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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Strategy and Business 2012 Organizational Culture Book of the Year This third edition of the classic resource, Productive Workplaces is smart, well-written and well-researched, thoughtful, somewhat provocative, and a one-of-a-kind review of the integration of economics, technology, and people. It covers such topics as: the work on self as integral to organizational change; the revision of Lewinian concepts for a new era; and the history behind "getting everybody improving whole systems" as a response to fast change and increasing diversity (not the same as using any particular method). The themes, case studies (many revisited), and models are as relevant as ever.
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Seitenzahl: 818
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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Contents
Cover
Endorsement
About This Book
Why is this topic important?
What can you achieve with this book?
How is this book organized?
What other Productive Workplaces resources are available?
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Other Books by Marvin R. Weisbord
Updates from the Field
Foreword: The Existential Question
Preface: Welcome to Productive Workplaces, 25th Anniversary Edition
Introduction: Getting the Most from Productive Workplaces
Purpose and Intent
How Do You “Build In” Follow-Up?
Who Might Benefit from This Book?
Three Major Themes
Overview of the Contents
What You Will NOT Find in This Edition
Appreciating the Limits
Part One: Mythology and Managing
Chapter One: A Mythology of Organizational Change
Myth 1: Changes Are Sustainable
Myth 2: Training Will Fix It
Myth 3: Profit Rules
Myth 4: Fortune 500s Are Forever
Myth 5: Organizations Learn
Myth 6: Layoffs Improve Bottom Lines
Myth 7: Hard Data Motivates Skeptics
Myth 8: Diagnosis Solves the Problem
Myth 9: The Technology-Saves-Time Myth
Myth 10: Meetings Undermine Work
Chapter Two: How I Learned to Manage by Managing
Introduction to Theory Y
The Initial Project: Multi-Skilled Teams
Successes
The Transformation of a Family Enterprise (2003)
From Work Team to Team of One
Part Two: Searching for Productive Workplaces
Chapter Three: Scientific Management: A Tale of Two Taylors
Quaker Pacifist: Social Consciousness and Wealth
Taylor the Pioneer Consultant
Chapter Four: Taylor Invents a New Profession
Extending Taylorism
Learning from Taylorism
Chapter Five: Action Research: Lewin Revises Taylorism
Lewin's Contributions to Management
From East Prussia to Iowa
Studying Groups
Chapter Six: Lewin's Legacy to Management
The Power of Participation
Reducing Resistance to Change
Action Research Today
From Research to Real Life
Limits of Sensitivity Training
Chapter Seven: The Transition to Experiential Learning
Epilogue 2010
Chapter Eight: McGregor and the Roots of Organization Development
McGregor and Taylor
A Family with a Mission
McGregor's Influence
Theories X and Y
A New Prescription
Labor Relations Manager: Dewey and Almy
Chapter Nine: Theories X and Y for a New Generation
McGregor at Antioch
Creating a Classic
A New Look at X and Y: Two Selves in Each of Us
Chapter Ten: Emery and Trist Redefine the Workplace
Sociotechnical Systems: Choice, Not Chance
Tavistock Institute
Bion's Group Theory
Industrial Action Research in a Yorkshire Coal Mine
A Paradigm Shift
Enter Emery and Open Systems
Chapter Eleven: Learning to Work in a New Paradigm
Work As a Systems Problem
Major New Concepts
The Knowledge Revolution
The “Turbulent” Environment
Communities, States, Nations
Remembering Eric Trist and Fred Emery
A Collaboration Resumed
Part Three: Learning from Experience
Chapter Twelve: Putting Action Research to Work
Going Beyond Taylor
Adding Action to Research
A New Look at Expert Problem Solving
Likert's Refinements
Task Forces
Chapter Thirteen: Rethinking Diagnosis and Action
Turnover Update at Food Services
Chem Corp Twenty Years Later
Inventing “Local Theory”
Packaging Plant Revisited
Learning from “the Environment”
Searching for Solcorp
Chapter Fourteen: Managing and Consulting in Permanent White Water
Process Thinking
Unfreezing, Moving, Refreezing
Change Theory
Four Cases Revisited
Rethinking Lewin
Chapter Fifteen: Involving Everyone to Improve the Whole
Medical School Revisited (2003)
Printing Inc. Revisited (2002)
The Case for Process-Focused Assessment
Chapter Sixteen: Revising Theories of What Works
The DIAGNOSIS: Great Differentiation, Little Integration
Output- Versus Input-Focused Organizations
The PRESCRIPTION: Training as Action Research
Building on Individual Autonomy
No Right Answers
Finding an Organizational Solution
Learning from Experience
Whence Cometh New Behavior?
