Customer Reviews

The Six Secrets of Change: What the Best Leaders Do to Help Their Organizations Survive and Thrive

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Michael Fullan has been working to discover change secrets for years allowing him to amass an extensive data base on the subject. His depth of understanding provides a unique view for the change agent of today. An intriguing aspect of the book is how Fullan goes beyond the work of Collins book Good to Great. If you are a fan of G2G you will appreciate the Six Secrets and how it moves change to the next level. This book will give you ideas to contemplate.

Up until this point, most of Fullan's writing has been about school and district reform. This book breaks the mold and looks at organizations--and what great organizations do differently to sustain great results over time. The book is full of references, and one of the books quoted often is, Firms of Endearment. This book is apparently the next Good to Great and highlights businesses that outperformed the companies featured in Collin's seminal work.

Due to Fullan's deep experiences and backgrounds working in schools, the secrets he shares can easily be applied to schools, and there are many school stories throughout it's pages. I won't keep you in suspense any more, the Six Secrets are as follows:

1. Love Your Employees

2. Connect Peers with Purpose

3. Capacity Building Prevails

4. Learning is the Work

5. Transparency Rules

6. Systems Learn

This is a book every superintendent should read. It will help you to take the long view toward school and district improvement and give you plenty of fresh ideas about how to make your organization the best it can be.

Successful leadership is defined in part, by how effectively a leader can lead an organization through change. Fullan's 6 Steps are common sense essentials that are all too often forgotten or overlooked in practice. This is a must read for any manager or leader to reacquaint oneself with these essentials to ensure the smoothest transitions during the difficult times of organizational change.

All school leaders and business leaders as well should read this as part of their professional reading. Fullan, as usual, focuses on building a culture that can sustain change. Some of the people who rely on pop wisdom for guidance, should check out Fullan's work. The themes in this book generalize easily across all settings, public and private.

In recent years, there has been a growing trend to transpose educational problems into a corporate framework. The formula is always the same; find a few corporations that have been successful, identify some of their characteristics, and transpose those characteristics on schools. Walla...you have educational reform. Fallan provides a survey of organizational management theory over the past 100 years. He includes oldies but goodies such as Frederick Taylor's scientific management (influential theory in early 1900s but largely obsolete by the 1930s) and Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Y. More recent developments include Firms of Endearment from 2007. One corporate exemplar of choice is Toyota. Bad timing. The book was written in 2008. In 2008, Toyota had overtaken General Motors to become the world's biggest car company. Unfortunately, since the book has been published, Toyota's reputation for peerless quality, its greatest asset, has eroded in the wake of a small problem with throttles that stick open. Since then, Toyota's reputation has taken a black eye and endured a financial raking that affected millions of cars and billions of dollars.

Fallan's book is an easy read and appeals to common sense. He does not add any research to the field. He recycles existing research into his six secrets. For me, Fallan's platitudinous advice comes across as a bit hypocritical. He spent his life as an educator in Canada. His degrees are in education. All of a sudden, to sell books, he is erudite of all things corporate. I think that if I wanted to hear about what made Toyota so great, I would rather hear it from someone who worked at Toyota. He is an educator. I would have liked to hear him discuss children, or teaching children, or what makes an effective learning environment. He sprinkles his six secrets with some education findings. These educational references are touched upon briefly, like a slalom skier going around a gate, but he seems to rest most of his analysis on corporate research. For example, on page 69 he states that "England, for example, made the teaching profession the most popular profession among undergraduates and graduates ages twenty-one to thirty-six in just five years." Astounding finding, but that was it; quote end quote. Note even a citation. Did England really do that? I think that is worth a book itself. However, the author quickly caroms back into discussion of corporate America.

On the other hand, there is no shortage of references to Toyota. For some reason, he does not seem to think educational analysis will hold it`s own weight and is compelled to transfer the positive feelings about one characteristic in corporations (profits) to an unrelated characteristic in education (student learning). Fullan correctly identifies this tendency as `halo effect'; the tendency to judge somebody as being totally good because one aspect of his or her character is good. However, he then spends 245 pages doing it. Fullan meanders among several corporations, identifying suitable characteristics that support his six secrets.


His choice of Toyota as his champion demonstrates one problem with his analysis ... a horse is only as good as its last race. So much for the halo effect. But even if he hadn't picked the wrong horse ... let's say his pari-mutuel betting resulted solely in winners with indefinitely increasing profits and stakeholder confidence. Does that mean what is right for corporate America is right for public education? Why does increased corporate profit translate to increased student learning? I do not think anyone has made the connection. I do think, however, that "learning" is hard to define, but "profit" is not. The traditional approach to education has been based on subjective and vague references to intellectual maturity and greater good. On the other hand, corporate success relies on measurable, objective, and "return on investment." Therefore, we will likely continue to see the trend of books about educational reform in a corporate framework whether it is warranted or not.

Fullan has the great ability to take the complexities of educational concepts and simplify them and provide accurate analogies, descriptions and examples that make the complexities accessible. The book is on target and a critical part of any principal, director's or superintendent's library.

A simple synopsis of Fullan's work - easy to see application in the field. Common sense use of research.

Another valuable contribution from the Fullan collection.Always nice to receive a new quality second hand hardback version promptly and efficiently!
thank you.