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Leadership on the Line, With a New Preface
book

Leadership on the Line, With a New Preface

by Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky
June 2017
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
288 pages
6h 48m
English
Harvard Business Review Press
Content preview from Leadership on the Line, With a New Preface

3

Get on the Balcony

Few practical ideas are more obvious or more critical than the need to get perspective in the midst of action. Any military officer, for example, knows the importance of maintaining the capacity for reflection, even in the “fog of war.” Great athletes can at once play the game and observe it as a whole—as Walt Whitman described it, “being both in and out of the game.” Jesuits call it “contemplation in action.” Hindus and Buddhists call it “karma yoga,” or mindfulness. We call this skill “getting off the dance floor and going to the balcony,” an image that captures the mental activity of stepping back in the midst of action and asking, “What’s really going on here?”1

Why do so many of the world’s forms of spiritual and organizational ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781633692848