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No Surprises! — Anticipating and Preparing for the Unexpected

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Abstract

As an organizational leader you are operating at the interface between the past, the present and the future. If you are to manage this interface effectively, you are going to need the ability to appreciate the past, to understand the present and to anticipate, plan for and shape the future. A core message of this book is that the plans that you make for that future will be constantly and increasingly buffeted by unexpected events with the potential to knock such plans for six.

Feelings of surprise are diagnostic because they are a solid cue that one’s model of the world is flawed

Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe1

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Notes

  1. Karl E. Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, Managing the unexpected, Jossey Bass, San Francisco, 2001.

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  2. Jan Carlzon, Moments of truth, Harper Perennial, New York, 1987.

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  3. Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, In search of excellence, Harper and Row, New York, 1982.

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  4. Charles Handy, The Hungry Spirit, Hutchinson Arrow Books, London, 1997.

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  5. Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, Managing the unexpected, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2002, page 92.

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  6. Jim Collins, Good to Great, Random House Business Books, London, 2001.

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  7. Arie de Geus, The Living Company, Nicholas Brealy, London, 1997.

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  8. Yiannis Gabriel, Storytelling in organizations: facts, fictions and fantasies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, page 18.

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© 2009 Graham Robinson & John Harris

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Robinson, G., Harris, J. (2009). No Surprises! — Anticipating and Preparing for the Unexpected. In: Unsecured Ladders. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230249158_4

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