Chapter Seventeen: Making Systems Thinking Experiential
Getting Ready for Labor-Management Cooperation
Sparrows Point Plate Mill, 1981
A Two-Week Systems Workshop
Experiencing the Whole System
Systems Thinking as Systems Doing
Sparrows Point Fifteen Years Later
Bethlehem Steel in the 21st Century
Part Four: Integrating the Past into the Present
Emerging New Millennium Practices
Chapter Eighteen: 21st Century Managing and Consulting
Guideline 1: Assess the Potential for Action
Guideline 2: Get the Whole System in the Room
Guideline 3: Focus on the Future
Guideline 4: Structure Tasks That People Can Do for Themselves
New Way of Consulting
Chapter Nineteen: Changing Everything at Once
A Division in Trouble: Technology Meets Economic Limits
Building a Company-Wide Mandate
Mobilizing a Productive Workplace
Can This Business Survive?
Medical Products Fifteen Years Later
Together Again!
Implications for Practitioners
Chapter Twenty: Teamwork in a Fast-Changing World
Teams and Team Building
Practical Theory
Adding Teamwork to Effectiveness
The Future of Team Building
Chapter Twenty-One: Designing Work for Learning and Self-Control
Designing New Structures
Implementing New Work Designs
Virtual Teams in the 21st Century
Back to Group Dynamics
Chapter Twenty-Two: Future Search: The Whole System in the Room
Principles Over Techniques
Development of Future Search Principles
Principles from Eric Trist and Fred Emery
Design Dilemmas of Searching
Parallel Universes
Principles from Lippitt and Schindler-Rainman
Honoring the Pioneers
Chapter Twenty-Three: Cross-Cultural Future Searching
Reaffirming Self-Management
Merging Future Search and Work Design
Training Practitioners
Launching a Future Search Network
A Network in Action
Ripples in the Stream of Social Change
Why Was This Happening?
Redefining Future Search
Part Five: Learning Then and Now
Chapter Twenty-Four: Ten Cases Decades Later: What's Sustainable About “Change”?
Q: What Led People to Undertake These Projects?
Q: How Did I Decide What Methods to Use?
Q: What Became of These Workplaces Years Later?
Q: Do These Cases Represent “Culture Change”?
Q: Did the Circles Get Bigger in the Ten Case Examples?
Q: How Can I Be so Sure That Making the Circle Bigger Has Both Economic and Social Benefits?
Q: What Comes After? Are There Natural Limits to This Work?
Chapter Twenty-Five: Changing the World One Meeting at a Time
The Allure of Ever-Larger Groups
Everybody Improves Whole Systems
What Will Work for YOU?
Events Versus Processes
What You Do Today Resonates Everywhere
Technology, Again
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Future Never Comes, It's Already Here
Leftover Questions
What Managers and Consultants Are Learning to Do
Working in Workplaces Means Working on Yourself
Political Democracy and New Technologies
The Time Is Now
References
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
“I have been a fan of Marv Weisbord’s for years. His thoughts and understanding of how people and organizations accomplish work improves with each update of Productive Workplaces. He is a master of this subject and, most importantly, he helps us practice what he teaches.”
–Richard G. Haworth, Chairman Emeritus, HAWORTH, INC.
“Weisbord has been a major voice in the theory and practice of organization development (OD) since the early 1970s. This book is a wonderful history and reinterpretation of many of the events, schools of thought, and controversies that have punctuated the field from its beginnings. It should be required reading for every organization behavior and development scholar. Among its many virtues, the book is beautifully written.”
–Peter Vaill, Senior Scholar and Emeritus Professor of Management, Antioch University Ph.D. Program in Leadership and Change, author of Learning as a Way of Being: Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water and Spirited Leading and Learning (Minneapolis, MN, USA).
“During my thirty-three-year career, I have been involved in publishing well over one thousand books. Productive Workplaces is certainly among the top five most influential in terms of its impact on the organizations in which I worked as well as on my personal leadership, management concepts, and practices.”
–Steven Piersanti, President and Publisher, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. (San Francisco, CA, USA, formerly president, Jossey-Bass Publishers)
“Reading the 1987 version of PW in the early nineties was a major stepping stone for me towards a more fulfilling, creative, and dynamic way of thinking and working.”
