A large body of research has shown that maintaining a Flow-promoting workplace is a win-win proposition for owners, managers, as well as for the workforce, irrespective of whether the organization is a business, a government agency, or an NGO. The mission of the game FLIGBY, and also the objective of this book, is to identify, measure, and help develop leadership skills that, if applied, would help create a Flow-promoting work environment.
Contemporary innovations, like Prezi, Ustream and Logmeln, are just some of the examples of recent global startups originating in Hungary, that were conceived through fruitful cooperation between academia, people with technological savvy, and business entrepreneurs. This book is introducing just such an innovation that, we believe, has the potential of becoming an educational service product-that will gain global acceptance.
The overarching purpose of the book “Missing Link Discovered – Planting Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory into Management and Leadership Practice by using FLIGBY, the official Flow-Leadership Game” is to describe, discuss, and analyze an entrepreneurial innovation: an attempt by a group of extraordinarily creative individuals to transplant Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s widely-known Theory of Flow into a teaching and research tool which will illuminate and enhance effective managerial and leadership practice.
The “missing link discovered”, referred to in the title of the book, is the global-award-winning serious management game called FLIGBY. Referring to this innovative Game, Csikszentmihalyi, in his essay that follows, professes that FLIGBY “is a bridge between my lifetime of scientific work and aspiring and practicing managers and leaders who are interested in my ideas but are not sure how to apply them in everyday practice.”
Part I of the book discusses the science and value propositions of Flow, how leadership and Flow are linked, gives many examples of Flow-promoting leadership practices, and introduces a new method for systematically measuring the skill-levels of those who complete FLIGBY.
Part II is all about FLIGBY: its plot, the Game’s objectives and features, the assumptions and methods employed in its construction, and its wide range of its uses in teaching, training and research.
Part III introduces the reader to the authors’ planned global Leadership and Flow research program. The research initiative, which is just beginning, is an open invitation to academics from various disciplines and to managers and leaders of organizations, to join us in an endeavor to advance the science and practice of effective leadership.
The book launch event was held at Central European University with Prof. Csikszentmihalyi as a guest speaker. Check out the edited transcript of this forum here!
Blogposts about “Missing Link Discovered”: