* The most authoritative, comprehensive, and practical guide to this popular approach to large-scale change * Author Diana Whitney was a pioneer in the development and practice of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), and Amanda Trosten-Bloom was one of the first practitioners to use AI for large-scale change in a business setting * Introduces a menu of eight approaches to AI, illustrated by stories from a wide variety of business and not-for-profit organizations * Provides a detailed five-year case history tracking how one company used AI to improve its bottom line and create a new strategic direction and culture The Power of Appreciative Inquiry describes a wildly popular new approach to organizational change that dramatically improves performance by encouraging people to study, discuss, learn from, and build on what's working, rather than simply trying to fix what's not. Whitney and Trosten-Bloom use examples from many different types of organizations to illustrate Appreciative Inquiry (AI) in action, drawing in particular on a five-year project with Hunter-Douglas Window Fashions, a company which achieved a 15 to 20% improvement in their bottom line and created a new strategic direction and culture using AI. The authors illustrate each step in the AI process using actual events at Hunter-Douglas, emphasizing the customized, flexible, almost artistic nature of the process. A how-to book but not a manual, The Power of Appreciative Inquiry describes the newest ideas and practices in the field of Appreciative Inquiry since its inception in 1985.
