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Theory U

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Theory U

Leading from the Future as It Emerges

Berrett-Koehler,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

You can’t lead your organization to a positive future if you’re still trapped in the past.

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Editorial Rating

5

Qualities

  • Analytical
  • For Experts

Recommendation

This is an ambitious book. Leadership consultant and lecturer C. Otto Scharmer provides a theoretical framework for understanding the changes society faces and provides suggestions for institutional and personal transformation. Scharmer explains his process and its goals obsessively, even repetitively, walking you through multidisciplinary examples from his own experience, history and economics. He provides diagrams and breaks down his theories into numbered steps and rules. Still, you may find the book challenging, mainly because Scharmer is dealing with such large issues, but also because his ideas and vocabulary can get mystical. This book requires time and patience aplenty, but if you are open to such reflections, it could be for you. getAbstract recommends it to managers interested in personal change, organizational culture and futurism.

Summary

Crisis and Transformation

The world is currently facing not one but many crises. Unbalanced economies make a few people rich and leave most others to starve; education and healthcare systems malfunction and waste money; and the climate is changing. These problems are not beyond human control. In fact, they arise from human activities and decisions – sometimes, from the very systems that are supposed to fix the problems. For example, most illness in developed countries results from lifestyle choices: what and how much people eat, drink and smoke; how they deal with stress and whether they exercise. Educational systems prepare students for jobs they don’t want or that don’t exist.

Social structures are crumbling and a new world is emerging from the wreckage. Three intersecting factors will define it:

  1. “The rise of the global economy: a technological-economic shift” – In Europe, Japan and the United States, deregulation is widespread. Capital and labor are abrogating their traditional social contracts. Capital spreads quickly around the world; but as a result, so do economic crises. Organizations such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization...

About the Author

C. Otto Scharmer is the founding chair of the Presencing Institute, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-author of Presence.

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