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l'ere du travail en equipe [How To Solve The Mismanagement Crisis - French edition]

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Critique de livre en anglais version:

The author, Dr. Ichak Adizes, is one of the great unsung giants in contemporary management theory. In this book, How To Solve The Mismanagement Crisis: Diagnosis and Treatment of Management Problems, he broke new ground with his theories about management and leadership. This book remains a cornerstone in management thought today, influencing more famous successor works.

What is remarkable about Dr. Adizes is that he understood intuitively and at a relatively early age the management styles and modes of behavior that are effective at different times depending on where the organization is in its life. And with the techniques provided, we can know where the organization is in its life.

Nothing in management is really static; time is an essential variable. Problems typically occur when certain leadership behaviors and patterns arise at wrong times, and because of the nature of management and leadership, these behaviors and patterns will exist in natural conflict with what is required for the organization to keep growing and getting more competitive.

This book might be the origin of system development life cycle theories of management. To appreciate how Adizes was able to see through things and explain in relatively few words the gist of mismanagement, one benefits from information about Adizes' early life. He began life in Skopje, Macedonia. The first of his several languages was Ladino (15th century Spanish). Because his father had a Spanish passport, the family was actually allowed out of a concentration camp and they fled to Albania. He later made it to Israel and finally to the U.S. He experienced much of the world and the issues of human nature at a young age.

The Adizes website now has a quite sophisticated viewpoint of corporate lifecycles complete with infant mortality considerations and even premature aging. The reality is that survival is always difficult for corporate organizations. Interestingly, for organizations that survive into full maturity, there is decay and ultimate death. Corporations that make it this far succumb to periods of aristocracy followed by early bureaucracy and then full-blown bureaucracy. Then they die. (So much for holding a company's stock shares forever!) Death in one form or another awaits all corporations. Knowing where your organization is in its lifecycle is important - to state the obvious.

Nothing in Dr. Adizes' later teachings, or for that matter those of Peter Drucker, have contradicted the findings reported in How To Solve The Mismanagement Crisis. I believe this book is as relevant today as when it was first published in several languages.