Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box

Leadership and Self-Deception introduces readers to an important new idea in organizational thinking. It shows how the problems that typically prevent superior performance in organizations are the result of a little-know problem called "self-deception."

According to the authors, people who are in self-deception live and work as if trapped in a box. Blind to the reality around them, they undermine performance — both their own and others. The problem is, being in the box they can't see that they undermine performance. Consequently, they don't change, and neither do their results.

As Leadership and Self-Deception shows, this phenomenon occurs frequently in organizations. Most people spend much of their time stuck in the box, and this multiplication of boxes is the root cause of most of the problems that impede organizational performance — including problems relating to leadership, teamwork, communication, accountability, trust, commitment, and motivation.

The good mews is that there is a solution to self-deception and the costly problems that arise from it. Through an entertaining and highly instructive story, Leadership and Self-Deception shows what self-deception is, how people get trapped in it, how it kills organizational performance, and — most importantly — the surprising way to solve it.