This book has a simple message:

• Good thinking is the starting point for good leadership.
• Leaders who can reframe—look at the same thing from multiple perspectives—think better. They create a lucid portrait of what’s going on around them and have a clearer vision of what’s needed to achieve desired results.
• Leaders can see and do more when they know how to negotiate four key areas of the leadership terrain: structural, human resource, political, and symbolic.

This book answers a request we’ve often heard from readers and fans of our work who have asked for a shorter, more applied version of Reframing Organizations. This new book is a compact overview of our ideas about reframing and our four-frame model, with a focus on leadership. Because storytelling is often the best form of teaching, we use cases and examples, many of them from iconic leaders, to provide realistic lessons about how great leaders think and act.

This work appears thirty years after we published our first book (with the ungainly title Modern Approaches to Understanding and Managing Organizations). Back then, we hoped we might be onto something. Our ideas were still evolving, but we believed that they captured much of the existing research on organizations and leadership, and we were encouraged by former students who were starting to send positive reports back from the field. We’ve learned a lot in the years since, and we’re even more confident that our framework has breadth and power. Readers, colleagues, students, clients, and workshop participants continue to report that our ideas are useful, even career saving, in the heat of practice. Their support and input has taught us and sustained us along the way. So has our long-term partnership. Book writing can be rewarding, but it’s hard work that intersperses epiphanies and moments of joy with roadblocks and dark times when nothing seems to work. It’s a lot easier with a partner, and our respect and affection for each other has helped us sustain a mostly long-distance writing relationship through the decades.