It is now axiomatic that learning is a key challenge for managers seeking to improve their own skills and their organizations. What is less obvious is how, exactly, managers can go about learning while moving at the often-dizzying pace of modern organizational life. The authors of this book promise - and deliver - a fresh and highly useful approach to real-time, on-the-ground managerial learning. Called action inquiry, there is much to recommend it.

Action inquiry is far from a quick fix. The process is described as a long journey requiring us to alter basic assumptions and relationships over time. As such, it is refreshingly real and believable.

Action inquiry suggests we start our change processes where we are, be it alone or with one or a few people thinking and interacting with others in new ways. Its emphasis and effects expand outward to include and benefit work teams, the organization itself, and even society and human life, in general. We are reminded that a single, enlightened individual can make a real difference. This book inspires us to rephrase Gandhi's famous quote - "let us begin with ourselves to be the organizational change we want to see."

Written with Mary Winter a veteran manager, consultant and now organizational scholar.