The Evolving Self focuses upon the most basic and universal of psychological problems—the individual’s effort to make sense of experience, to make meaning of life. According to Robert Kegan, meaning-making is a lifelong activity that begins in earliest infancy and continues to evolve through a series of stages encompassing childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The Evolving Self describes this process of evolution in rich and human detail, concentrating especially on the ...

If contemporary culture were a school, with all the tasks and expectations meted out by modern life as its curriculum, would anyone graduate? In the spirit of a sympathetic teacher, Robert Kegan guides us through this tricky curriculum, assessing the fit between its complex demands and our mental capacities, and showing what happens when we find ourselves, as we so often do, in over our heads. In this dazzling intellectual tour, he completely reintroduces us to the psychological landscape ...

Unlock your potential and finally move forward.A recent study showed that when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don't change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through successfully. Desire and motivation aren't enough: even when it's literally a matter of life or death, the ability to change remains maddeningly elusive.Given that the status quo is so potent, how can we change ourselves and our organizations?In Im...

A Radical New Model for Unleashing Your Company’s PotentialIn most organizations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for-namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people’s impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company’s resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organization nor its people are able to realize their full potential.What if a company did everything in its power to ...

To nourish the love of language—its music and its surprise—Harvard professor Robert Kegan appeals to all a young child’s appetites— the fascination with animals, the preoccupation with food, the delight in the incongruous. Kegan’s clever text and Walsh’s evocative watercolors introduce the young child to the classic form of The Joke—a set up (“My palominos…) and a punchline (“…love jalapenos!”). They can’t resist “telling it” over and over. My Antelope Loves Cantaloupe is the Raffi of pict...

The Change Leadership Group at the Harvard School of Education has, through its work with educators, developed a thoughtful approach to the transformation of schools in the face of increasing demands for accountability. This book brings the work of the Change Leadership Group to a broader audience, providing a framework to analyze the work of school change and exercises that guide educators through the development of their practice as agents of change. It exemplifies a new and powerful app...

A recent study showed that when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don't change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through successfully. Desire and motivation aren't enough: even when it's literally a matter of life or death, the ability to change remains maddeningly elusive.Given that the status quo is so potent, how can we change ourselves and our organizations?In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey sh...

A whole new approach to business communication by two brilliant, Harvard-based educators, trainers and consultants. Kegan and Lahey show us how the way we talk in the workplace can be understood as seven different types of speaking, seven languages that reveal our attitudes, expectations, corporate culture, hidden agendas, emotional baggage, motivation and other crucial characteristics and issues. They show how all managers and executives are actually leading "language communities" wherein...

What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth?Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey have found and studied such companies—Deliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people's strongest...