Customer Reviews

End of Bureaucracy and the Rise of the Intelligent Organization

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How can citizens of a society that exalts freedom consent to spend the majority of their lives laboring within organizations that are hierarchical, slow-moving and dictatorial? Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot raised that question in their heralded 1993 book and provided the following answer: Not willingly and not for long. The Pinchots were among the first management scholars to predict the demise of the military-style command structure, along with its inherent secrecy and Machiavellian political sniping. Although a slew of books devoted to the same theme have been published since, none have done a better job at explaining the potential of informed and engaged employees who don't fear their bosses too much to take decisive action. We [...] strongly recommend this book, which brims with meticulous case histories showing how teams, employee-owned companies and internal free-market competition have transformed organizations. (In fact, the Pinchots coined the term "intraprenuership" to describe this process.) While you might not be convinced that a company run by consensus can ever compete with one run by The Prince, this book gives you hope that it can.

The seven essentials of organizational intelligence include widespread truth and rights; freedom of enterprise, liberated teams, equality and diversity, voluntary learning networks, democratic self-rule, and limited corporate government. It was this book, and the very strong applause that the author received from all those attending OSS '96, that caused me to realize that the U.S. Intelligence Community is just chock full of very good people that want to change, but are not being allowed to change by the organizational circumstances within which they are trapped-frozen in time and budget.

The Intelligent Organization is a groundbreaking book that catalyzed the reinvention of the Forest Service. Using what we learned in this book we increased our productivity in a variety of areas 1.8 times while radically increasing employee satisfaction. If you want to reduce bureaucracy and increase innovation and productivity, this book has the answers.

John Phipps
Associate Deputy Chief, State & Private Forestry
US Forest Sevice

The Intelligent Organization porvides agencies with a tool that they can use to make their organization more innovative, efficient and cost effective. The USDA Forest Service used the intraprenurial model described by Mr. and Mrs. Pinchot to create an Enterprise Program that has, according to the 2005 Pandolfi Report, made employees participating in this program 1.8 times as productive as the average agency employee. I would recommend this book to executives in government agencies and corporate business who wish to increase the creativity and innovation within their organization.