The SelfManaging Organization : How Leading Companies Are Transforming the Work of Teams for Real Impact,Used

Amazon.com Review Business consultants Ronald Purser and Steven Cabana argue that it's time for democracy to replace bureaucracy at work. In The SelfManaging Organization, they warn that hightech, knowledgebased businesses perform best with the flexibility, creativity, and information sharing that come with more freedom on the job. "We need the real medicine now: democracy at work," write the authors, consultants to such companies as Motorola and Procter & Gamble. Building on research by social scientists at the Tavistock Institute in London in the 1950s, Purser and Cabana explain the theory and provide examples of two selfmanaging techniques for improving work: Participative Design and the Search Conference. The Participative Design method asks workers themselves to determine what's wrong at the company and suggest solutions. And the Search Conference method has workers develop new business strategies to help the company succeed. The SelfManaging Organization thus offers provocative ideas to business managers and students. Dan Ring Product Description Based on the principles of "Participative Design," the authors explain why employees' participation is the key to successful corporate reorganization and present detailed case studies of major companies in which employees design and manage their own workplaces. From Booklist Using principles and methods drawn from case studies of such companies as American Express, Hewlett Packard, and Motorola, Purser and Cabana offer a blueprint for designing the selfmanaging organization. It is written for executives, middle managers, and frontline supervisors in all types of businesses participating in the new knowledge economy, which is dependent on knowledgeable workers. The book provides a set of tools that can be used at all levels of an organization to transform rigid bureaucracies into flexible work systems, with selfmanaging work groups serving as the basic building block. The authors explain and demonstrate how organizations can create social learning contexts, or "44 communities of trust," where people can engage in open dialogue and chart the future while redesigning their own work. The authors are consultants in the field of organizational behavior. They contend that their theories are not just another fad but essential to growth and profitability in the new corporate reality, where knowledge workers are the essential core of corporate activity. Mary Whaley Review Dawn Lepore Chief Information Officer, Charles Schwab Purser and Cabana's participative methods jumpstarted our IT strategy creation process and helped our team to have "ownership" of the outcome. Review Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. THE END OF MANAGEMENT AND THE RISE OF THE SELFMANAGING ORGANIZATION What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. T.S. Eliot Management is coming to an end. We might liken the end of management to the fall of communism. When institutions get out of synch with the movement of history, they go into decline whether they are national governments or private enterprises. We believe that conventional management will be the next domino to fall. Conventionally, management has been focused on planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, and controlling human efforts. Managers were seen as the exclusive stewards of the business, occupying a distinct social role and fixed position in a bureaucratic hierarchy. For many years managers were internally focused, absorbed in operational details, controlling and coordinating the work of their subordinates and dealing with office politics. Management was sucked into acting as a troubleshooter and firefighter for the level below. This all just seemed like the natural order of things. And from such a perspective, it didn't make sense to question what seemed to be well established dogma. Manageme