This year Adriaan Bekman published a book about self managing teams. It is not just another book about a specific topic of organization development. It is the result of a longtime living and working with the question: How can the the beautiful concept of horizontal leadership become a sustainable reality in organizations? Especially in cooperation with the IMO consultants in Brazil and their clients, he discovered the powerful value a good working self managing teams.
In Brazil Adriaan told about his dream of this realization of horizontal leadership. In the video below, he give words to this dream.
In the Introduction of this book, you can read:
Fifty years of working on organizational development in all kinds of organizations in many countries has, however, opened up a way for organizations to transform from a vertically operating, functionally driven organization by management, to a horizontally operating, self-managing organization based on leadership from all stakeholders.
In this book we want to describe this road, how this road can be paved and what effects can be expected. To this end, we outline both the more external and the more internal dimensions of change and development. On the one hand you will find the practical approach and some examples of practical cases and on the other hand we outline what it means for the people involved. That is the side of meaning and inspiration. We also delve deeper into the issue of community building and leadership. After all, these two dimensions of organizing are particularly at play when it comes to self-managing teams.
We hope to contribute to an urgently desired and necessary change in ways of working and leadership in companies and organizations.
The book Self Managing Teams and Horizontal Leadership is available on this website. It is free to download, free to use if you mention the name of the author.