Customer Reviews

The Unwritten Rules of the Game: Master Them, Shatter Them, and Break Through the Barriers to Organizational Change

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The rules discussed in this work are the informal mores and values that contribute to organizational culture and which can interefere with policy implementation from above. The concept is original, as is the framework of Strategy, Process, Resources and Organization in the context of which the analysis (and presumably management consulting) is performed. Beyond these two ideas the book suffers from a variety of flaws.
The language is stilted and regimented into an outline, which prevents a free flowing narrative that would be more appropriate to a case study method. Very little underlying theory is given for the concepts, but more importantly, for the methodology of identifying informal culture in an organization. The author presents many examples, but very little reason as to why and what he is doing.
His section on conducting an interview is almost a textbook example of the non-directed interview technique from psychology, and rather than concentrating on which questions to ask and what to look for, he instead gives us the amount of hours details of the brainstorming ritual that his consulting company performs.
The language of the book is unprofessional and it steers away from scientific terminology; the book is written in short soundbites and that contributes to the pop management feel of the whole work. The examples of the informal mores are generic and appear similar across his cases - job hop, keep your boss happy, protect your own turf, and yet the author fails to give any observations on this being the weakeness of the corporate exec culture as a whole. He mentions Machiavelianism, but at the same time fails to address corporate politics with any degree of satisfaction. I am not sure if this is a poorly written memoir of the man's professional career or if this is a marketing ploy for his consultancy.

I very much liked the book, mostly because it lead me into a "new world", the world of the unwritten rules (and our behaviour based on them).
I think the theory helps me get insight in every day life and the management of change. I do think I will be a more effective change manager when using the "unwritten rules approach".
I now try to use it in my projects.