–Richard Wilkinson, HR Director, International Training & Education Center for Health (I-TECH) a partnership of the University of Washington and University of California– San Francisco (Seattle, WA, USA)
“I discovered Productive Workplaces when I began teaching in the Pepperdine MBA program in 1990. I loved that Marvin had gone back and read the primary resource material written by the great management thinkers of the twentieth century: Taylor, McGregor, Lewin, Emery, and Trist. The book provides a cogent overview of management thought and how it has evolved over the last century.”
–Miriam Y. Lacey, Ph.D., Academic Director and Professor, MSOD Program, Graziadio School of Business and Management, Pepperdine University (Malibu, CA, USA)
“PW illuminated a path that would become my life’s work. Future Search gave me the practical understanding and tools to take the journey.”
–Shem Cohen (USA), Change Events, Inc.
“Reading Productive Workplaces we encountered a vision of a workplace in which people matter, teams collaborate, and direct participation enables individuals to contribute their full range of talents. That vision is just as relevant today as in 1987–perhaps more so–as change becomes constant and speed becomes imperative.”
–Frederick A. Miller and Judith H. Katz, The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc., authors of The Inclusion Breakthrough: Unleashing the Real Power of Diversity (Albany, NY, USA)
“Organizations that value ‘dignity, meaning, and community’ are not born overnight. The wisdom I have gained from Productive Workplaces Revisited has provided me with techniques, processes, and the openness I need for consulting to organizations that aspire to build these values into their cultures.”
–Richard Beckerman, President, Richard Beckerman Consulting (Seattle, WA, USA)
“I have a much-dog-eared copy of Productive Workplaces, which I read while managing an R&D lab at NYNEX (then the ‘Baby Bell’ in New York and New England). The book was a turning point for me. It inspired me to run against the grain of re-engineering with a participative work design project for a critical business process. That project was one of the most successful among a spate conducted during the re-engineering craze at NYNEX (and it required no new technology!).”
–Jim Euchner, Visiting Scientist, MIT Sloan School of Management (Cambridge, MA, USA)
“As a professor in graduate studies in leadership and business psychology, I see my role as passing on to a new generation the values and lessons learned from a twenty-five-year career in organizational effectiveness. Marvin Weisbord is a master whose wisdom I encourage my students to seek out. Productive Workplaces has been an anchor in my life and career. It is my mission to see that it becomes the anchor for a new generation of practitioners.”
–Connie S. Fuller, Ph.D., Associate Chair and Assistant Professor, Business Psychology, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology (Chicago, IL, USA) co-author, Bridging the Boomer-Xer Gap: Creating Authentic Teams for High Performance at Work.
“I devoured the first edition of Productive Workplaces. Here was a book that confirmed everything I had experienced in my consulting career. I felt validated. Today when people ask me where they can learn about the history of the field, this is the one book I recommend.”
–Dick Axelrod, The Axelrod Group (Chicago, IL, USA), author of Terms of Engagement: New Ways of Leading and Changing Organizations.
“PW has shaped the way I have approached my consulting practice for nearly twenty-five years.”
–Loretta Raider, Principal, The Raider Consulting Group (Melrose Park, PA, USA)
“Productive Workplaces (PW) is more than a book about the field of organization development; it also shows the possibility for aligning yourself with basic values about [organization and management] and some hints about trying new ideas for yourself. This takes courage, of course, and courage has meaning only in situations where you are in doubt. With PW in your hands you are not alone.”
–Henrik Simmelkjær, Consultant (Kolding, Denmark), former secretary of European Institute for Transnational Studies in Group and Organizational Development (eit).
“This is the OD book of the century.”
–Bengt Lindstrom, Ander & Lindstrom, AB (Stockholm, Sweden)
“Marvin Weisbord’s story of his own encounter with worker participation in his family business was a ‘me-too’ story of great power. To read the unfolding argument in favour of letting ‘those with a stake in the problem help define and solve it’ was riveting–it affirmed and informed my research and my practice as a consultant to industry then, and continues to do so now.”
–Verna Blewett, Associate Professor, Occupational Health and Safety, University of South Australia (Adelaide, Australia)
“If somebody asks me to name just one good book on management, or organization development, or social psychology, I give them the same answer: Productive Workplaces. It addresses the heady topic of meaning and dignity in work with writing that is as engaging as a well-written novel.”
–Gil Steil, Gil Steil Associates (Boston, MA, USA)
“So far as I know, PW provides the only systematic review of multiple cases over the longer term, fifteen to thirty years after the intervention.”
