About Unstuck
UNSTUCK is written by Keith Yamashita (the founder of a firm in San Francisco that works with CEOs to reinvent and recenter their organizations) and Sandra Spataro (a professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management).
The idea for UNSTUCK came about when Sandy was teaching an MBA course at Yale and invited Keith to teach a few classes with her. The topic for the classes? How to flex leadership and communications skills in complicated times. In preparing for those classes, our ambition was to create a tool that would help the students lead their teams through times of change. We wanted to take knowledge from Sandy's research, other thinkers in the field, and Keith's on-the-frontlines work with CEOs — and bake that knowledge into a form that these leaders could use in tough situations to drive the right actions in their teams.
We soon discovered that while there are thousands of books published every year on leadership, management, and innovation, very few function as in-the-moment tools that let you take instant action. We ended up creating a set of flash cards, which we hastily named Unstuck Cards. And an interesting thing happened. The cards were a hit. The students demanded more of them. One student even remarked, "This is the stuff I came to business school to learn, wrapped up in a way that I can actually use." We were on to something.
For additional information on the authors, click here.