Customer Reviews

Creating Tomorrow's Organization: Unlocking the Benefits of Future Work (Financial Times)

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New organisational trends and fads are a big business. If you manage to introduce one, you can be assured of lucrative lecturing and publishing deals. You cannot avoid thinking these realities of modern consulting as you read how Birchall and Lyons try to glue together ideas like teleworking, hotdesking, networking, distributed teams, business process re-engineering, virtual and learning organisations, etc. in order to build their concept of Future Work. The problem is, there is nothing new in this book, and quotes from literature make up a considerable part of the 274 pages. What is more, there is a lot of redundancy in addition to the introductions and executive summaries of each chapter. Finally, the language used is unnecessarily tangled and tricky. A good editor should have been able to shave away dozens of pages without removing any actual content.

The concept of organisational metalanguage might have been interesting, had it been discussed in detail, but now it felt just like an addendum located at the end of the book. This way it just makes the reader confused.