–Tonnie Van der Zouwen, Ph.D., Van der Zouwen Consultancy, author of Building an Evidence Based Practical Guide to Large Scale Interventions: Towards Sustainable Change with the Whole System (Vlijmen, Netherlands)
“While I can’t say that Productive Workplaces saved me from a burning building or plucked me from a raging river, I can say that this book slowly, systematically changed my thinking, my career, and my life.”
–Birgit C. Olsen, Higher Education Consultant, doctoral student in organizational psychology, Walden University (Los Angeles, CA, USA)
“Productive Workplaces has been required reading since 1987 in Seattle University’s Organization Systems Renewal (OSR) graduate program (formerly at Antioch Seattle). OSR’s founding principle is to learn the theory, acquire the knowledge, and practice the skills required for putting theory into action. That is exactly what PW shows you how to do.”
–Bob Woodruff, The Woodruff Group and Institute for Systemic Learning; former director and faculty, OSR (Seattle, WA, USA)
“For the past quarter of a century and for the foreseeable future, the clear and elegant expression of Marvin Weisbord in his books and his personal support have inspired untold numbers of practitioners dedicated to organizing and managing for dignity, meaning, and community. We are indebted to him and love him for his contribution to our work.”
–Neil Watson, Independent SocioTechnical Systems Consultant (Sydney, Australia)
“Reading the preface of Productive Workplaces, I was touched by these words: ‘There are no technical alternatives to personal responsibility and cooperation in the workplace.’ To me, that sounded like coming home!”
–Hans Begeer, co-founder, Ubuntu4u (Brussels, Belgium)
“Learning from experience is somewhat of a cliché, but as the reader enters Marvin's thoughtful insights and reflections, the trip becomes an exciting journey.”
–From the Foreword by Billie Alban
About This Book
Why is this topic important?
Productive Workplaces, 25th Anniversary Edition, traces the origins of and validates “getting the whole system in the room,” a principle that has influenced large scale projects ever since the 1987 edition. The book was voted one of the five most influential books in the field by the Organization Development Network in 2004. It provides a model, guidelines, and successful methods for improving organizations under conditions of nonstop change. This may be the only book of its kind, for it includes follow-ups to ten projects done fifteen to thirty years earlier; the author not only reports what happened afterward, but also draws implications for managers and consultants today. With this glance backward, the book challenges the myth that you can “build in” practices that ensure continuity of new norms when leadership, staff, markets, technology, and ownership are constantly changing. “Each new generation,” says Weisbord, “must learn all over again for itself.” In this edition he supports his contention with forty new stories from practitioners who read earlier editions and applied the ideas to their own work.
What can you achieve with this book?
You can learn how to establish conditions for success before undertaking complex change projects. You will gain a deeper appreciation of key management practices and why some work better than others. The book will lead you to rethink, appreciate, and learn from your own experience and confirm that values matter more than techniques. It will help you become more secure and competent to face unprecedented dilemmas of nonstop change and cultural diversity.
How is this book organized?
The book contains five sections, revised to enhance the original by cutting some parts and adding contemporary material. Part One provides the bookends of Weisbord’s story, starting with a summary of his conclusions after fifty years of practice, then backing up to tell the story of how he got started as a manager. Part Two tells key stories from management history, comparing the work of Frederick Taylor, “father of scientific management,” to that of social scientists who came after. Part Three presents cases involving typical managerial dilemmas that illustrate an evolution in practice from expert problem solving toward involving everyone in whole-systems improvement. The cases were updated in the 2000s, with implications for today. Chapters added in 2003 on seminal workshops in primary medical care and steel production show the benefits of having whole systems study themselves. Part Four presents a practice theory for managing and consulting in the new millennium. It includes key guidelines for success and how-to methods by which the theory can be applied. It also shows how one company saved itself from oblivion using these guidelines. Part Five has new chapters on choosing among large-group methods and a summary chapter answering critical questions about the nature of change and the practice of effective workplace improvement.
What other Productive Workplaces resources are available?
An Instructor’s Guide is available highlighting key points and questions raised by each chapter at www.pfeiffer.com/go/weisbord. At www.organizationaldynamics.upenn.edu you will find the Marvin Weisbord Archive, containing video interviews with many people mentioned in the book, plus cases studies and documentaries illustrating the themes. At MarvinWeisbord.com you will find downloadable versions of several cited articles.
