbury Adams, Hershey Corporation, The Atlantic Philanthropies, the US Patent & Trademark Office, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Johnson & Johnson, ADP, and The CIA.
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