New Giants Rising : How Leaders Can Help People and Companies Grow During the Followership Crisis

Today, one of the greatest concerns for all Americans - leaders and followers alike – is how their prosperity seems to depend on a shrinking foundation of technology-only growth. And the onset of artificial intelligence only threatens to marginalize people even more with job loss and increasing isolation inside the few remaining jobs that it will leave behind.

To older Americans whose parents uprooted themselves from the farm for the blue-collar jobs in our factories during most of the prior century, the future feels like it’s happening without them. Likewise, younger generations are battling for relevance - but for different reasons. Millennial stigmas heaped on them by the generations they are replacing has added confusion, misdirection and workplace productivity problems for people already struggling to adapt and serve their fundamental human needs.

Fisher helps us understand that business growth fueled by labor productivity does not rely on leadership as we’ve come to celebrate it, but on our ability to sustain loyalty and commitment to one another– a following if you will - inside and outside our workplaces. When we recognize and understand our historical Followership Cycles, we can then reimagine and reengineer our workplaces to meet the demand of all Americans for a better future.

New Giants Rising takes us on a journey of the Followership Cycles of our recent centuries. And, more importantly, it puts forth a plan of action - voiced very simply by Henry Ford during the last cycle over a century ago when he faced the same moment then as we do now:

"Coming Together is the Start. Keeping Together is Progress. Working Together is Success."

• Provides a new, sustainable growth model based in the socioeconomic realities of modern America and the world it wants to lead – a new Followership System.
• Tells the story of how one profession, on the brink of disappearing into irrelevance, will lead the new Decision Economy into the 21st century.
• Demonstrates the development of the "leaderless" specialists who will manage evidence together to pursue a Reason-to-Grow.
• Stresses the importance of charging all C-Suite executives with leading a continuous process of discovering, articulating and then defending those stakeholder agreements to share purpose.
• Reveals, not the technology infrastructure, but the social architecture that organizations will use to build new social capital – the Followership that will propel our New Giants to future greatness.

Introduction

Chapter 1 : Model of Change : The Mayo Clinic
Chapter 2 : Shared Purpose : A Reason to Grow
Chapter 3 : Step One : Define your reason to grow
Chapter 4 : Relevance. Transparency. Choices.
Chapter 5 : Shared Quality : Balancing Results and Outcomes
Chapter 6 : Step Two : Design your new process control environment
Chapter 7 : Shared Quality : A Case Study
Chapter 8 : Shared Language : Accountability to the Clinic
Chapter 9 : Step Three : Implement Your New Operating System
Chapter 10 : Back to the Future

Index