Copyright © 2012 by Marvin R. Weisbord. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weisbord, Marvin Ross. Productive workplaces : dignity, meaning, and community in the 21st century / Marvin R. Weisbord. – 3rd ed., 25th anniversary. p. cm. The workplace classic, revised and expanded, including six new chapters and forty reader stories.’ Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-470-90017-8 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-09906-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-09907-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-09908-7 (ebk) 1. Industrial management. 2. Industrial management–Employee participation. 3. Quality of work life. I. Title. HD31.W424 2012 658.3′14–dc23 2011029049
Sitting in my local movie theater one Saturday at age eight, I was astonished a monochromatic film changed into brilliant Technicolor. The Wizard of Oz became my initiation into the illusory power of technology. Dorothy and her terrier Toto, blown by a Kansas tornado to a magic land, learn that only the Great and Terrible Oz can send them home. On the Yellow Brick Road to Oz, they meet a Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion, each seeking a missing part: heart, brains, courage. The creatures join Dorothy and Toto, hoping the Wizard will make them whole.
The Great Oz awes them with his magic, appearing as a giant head, a lovely lady, and a ball of fire. He booms out that to have their wishes they must kill the Wicked Witch of the West. The quartet and Toto take on this risky quest. With axe, straw, and loud roar they defeat the wolves, crows, and bees sent to stop them. When all looks hopeless, Dorothy, protecting her friends, pours water on the Witch. To her astonishment, this simple solution melts the evil hag into oblivion.
They return for their rewards, and Toto, poking around, tips over a screen to reveal the Great and Terrible Oz as an old bald guy creating illusions with a homemade contraption. “Oh, you are a very bad man!” says Dorothy. “Oh no, my dear,” says the Wizard, “I'm a very good man. I'm a very bad Wizard.”
He then pretends to deliver heart, brains, and courage to Dorothy's companions, knowing that they already found these qualities while questing to kill the Witch.
“How can I help being a humbug, when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can't be done?” asks the Wizard. Later he suggests that Dorothy return to Kansas by clicking her heels three times, a capability she always had. Until that moment, she did not know that she had it.
I dedicate this book to Dorothy Barclay Weisbord, my lifelong companion on the Yellow Brick Road.
Other Books by Marvin R. Weisbord
Campaigning for President
Some Form of Peace
Improving Police Department Management (with Howard Lamb and Alan Drexler)
Organizational Diagnosis: A Workbook of Theory and Practice
Discovering Common Ground (with thirty-five international authors)
Future Search: An Action Guide (with Sandra Janoff)
Don't Just Do Something, Stand There! (with Sandra Janoff)
Other Resources
Visit the Marvin Weisbord Archive of interviews and case studies bringing to life people, cases, and stories from this book on the website of the Organizational Dynamics program at the University of Pennsylvania www.organizationaldynamics.upenn.edu/.
Updates from the Field
Henrik Simmelkjaer (Denmark)
Bob Woodruff (USA)
Connie S. Fuller (USA)
Neil Watson (Australia)
Gina Lowdermilk (USA)
Albie Merrill (USA)
Alex Twigg (New Zealand)
Frederick A. Miller and Judith H. Katz (USA)
Paul Curci (USA)
Srikanth Gopalakrishnan (USA)
Miriam Y. Lacey (USA)
Richard Wilkinson (USA)
Drusilla Copeland (USA)
Marianne Tracy (USA)
Gil Steil (USA)
Leopold Vansina (Belgium)
Richard Beckerman (USA)
Neelima Paranjpey (USA)
Richard Axelrod (USA)
Jeannine Yancey (USA)
Shem Cohen (USA)
Verna Blewett (Australia)
Barbara Kunaniec Bertling (USA)
Nancy Polend (USA)
Bengt Lindstrom (Sweden)
Jon Harvey (United Kingdom)
Chris Kloth (USA)
Jean-Pierre Beaulieu (Canada)
Jim Euchner (USA)
Nancy McMorrow (USA)
Keith H. Griffin (USA)
John Goss (South Africa)
Marilyn Durbin (USA)
Talia Eisen (USA)
Sandra Janoff (USA)
Loretta Raider (USA)
Hans Begeer (Belgium)
Steven Piersanti (USA)
Brigit C. Olsen (USA)
Tonnie Van der Zouwen (The Netherlands)
Foreword: The Existential Question
Years ago I was traveling on a tanker off the West Coast of South America crossing the equator into the southern hemisphere. It was a brilliant starry night. I had never seen the Southern Cross before, and there it was on the horizon. I was joined on the deck by a crew member. We stood there, the two of us, tiny, human specks under the dome of this incredible night. He turned to me and asked, “Señora, do you think we make any difference?” I have pondered that question most of my life.
