All Hat and No Cattle: Tales of a Corporate Outlaw Shaking up the System and Making a Difference at Work [Hardcover]

Chris Turner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1999

Are “knowledge-work,” “empowerment strategies,” and “continuous improvement” making your head spin? Have you heard “let’s get everybody on the same page” just one time too many? Was the latest management training just another dose of warmed-over dogma? Then it’s time to start kicking up some dust and making a difference. In All Hat and No Cattle, maverick consultant and writer, Chris Turner, serves as our guide, and with a healthy dose of Texas humor and the wisdom gained from experience on the front lines, she exposes much of what passes for management wisdom as baloney and offers alternative ways of thinking about organizations and the people who bring them to life. Not your father’s management textbook, All Hat and No Cattle shows how real growth, vitality, and change result when all of us take responsibility for doing things in new ways—ways that create the future now. All Hat and No Cattle is chock full of ideas guaranteed to help frazzled folks shake up the workplace.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Your company is not a machine. It may make machines, or it may service them, but it is not, in itself, a machine. It's a living entity in an unpredictable world. This makes it nearly impossible to run a business organization effectively with a hierarchical, top-down management style. And yet, posits Chris Turner in All Hat and No Cattle, that's the way most companies try to do it. They may give lip service to other management styles, to open chains of communication and all that, but in reality these managers are "all hat and no cattle": they talk a good game, but in the end don't really have anything to back it up.

Turner is a veteran of Xerox. She was there when its corporate name was synonymous with photocopying, and when it had huge markets to itself, and she was still there when the Japanese turned the copying world upside down by being able to sell machines for less money than it took Xerox to manufacture them. So she's seen how a corporation's assumption about how the world works can get turned on its ear, and she thinks the lessons she learned at Xerox are applicable to any large company that's set in its ways. For example, she notes that very few people actually learn how to do anything by reading the instructions--only about 15 percent, according to a study she cites. Far more--61 percent--learn by trial and error, or through social interaction, or a combination of those two methods. And yet, most managers try to teach people to do things by showing them the instructions. "I wondered who learns from PowerPoint slide presentations," she writes. "The answer is nobody!" This is a book that nearly anyone who trains, teaches, or manages a staff can learn from. Some managers reading this book will see themselves reproduced in unflattering shades of black and white, but, hey, sometimes you have to look at yourself as others see you, unpleasant as that may be. --Lou Schuler

Review

"Chris Turner brings a fearlessly iconoclastic viewpoint to management in this entertaining and challenging account of what she has learned (and unlearned) at one of the best-known learning organization companies." -- American Way --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st edition (October 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738200964
• ISBN-13: 978-0738200965
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,400,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rare Diamond, January 2, 2000

By 

Marius Jordaan (Somewhere in the USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All Hat and No Cattle: Tales of a Corporate Outlaw Shaking up the System and Making a Difference at Work (Hardcover)

Probably one of the most searing, and brutally honest, books on the subject of business structure and organization of the 20th Century. All is told in an entertaining style, and with refreshing clarity.

Chris succeeds in melding the lessons of complexity theory into a comprehensive, and very practical book dealing with the deficiencies of modern business. She does this by constantly ripping apart the prevailing hierarchical mindset so often found in big companies, and by contrasting that to real success stories obtained through viewing business as a complex adaptive system, instead of a machine. Where people get treated like intelligent human beings, and not as second-hand citizens.

Through various stories and anecdotes she illustrates the incredible potential of the new way of seeing reality. She excels in making the case for unleashing the creativity and promise of employees, through allowing greater openness, and the freedom to learn, collaborate, and interact across geographical and functional boundaries.

Some of her no-holds barred quotes will make the point stronger than I can get across in these few words:

1. There is no telling how much 'pee-pee' there is in the corporate coffee. People who feel shat upon often get revenge.

2. Executive pay is obscene. I mean, these folks make feudal lords look like philanthropists...Lou Gerstner, who axed two hundred thousand IBM employees in 1993 and 1994, simultaneously tripled his own pay to $12 million. What a guy.

3. We should understand that when people are hanging out in the hallways or on the production floor, there is learning going on.

4. People are either learning things that support the strategic intent of the organization, or they are learning how to retire on the job.

5. Understanding the assumptions underlying current organizational practices is the first step toward creating productive organizations filled with learning, creativity, imagination, energy, fun and meaning.

6. The planning process is useful only to the extent that it is thoughtful, that it provokes questioning and causes people to challenge old thinking.

7. Given the dollars spent on wooing new customers, wouldn't it make sense, to try to hang on to them? Wouldn't it make sense to design systems and create environments that amaze customers?

8. Organizational disturbances should unsettle, cause a commotion, create a ruckus, and shake things up. Designed well, they lead to new thinking, new doing, to questioning the status quo, and to give rise to a new level of consciousness. Good disturbances create the future now.

Buy the book!

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than a business book., November 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: All Hat and No Cattle: Tales of a Corporate Outlaw Shaking up the System and Making a Difference at Work (Hardcover)

A powerful critique of contemporary business culture. Exposing corporate hypocrisy for what it is, Turner makes a convincing case for mindful organizations that foster participation, enrich learning, and understand themselves as living systems in need of disturbance rather than as machines in need of oiling. This irreverent, thoughtful, and engrossing book is a must-read for business people and for anyone concerned with generating institutional change. All Hat & No Cattle suggests actions that each of us can take to create the world we want.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and entertaining, with a message., October 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: All Hat and No Cattle: Tales of a Corporate Outlaw Shaking up the System and Making a Difference at Work (Hardcover)

Ms. Turner tells it like it is. She uses skillful narrative to weave a true tail of corporate intentions gone wrong, and a few that went right. Read between the lines to create a "how to make change happen" manual for yourself and your organization. Read this book for the refreshing writing style and straightforward perspective.