In organizations, there are always situations that can't be fixed with top-down directives. Often the only thing left to do is to craft cooperative relationships through understanding, power, or trust. The concept of lateral leading-leading to the side - brings together ideas about how we can create processes of understanding, construct arenas of power, and build trusting (or mistrusting) relationships.

Stefan Kühl is professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld in Germany and works as a consultant for Metaplan, a consulting firm based in Princeton, Hamburg, Shanghai, Singapore, Versailles and Zurich. He studied sociology and history at the University of Bielefeld (Germany), Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (USA), Université Paris-X-Nanterre (France) and the University of Oxford (UK).