From The Ground Up: Six Principles for Building the New Logic Corporation (Jossey-Bass Business & Management) [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Edward E. Lawler III (Author)

Book Description

Series: Jossey-Bass Business & Management | Publication Date: August 14, 1996

Selection of the Executive Program Book Club
For any manager or executive who's had it with quick-fix approaches to organizational transformation, here's a proven approach that lasts. In this paperback edition of the best-selling original work, management expert Ed Lawler presents six principles--and plenty of practical guidance--for overhauling an enterprise from bottom to top and bringing it into alignment with the realities of today's marketplace. Don't fall for yet another silver-bullet solution. This is the definitive approach to making the kind of substantive changes that will bolster your company's competitive stance, now and for years to come.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 316 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1st edition (August 14, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787902411
• ISBN-13: 978-0787902414
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,134,151 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Edward E. Lawler III joined the faculty of Yale University after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. Three years later he was promoted to Associate Professor.

He moved to the University of Michigan in 1972 as Professor of Psychology and also became Program Director in the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research. In 1978, he became a Professor in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. That same year, he founded and became Director of the University's Center for Effective Organizations. He was named Professor of Research at the University of Southern California in 1982 and Distinguished Professor of Business in 1999.

Lawler has been honored as a major contributor to theory, research, and practice in the fields of human resources management, compensation, organizational development, corporate governance, and organizational effectiveness. He is the author and co-author of over thirty-eight books and more than three hundred articles, which have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, MIT-Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, USA Today, Strategy and Business, the Financial Times, and more than thirty other magazines, journals, and newspapers.

His most recent books include Rewarding Excellence (Jossey-Bass, 2000), Corporate Boards: New Strategies for Adding Value at the Top (Jossey-Bass, 2001), Organizing for High Performance (Jossey-Bass, 2001), Treat People Right (Jossey-Bass, 2003), Human Resources Business Process Outsourcing (Jossey-Bass, 2004), Achieving Strategic Excellence: An Assessment of Human Resource Organizations (Stanford Press, 2006), Built to Change (Jossey-Bass, 2006), The New American Workplace (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), and America at Work (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage (Jossey-Bass, 2008), and Achieving Excellence in HR Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Organizations (Stanford Press, 2009) and Management Reset (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Business Week has proclaimed Lawler one of the top six gurus in the field of management, and Human Resource Executive called him one of HR's most influential people. Workforce magazine identified him as one of the twenty-five visionaries who have shaped today's workplace over the past century. He has been a consultant to many corporations, including the majority of the Fortune 100, as well as governments at all levels.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Six New Logic Principles and the Star Model., January 26, 2001

By 

Turgay BUGDACIGIL (Istanbul, Turkey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: From The Ground Up: Six Principles for Building the New Logic Corporation (Jossey-Bass Business & Management) (Hardcover)

"When we look around the business landscape, we see many giant corporations that were once very successful-General Motors, Westinghouse, IBM, Kmart, Digital, and Sears-trying to regain their glory days. At the same time, we see much younger corporations such as Compaq, Wal-Mart, Intel, and Microsoft competing with them and thriving. How did these successful giants of the 1960s and 1970s end up with major competitiveness problems in the 1980s and 1990s? The answer is both simple and extraordinarily complex. These once very successful corporations remained good at operating well-managed, bottom-line-oriented hierarchies, and as a result they continued to make small improvements in performance. Their fiercest competitors, on the other hand-often other U.S. companies-were, and still are, redefining the rules for business success and achieving dramatic improvements in their performance. Until recently, many of these formerly very successful companies have stubbornly clung to the old ways of doing things and refused to accept that a new era of management thinking what I call the 'new logic' of organizing-is beginning. As a result, the IBMs, Westinghouses, and Sears Roebucks of the world are behind in the race to reinvent themselves and the way they are managed" (from the Introduction).

In this context, Edward E. Lawler III firstly outlines and contrasts the most important assumptions and elements of both the traditional logic and the new logic appproach as following:

I- The Six Old Logic Principles:

1. Organization is a secondary source of competitive advantage.

2. Bureaucracy is the most effective source of control.

3. Top management and technical experts should add most of the value.

4. Hierarchical processes are the key to organizational effectiveness.

5. Organizations should be designed around functions.

6. Effective managers are the key to organizational effectiveness.

II- The Six New Logic Principles:

1. Organization can be the ultimate competitive advantage.

2. Involvement is the most effective source of control.

3. All employees must add significant value.

4. Lateral processes are the key to organizational effectiveness.

5. Organizations should be designed around products and customers.

6. Effective leadership is the key to organizational effectiveness.

Then, after introducing a new way of organizing and managing based on the new logic principles, he focuses on applying the six principles to the organizational elements in order to create a high-performance organization within the context of the Star Model-it has a pentagonal shape with a five-pointed star inside. It depicts the key features of an organization: strategy, structure, rewards, processes, and people.

Highly recommended.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended reading for all corporate managers., April 5, 2000

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: From The Ground Up: Six Principles for Building the New Logic Corporation (Jossey-Bass Business & Management) (Paperback)

From The Ground Up: Six Principles For Building The New Logic Corporation offers an approach for corporate development that is designed around job functions and departments as it focuses on management rather than leadership. Author Edward Lawler presents the "new logic" in six easy-to-understand principles for organizational redesign and a hands-on plan for putting them in place. Lawler draws upon real-world examples from Motorola, Home Depot, #M, and WalMart to illustrate how these new logical principles can affect positive change in streamlining company processes, improving customer service, boosting employee morale, tackling time-to-market issues, defining business strategies, and outlining mission statements. From The Ground Up is highly recommended reading for corporate managers at all levels of responsibility in today's highly competitive and global marketplace.