Customer Reviews

Managing Corporate Lifecycles

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This book (an updated, improved version of Adizes' 1988 "Corporate Lifecycles") has given me an extremely useful framework for thinking about and improving the organization I work with. In the Adizes framework, my organization would be considered in Early Adolescence, and a turbulent Adolescence at that. What Adizes has helped me to more clearly see is that some of our turbulence is predictable and structural, just as each stage in the typical corporate lifecycle features problems that are normal (as well as problems that are abnormal or pathological). Furthermore, Adizes doesn't stop at diagnosis; he offers prescriptions for anticipating and addressing the tensions inherent in moving from one stage in the lifecycle to another. As a founder of more than one company, Adizes is also refreshingly candid about the difficulty founders face in helping their companies move through the stages. ("It's hard to see the picture when you're in it.") Adizes has helped me to articulate critiques and advocate solutions that I have long sensed dimly, but couldn't adequately pinpoint. Here's a great resource for your leadership team to discuss at a retreat or planning session -- and then to act upon.

I see that the e-version is only 12 pages and has received very poor reviews. I can understand since I cannot imagine how one could condense the wisdom of this book into so few pages. That said, I can't say enough about the hard cover version. I have read it twice and it should be read by anyone in business leadership. There are few books that are "transcendental" in nature and this is one of those for me. The clarity that Adizes paints into the start-up, growth, increased control, and slide-into-irrelevance phases of the corporate lifecycle is brilliant. He will give you insight into "seeing" these stages and avoiding the mistakes of others. I hope that others will separate the e-version as described, from the real thing that is the book.

Why do some businesses falter immediately and others stay around for a century or more? "Managing Corporate Lifecycles" is a revision of a previous book on corporate longevity and how to stand the test of time as a business. Businesses have stages of life, just like everything else, and Dr. Ichak Adizes calls this process PRIME. Understanding PRIME is a key tactic in furthering one's business, and it makes "Managing Corporate Lifecycles" a powerful and invaluable resource for any business executive who keeps the future in his head at all times.

Ichak Adizes is not the only person to ever have written about corporate lifecycle management, but he is unique in the degree to which he has made it practical, applicable, and integral to a whole approach to organizational management. It is hard to understate how useful his framework is to people who are trying to build, manage or revive organizations. I work with a lot of startups, and I encourage everybody on the startup team to read this book, which has resulted in the book getting the nickname "the Bible" a couple of times from those who work with me. But I encourage startup teams to read it for a reason. It makes it so much easier to talk about the chemistry of the startup team, the predictable challenges we will face, and the temptations that might kill us. It's mandatory reading for startups, I would say - ideally for the whole team. But it's also useful for people at every other major organizational transition.

There's that painful stage of organizational growth when you're growing so fast the founders can't keep up, and you have to start bringing in professional managers who behave very differently from the founding group. Then there's the challenge of keeping your edge and not getting complacent when you get large and successful. There are also challenges when people in your company are kind of accustomed to being the market dominators, but down on the shop floor the signs of trouble and slipping market share are visible. Finally there are the challenges of trying to turn around a huge bureaucratic institution that no longer serves its stakeholders very well. All of these problems can be understood in terms of Adizes lifecycle theory, and this book is a coherent, practical approach to that entire problem-set.

This makes the book unlike most other business books. It's not an academic book of theory, and it's not one of those flavour-of-the-month business books that takes one or two slim points and stretches them out for 200 pages with filler and anecdote. It's a book written in practical, accessible business language that nevertheless presents a whole coherent theory. That makes it a rare beast - a practical theory book, battle tested over decades of implementation by Dr. Adizes and a global network of Adizes Associates. Few such books exist, and this is one of them.

As a result, this is crucial for people who want to manage the "big picture" of the life of an organization itself, helping it through its growing pains and keeping it from aging. The Adizes Methodology is a system of ideas, and no book by Dr. Adizes stands entirely alone, but this one is quite comprehensive and everything you need in order to understand it is contained within its pages. It is a pretty big book, however. For sharing its ideas with people who have less time to read, The Pursuit of Prime by Ichak Adizes is a shorter and more popularized version of the same ideas. To enrich your understanding of the core ideas, Mastering Change by Ichak Adizes explores the foundational concepts in a conversational tone. (Full disclosure: I got so bitten by the Adizes bug that I wrote a book myself - called The Structure of Concern: A Challenge for Thinkers on one of the core concepts of the methodology - which is sold through Amazon but legal full-text softcopies are available online at Scribd and other locations.)

The Adizes Methodology can profoundly change the way you view you business and your life. He's been called the "best kept secret in America" by Ken Blanchard, but really the time for him to be secret knowledge among a few captains of industry is over. At a time when we are needing to reinvent our institutions and our economies, more than ever we need insight into how organizations grow and die, in order to help some grow, and also to help some die to be replaced by new creative structures. I would love to see creaking fossilized bureaucracies replaced by vibrant new social institutions, and the Adizes Methodology could help us all get there.

IF you read this book, and I highly recommend you do, perhaps you'll agree!

One of the best books I have ever read! They do not teach it at MBA, but this books is the must read for everybody who wants to understand what is going on in your company. Reading this book made my life easier. I understood the nature of the problems that my company faced. By the way, all books of Dr. Adizes are fun to read!

I found this book to be fascinating and a real eye-opener into the life of organizations. I've owned this book for almost ten years and it still has a place on my immediate reference shelf because the information it contains is vital if you're involved with running or managing any organization. If you find yourself in a situation where you need to "turnaround" an organization, whether it be a business, a community organization or even a government, the knowledge contained in this book is invaluable. It can truly serve as a guide to where your organization should be as well as a road map to bringing it back to prime.

We all know that organizations, just like biological organisms, are born, go through life and eventually die. Just like people, the various stages of an organization's lifecycle has discernible characteristics and behaviors. When you can identify an organizations stage of life you can determine if it's healthy and operating at its optimum level, or if it's dysfunctional and needs help. Adizes does a great job of describing how an organization should evolve in order to stay vibrant and effective. Unfortunately there are numerous things that can go wrong if we aren't careful.

This book is very easy to read and follow. Adizes writes in a very engaging style that I found fun and enjoyable. Well researched, there are plenty of references one can delve into if you desire to learn more about a particular area.

In today's world, with so many organizations losing their effectiveness and legitimacy, the knowledge contained in this book is needed more than ever. Want to understand why Government no longer works and longstanding businesses are going out of business? Then you need to read this book.

This is truly an outstanding book that serves as the foundation for how corporations and businesses alike should be managed. This book will give you a leg up on the competition and highlight ideal business strategies that are the most efficient and productive.