Modern Solutions for Modern Problems

Leaders Leap: Transforming Your Company at the Speed of Disruption

By Steve Dennis

Wonderwell, 224 pp., $27.99

Leaders Leap provides a firsthand view of significant challenges in today's marketplace and the impact on leaders and the organizations they serve. The book builds on author Steve Dennis's personal leadership roles as a strategic advisor, board member, and analyst at two Fortune 500 companies in the retail industry. He outlines how some companies will suffer and possibly perish if leadership underestimates the rapid speed they need to survive and thrive in an ever-changing and disruptive economy.

Gone are the days of doing what businesses have always done in the past, making small improvements without truly addressing market needs, and using technology to create a breakthrough. Dennis emphasizes that taking a slow, deliberate approach has led to many companies' demise. Instead, leaders must take mind leaps (new ways to acting and thinking), move faster, and aim higher to embrace degrees of disruption.

Dennis divides the book into three sections. Part one describes the uncomfortable environment leaders and companies encounter. It examines the gap between what companies must do and what they are doing to solve problems.

In part two, Dennis offers solutions to concerns from part one. He focuses on seven mind leaps for personal and organizational growth: crush your ego; wake up; special, not big; start with wow; think radically; safe is risky; and faster, faster, go, go, go.

Some solutions or mind leaps may be uncomfortable to apply during an honest examination and may promote fear, biases, defense mechanisms, and other unsettling results. However, they are important for the growth and development of leaders and their organizations, Dennis explains.

Part three advises implementing the mind leaps so that they become a sustainable practice in an organization. Dennis shares some of his own challenges and success stories.

One of the book's strengths is that each solution contains a set of introspective questions to promote application, regardless of role, company, or industry. Most of all, it ensures leaders committed to having a vision, creativity, curiosity, and drive are well positioned to leap into an economy of continuous change and disruption.