VISION—The Journal of Business Perspective ● Vol. 9 ● No. 1 ● April–June 2005 Book Reviews ● 79 originality is compromised. The reviewer agrees though, that without these foundation stones of earlier academicians one cannot present fresh ideas. The uniqueness of the book is in combining emotional energy and willpower together to move the organizations into high-energy zones. In terms of emotional energy at the individual level and the organizational level, combining the two to get a powerful, alert and urgent sense of action is groundbreaking. Managers and leaders will learn the how and the why of managing active non-action, and douse day-to-day fires and spark the fire within and manage that fire to get things done and dream big dreams and most importantly make them come true, with purposeful action and reflection. Jyotsna Bhatnagar (Dr.) Faculty, Human Resource Management Area Management Development Institute Mehrauli Gurgaon road, Gurugram Gurgaon-122 001, Haryana Louis Carter, David Ulrich, Marshall Goldsmith (Eds.), Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organization Change: How the Best Companies Ensure Meaningful Change and Sustainable Leadership. San Francisco: Pfeiffer/John Wiley, 2004, 512 pp. Price $ 75 Hard. Leading the change in the contemporary economic environment, which is surcharged with chaotic competition, is becoming perhaps one of the most serious challenges for business as well as social organizations. Change issues are increasingly taking an increasingly complex shape due to rapid changes in economy, polity and society that are resulting from globalization. Economies in the new era are largely driven by venture capitalists, large companies, and global consulting firms. Mergers and acquisitions are taking place at a phenomenal scale as devices to counteract competition. Virtualization is also being resorted to in a big way to help promote more effective organizational survival. These realities are spreading to the developing world as well, including Asia. The aspirations of the new-generation employee, whose working style and value choices have been considerably influenced by the globalization realities, are significantly influencing the structuring of the workplace. New paradigms are emerging in management so as to respond to the emergent new realities. The incidence of customization in manufacturing as well as services sectors operations is increasing. This has put added pressure for competitive performance excellence on organizations of different sizes and types. Thus, there is greater need for designing and leading change in organizations. So far as management of human resource is concerned, new dimensions are being added to yesterday’s issues related to competitive performance. The workplace is witnessing the emergence of a new psychological contract, with collectives like unions seeing their strengths and adversarial approach to employee relations issues considerably diluted. Globalization has been facilitating the emergence of convergence theory in management, thus emphasizing the need for studying comparative contexts in which management concepts can be made to work with a greater degree of similarity of results. With the increasing influence of globalization, the distinctiveness of cross-cultural specifications is getting somewhat diluted. So as to serve the rapidly-growing economies, the urgency to globalize will get manifested in different spheres of economic functioning. There will be greater pressure on organizations towards re-packaging people-management and change- management models closer to those adopted by multinational organizations and other professionally- run organizations at global and local levels. In the above scenario, Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organizational Change is a significant contribution towards designing and implementing change efforts in variegated situations. The book is part of a case studies research undertaken by the first editor’s (Louis Carter’s) Best Practices Institute, USA, which involved studying trends and practices in leadership development and organization change. The study illustrates strategies, structures and processes of leading change management through case examples of some of the best performing global organizations. David Norton of the Balanced Scorecard fame had rightly pointed out that “managing strategy is, in essence, managing change.” A majority of the best organizations chosen for this study described leadership development and organizational change as “the real work of the organization” which contributed to their strategic advantage. The 18 organizations studied include: Agilent Technologies, Corning, Delnor Hospital, Emmis Communications, First Consulting Group, GE Capital, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Mattel, McDonald, MIT, Motorola, Praxir, St. Luke Hospital and Health Network, Storage Tek, and Windber Medical Center. This research shows that