GURU EXECUTIVE EDUCATION (upper right quadrant)

 

Byington (I was sent so many to review at JOCM) and other empowerment book authors (e.g. Peter Blocks The Empowered Manager, 1987 The Empowered Manager: Postitive Political Skills at Work. San Francisco: Jossey Bass; Judith Vogt & Kenneth Murrell' (1990) Empowerment in Organizations: How to Spark Exceptional Performance University Associates; Bailey, R., 1995 How to Empower People at Work: A Guide to becmong a Green-Fingered Manager. Didcot, Management Books; and Ron Sims book on empowerment. With the exception of Manz, C. C. & Sims, H. P. Jr. 1993 Business without Bosses: How self-managing teams are building high-performing companies. NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. the executive education empowerment books do not tackle the issues of disempowerment found in the Clegg and Alvesson & Willmott texts (next section). Nor do they look at the issue of participative democracy, as in Emery's book above, nor the work of the workers' council movement to emancipate workers from managerialist control structures. Empowerment without democratic worker control of the enterprise is shallow compared to the initiatives in the next quadrant. In short, these empowerment texts "make people comfortable" and "makes things simple."

 

Covey, Stephen R.

1989 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. NY: (Fireside) Simon & Schuster. This international bestseller book reviews several centuries of positive mental attitude and Napoleon Hill-genre books to invoke the notion of character over personality. In seven simple lessons, the 7 habits of character are infused into leading organizations into the current mania for spirit at work. Habit 6 is to synergize, the mainstay of Disney. And every corporation uses Habit 1 personal Vision and Habit 2, personal leadership is the stuff of MBA programs. All the habits are essential to the MBA.

 

Imai, Massaki

1992 Kaizen. This book summarizes the TQM continuous improvement genre of countless books celebrating Edward Demings and others whose claim to fame is initiating the TQM movement. I could list 100 TQM books. They continue to be popular in executive education and in MBA programs. I have my own read on these texts. It is a reading that invades from the two quadrants below. Through principles that Frederick Taylor used long ago to use science to assess work processes, the TQM movement took the stopwatch armed observer out of the equation by handing the stopwatch and clipboard (now a music stand) to the employee. Hammer and Champy dish TQM for being too slow, not radical enough, and too simple to work. But, agree or disagree with TQM, it makes people comfortable, it is the stuff of ISO 9000 and everybody is doing JIT and Kaizen (continuous improvement involving everyone). Someone borrowed my book and never returned it or I would give you the publisher. Every MBA program teaches this in several courses. It is the comfortable knowledge of the status quo MBA.

 

Robbins, Steve

He has an OT book, but I will list here 1997, Managing Today! NJ: Prentice-Hall. He has several Management Texts, making him the best-selling Management Text writer in the world. He covers workforce diversity, TQM, reengineering, dismantling hierarchy, the demise of the 9-to5 job. His is a merger with the media corporations On the back cover are the VIACOM Company Internet Addresses. Executive education packaged by Prentice Hall, Paramount, MTV, Blockbuster Video, the Sci-Fi Channel, and many more. Steve Robbins (1997) for example, the writer of the most widely selling management textbooks, has gone so far as to locate the historical review of organizations, the contribution founding fathers Fayol and Weber, and founding mother Mary Parker Follett into his appendix (In a few sessions, I will relate Fayol, Follett and Weber, but that is another story). Robbins (1997) explains "students’ interest in history is minimal" (1997: xvii); "students want material they can apply on their jobs" (p. xvii); "Students want to know what works and what doesn’t… They are not interested in the details of research, the historical evolution of our knowledge, or long discourses on competing ideas" (p. xvii). Yet, I observe that Robbins also writes and substitutes a more contemporary history located in the main text, one that will appeal to our pragmatic, career students. One that stands muster with Viacom. As Robbins (1997) puts it: "The majority of workers have entered the contingent workforce" (p. 23) and are becoming knowledge workers in the knowledge organizations of our global knowledge community. In short the text "Makes People Comfortable" with the new history and "Makes Things Simple."

 

Senge, Peter.

1990 the 5th Discipline. NY: Doubleday. The book has many fascinating ways to achieving a consensus speech community.

 

Srivastva, Suresh and David Cooperrider (I have to put Suresh in the Table)

1992 Appreciative Management and Leadership: The Power of Positive Thought and Action in Organiztions. Jossey-Bass. The approach it to appreciate and value the best of "what is," to envision "what might be," to dialogue "what should be" and to innovate "what will be." It is based in Ken and Mary Gergen's work on avoiding the "language of deficit" and never using the "deconstruct" word. I spend a fair amount of time doing doctoral training at institutions where AI 9Appreciative Inquiry) is the view. The idea is to make things simple and make people comfortable. There are many validation studies in journal pipelines attesting to the success of AI.

 

Stead, Edward W. and Jean Garner Stead

1996 Management for a Small Planet. 2nd Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. I wanted to put this book here as a counter-perspective the Emery's PDPD. The book covers population growth, earth as a living system, and Gaia theory. It gives credence to nature as a stakeholder. I wanted to have something appreciative to say about this upper right quadrant, though I locate fairly near the lower right. There is cross-over here with the affirmative postmodern positions.

 

Daft, Dick

1998 Organization Thoery and Design. 6th Edition. Minneapolis/St.Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Company. The best selling organization theory textbook in the world is by Richard Daft in its multiple editions. Daft’s recent (1998) edition of OT starts with a chart summarizing a book I did with Robert Dennehy (1993), Managing in the Postmodern World (see lower right). The chart compares various modern and postmodern concepts of OT. But, after introducing postmodern OT, Daft does not return to it in the rest of the book. Still it is terrific to be recognized in the best selling OT book in the world. Daft (1998: 82) is much like Robbins: