The Organization of the Future [Hardcover]

Frances Hesselbein (Editor), Marshall Goldsmith (Editor), Richard Beckhard (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 20, 1996

Join the best minds on business as they envision the future
The Drucker Foundation
This much anticipated second title in the Drucker Foundation Future Series imagines tomorrow's organization.
Bringing together such heavy hitters as James Champy, C.K. Prahalad, Charles Handy, Lewis Platt (CEO of Hewlett Packard), and Jay Galbraith, this second volume in the Drucker Foundation Future Series is poised to be the business book of the year.
In these 40 new, never-before-published essays, best-selling authors, top-notch consultants, Fortune 500 CEO?s, and revered management scholars expound on the challenges we face in building the organization of tomorrow. Fresh perspectives and challenging observations will enlighten business people from all industries on how to keep their organizations healthy and competitive well into the 21st century.
Supported by two giants--Peter Drucker opens the book, and Charles Handy closes it--the authors within provide their own perspectives on tomorrow, in thoughtful, to-the-point chapters. Together they underscore where, when, and how organizations and their leaders must evolve, not only to survive but also to prosper.
The contributors show how to:
* prepare for breakdowns and create the nimble, change-adept company
* navigate generational riptides among employees by meeting their preferences in leadership style
* attract, motivate, and retain the best employees
* achieve a winning culture of high performance and high self-esteem
* support work-life balance and provide flexibility to knowledge workers
Today's and tomorrow's leaders everywhere will find practical advice in these essays to help them reshape their own organizations of the future.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The 49 contributors to this collection?an eclectic mix of executives, academics, management experts and consultants?offer highly accessible, often conversationally written essays intended as thought-provoking goads to action or change in today's business environment. The emphasis is on creating flexible organizational structures that can respond effectively to global competition, information technology, innovation and customers' changing habits. Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter explores the difficulties of motivating people to work in the downsized, high-pressure corporation. Futurist Joel Barker examines the Mondragon Cooperative, a complex of more than 100 worker-owned enterprises in Spain's Basque Provinces, as a model of entrepreneurship, job creation and worker democracy. James Champy, guru of company reengineering, argues that the larger the scale of a program for change, the more likely it is to succeed. Avoiding platitudes, these wide-ranging essays provide a wealth of innovative thinking on leadership and management strategy. Hesselbein is president of the Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management; Goldsmith runs a San Diego corporate consulting firm; organizational consultant Beckhard is a former management professor at MIT.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this second in a series sponsored by the Drucker Foundation (The Leader of the Future, Jossey-Bass, 1996), 48 distinguished managers, academics, and writers have contributed highly readable articles on modernizing organizational structures and hierarchies. A unifying theme is that the way managers have divided up work and assigned tasks and resources in organizations must be examined through the lens of customer satisfaction and employee empowerment. Of the many excellent contributions, some that stand out include Joel A. Barker's description of the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain as an example of workplace democracy; Rosabeth Moss Kanter's exhortation to managers to place employees at the heart of any organization design; and Jeffery Pfeffer's review of how America's managers organized in the past. The somewhat academic tone should not prevent the book from being read by those at the helm of today's organizations. Strongly recommended.?Andrea C. Dragon, Coll. of St. Elizabeth, Convent Station, N.J.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 399 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1st edition (December 20, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787903035
• ISBN-13: 978-0787903039
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #735,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding views for today and tomorrow., June 12, 2001

By 

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

This review is from: The Organization of the Future (Hardcover)

'The Organization of the Future' is an outstanding integration of much of the current thinking of leadership, organization, strategy, change, and innovation. Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Richard Beckhard (editors) have gathered together in this collection remarkable 49 thought thinkers.

Charles Handy suggests in his chapter that "Margaret Wheatley, in 'Leadership and the New Science,' has written of the danger of believing in Newtonian organization in a quantum age. Newton wasn't wrong. He just wasn't right enough to cope with the dilemmas of science now. Similarly, the old way of looking at organizations wasn't wrong; it just does not capture the real essence of what it means to organize today." On the other hand, Peter F.Drucker notes in his introduction, "...now a totaly different approach is emerging, not replacing the older approaches but being superimposed on them: it says that the purpose of organizations is to get results 'outside,' that is, to achieve performance in the market. The organization is, however, more than a machine...It is more than economic, defined by results in the marketplace. The organization is, above all, 'social.' It is people. Its purpose must therefore be to make the strengths of people effective and their weaknesses irrelevant."

In this context, the editors divide this book into six parts. They write in their preface, "throughout the chapters in this book, the need for organizations is unquestioned. The authors provide a variety of forms and operating plans for organizations today and tomorrow; at the same time, each recognizes the indispensable role of organizations to human accomplishment and achievement."

Highly recommended.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT OPTIONS FOR CREATING ORGANIZATIONS THAT ACHIEVE MORE, February 3, 1999

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Organization of the Future (Hardcover)

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE FUTURE is the best compilation of essays that I have seen on different ways to organize businesses and nonprofits to achieve different kinds of results. The book is full of intriguing questions and choices, and lots of good ideas about how to make the desired changes you select. Anyone who manages people should read this book, and refer to it when effectiveness questions arise. The only thing that seemed to be missing from this book was a "clean slate" approach to organizations, by imagining what has never existed before. That would be an intriguing addition for future editions. The Drucker Foundation has done a real service to us all by creating its series (THE LEADER ..., THE ORGANIZATION ..., and THE COMMUNITY OF THE FUTURE). I hope that a future version will appear on THE MANAGEMENT PROCESSES OF THE FUTURE. That would be an invaluble complement to this outstanding series.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Insightful!, May 14, 2001

By 

Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Organization of the Future (Hardcover)

Editors Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith and Richard Beckhard present a series of short essays by 39 authors describing the structure of tomorrow's organizations. The essays, which are introduced by Peter Drucker, are organized into six main themes: shaping future organizations, new models for working and organizing, organizing for strategic advantage, working and organizing in a wired world, leading people in future organizations and understanding and improving organizational health. Given this approach and more than three dozen authors, some repetition is inevitable, so we [...] wonder if readers will prefer to dip in and choose articles that appeal to them the most. Generally, the book explicates broad trends in structural thinking, almost like a survey of organizational forecasting by top philosophers, authors and leaders in the field. This is sure to intrigue the executives charged with steering large organizations to and through this complex future.