Customer Reviews

The Democratic Corporation: A Radical Prescription for Recreating Corporate America and Rediscovering Success

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Ackoff presents his organization design based on democracy and free market as organization principles. Most people generally believe democracy and free market are good principles for societies, while most business and government organizations have internal organizations based on autocratic authority and monopoly of services, resources and markets. Why does this happen? Ackoff is very objective in his view of the corporations as social systems, which must satisfy their stakeholders. He presents very objective solutions for the problems of quality of working life, power and authority distribution, performance evaluation and control and structure design. The title of this book promises a radical prescription, and that is a very good description of the contents. The book is dense with well thought, well developed ideas, with examples of their successful application! If you have a position about democracy and free market you should carefully read this book, even if you don't agree with everything Ackoff proposes.

to be quite frank, he could have done better, the content was informative but his explanation were too wordy and repetative. he could have explained his system thinking theory's in half as much time by sticking to the point, not adding paraphrases that were confusing and misleading. question is "does he get paid by the number of words he uses or the content?".