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Organizational leadership theories too often manifest into tedious memoirs peppered with Sun Tzu and Machiavelli quotes. The frequent outcome is subjecting teams to rewriting job priorities as MBOs, KPIs or another pedantic upper management craze. When a cultural management program breeds further disillusionment, it hardly seems worth it. Naturally, when a free copy of Tribal Leadership crossed my desk I was skeptical. That being said, because Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh wrote the introduction and IDEO founder David Kelley is featured, I was willing to give it a read. After all, these two leaders have clearly made strides in defining positive company culture.

Written by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer- Wright, Tribal Leadership is a new perspective on company culture consisting of a series of "stages". This theory requires no immediate organizational overhaul and instead concentrates on a behavioral hierarchy where companies "level up" their individual employees. In short, and refreshingly, the project tools do not change; instead, the way of looking at employees within each Stage becomes the focus.