Eon Stef Stef থেকে Hauteville, 42820 Ambierle, France
I kinda loved it, I kinda hated it. If you have read it, you know what I mean. It is tough to review. One of the reviews here compared it to those motivational posters. The book kind of has that feel, starting with 16 pages of grainy black and white full page photos. It is set in a sans-serif font with plenty of white space on the pages. The 10x10 format makes it feel more like a coffee table book than a book on organizations. However all this sells the book short. What I liked about the book is the "take no prisoners" approach to battling the "scientific management" mindset. Business schools, management experts, efficiency experts all traditionally take us down the course of "plan before you do" and particularly that the more you plan, the better it is to be. The ultimate in the scientific mindset is that if business activity can be defined into detailed sub-minute tasks which are then flawlessly performed by workers that this will lead to the perfect organization. The factory office. "a simpler way" rejects scientific management from the start saying that you should organize around play, organizing, self, or coherence. It sounds at first like some new-age spiritual guide talking about life, and how life evolves and succeeds and is resilient against all eventualities. How nature is both profligate in abundance of forms, and yet merciless about elimination of waste. Life is personified as "being attracted to order" and yet at the same time "using messes" to achieve it. One quote I liked: There is no such thing as survival of the fittest, only survival of the fit. This means that there is no answer that is right, but many answers that might work. The implications is that an organization based on these principles will thrive by leveraging the collective intelligence of the members of the organization. Such an organization will allow creativity and imagination to thrive to find unique adaptive solutions to problems as they are faced, and will not be locked into a centrally dictated and increasingly outdated plan that was drawn up separately from the organization. There are plenty of references from philosophers and sociology studies to back these points of view: Sagan, Maturana & Varela, Darwin, Gould, Prigogine, Shopenhauer, and many more. What you will NOT find is a plan on how to construct such an organization. There is no cookbook recipe to achieve this. How could there be, after all, a centralize plan for a decentralized behavior? The book instead speaks to your intuition about how organizations really work, less because of the structure placed on them, and more in spite of it. Who should read this? Tough question. If you are leading (or advising the leader) of an organization that survives on creativity, then it is possible that you will find some support to lend confidence in an approach that allows for a messier organization. That may be faint praise. Who wants a messier organization? This is put forward as a way to battle complexity, and to provide for resilience, in the face of unpredictable future courses. It exudes a kind of wisdom that a mature manager will probably be able to make use of. But don't expect any formulae. If I were to try, I could probably pick a lot of holes in the material presented, but that is not the point of the book. Instead it is a book to make you think. And I believe it achieves this.