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"What do you want...and what will you do to keep from getting it?" With that opening quotation from their Harvard colleague the late William Perry, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey launch us into a voyage of discovery — understanding the possibilities of change by attending to our powerful inclinations not to change. Saying we want transformation, we instead master self-sabotage, continuously manufacturing "the antigens of change." Unless we accept and appreciate both capacities, real change will be elusive.

Not only is How We Talk a book for individual development, it's a book "for people interested in supporting the transformational learning of others," what Kegan and Lahey consider "an increasingly necessary feature of effective leadership, since nearly all leaders [formal or informal]...are called upon to lead processes of change."

Kegan and Lahey suggest that both organizations and individuals thwart change through a "third force we call dynamic equilibrium..., our own immunity to change." Their tools for change are "novel language forms" that shift "a customary mental or social arrangement into a form that increases the possibility of transformational learning."

We must pay attention to the way we talk with others in public and in private, singly and in groups, and we must pay attention to the way we talk to ourselves, since we run that intimate conversation almost continuously. Kegan and Lahey maintain that all leaders are leading language communities," and so have even more power to "shape, alter, and ratify the existing language rules." The question is not whether leaders use language to affect the workplace but how they do it.