I invited one of the people who contributed a story to the current edition of this book to tell me what she thought the word “meaning” signified in the subtitle of the first edition (Organizing and Managing for Dignity, Meaning, and Community). She responded, “The opportunity to make a positive difference in your workplace or organization.”
Marvin Weisbord, with the publication of the first edition, made a major contribution to the field of organization development. This third edition of Productive Workplaces contains forty new stories and examples, interspersed among the chapters and contributed by people from all over the world: Scandinavia, Australia, South Africa, the U.S., UK, Europe, Canada, New Zealand, and Afghanistan. These managers, consultants, teachers, and students found that the concepts and ideas in Weisbord's book have resonated for them and influenced what they have done in their workplaces and communities.
The first chapter, “A Mythology of Organizational Change,” sets the framework for the book. Marvin Weisbord, my colleague for four decades, points out that people's behavior is based on the myths and assumptions they hold as true. The stories we tell ourselves and the assumptions we make influence our behavior and the choices we make.
In the second chapter of Part One, Marvin tells the story of his own experience in his family business. “How I Learned to Manage by Managing” tells the story of his struggles working with employees to set up multi-skilled work teams that focused on the customer. Not only did this highly participative process work, increasing productivity, but also brought to the workforce a sense of dignity, meaning, and community. As you will read, the walls literally came tumbling down. It was this experience that propelled Marvin to venture out on a learning journey.
This book is the story of his travels, starting with Fredrick Taylor and pursuing the theories and experiments of those who strove to improve organizations. Marvin is constantly testing, moving back and forth from theory into practice and practice into theory. The book contains wonderful reflections on the work and insights of Fredrick Taylor, Kurt Lewin, Douglas McGregor, Eric Trist, and Fred Emery.
I want to call attention to Parts Three and Four in this book “Learning from Experience” and “Integrating the Past into the Present.” Marvin highlights cases where he worked as a consultant searching to develop better organizations and workplaces, always testing theories and assumptions. What is remarkable about these sections is his return to these organizations, years after the work was completed, to find what had happened to the work they did together. How many consultants and managers dare go back to the sites where they have worked to learn what has occurred in the interim? It is a courageous thing to do! Many of us would rather live with the illusion that we made a difference and leave it at that!
The analyses of these cases is fascinating. Learning from experience is somewhat of a cliché, but as the reader enters Marvin's thoughtful insights and reflections the trip becomes an exciting journey.
Two important cases in this book are from the Sparrows Point plant of Bethlehem Steel and Atomic Energy of Canada's Medical Products Division (see Chapters Seventeen and Nineteen). These two cases offered a major opportunity for “involving everyone to improve the whole system,” applying Marvin's core principles from his experience. Marvin also reminds us “sustainable change is an oxymoron” (see Chapter One). Organizations and our interventions often do not outlast the waves of tumultuous internal and external change: new managers, technologies, mergers, changes in the economy. However, those who are involved in participative organizational renewal processes report that they wouldn't have wanted to miss the experience. They carry the learning with them into the future.
Why, even when we get so fed up with bureaucratic and hierarchical systems, is it so hard to let go of old models? Could it be that early in our lives we are socialized into hierarchical systems—in family life, education, religious institutions, the military, and our early work experiences? Much as we disliked these systems, when push comes to shove we fall back on them, familiar and internalized. There is a wonderful examination of Douglas McGregor's Theories X and Y in this book. Marvin points out that the X and Y polarities are internal dialogues within the individual, not just a way of categorizing organizations and management styles. Marvin quotes Kurt Lewin, “We know more about autocracy than we know about democracy.” In spite of the outstanding examples in this book, the act of working with these principles requires courage, daring to say “yes” to the dialogue within us.
I appreciated, throughout the book, the guidelines and principles that support the work of engaging everyone to improve the whole. I found myself noting many of the sage recommendations; guidelines for engaging the whole system, generic menus for work design, important insight in the use of team building, and, above all, always operating out of a clear set of values and principles, before worrying about methods and techniques.
Chapter Twenty-Six, the last chapter, has a wonderful closing section on “a life long agenda for managers and consultants.” It contains suggestions for our journeying as we look to make a difference where we work and live. Marvin points out that all change—social, technical, economic—takes place one meeting at a time. Thus we have boundless opportunities to make constructive changes through the meetings we have each day.
There is a beach in the southern part of Chile that is strewn with stones marked with crisscrosses, tossed up by the waves. Legend has it that the Southern Cross periodically scatters these stones. People collect them as a talisman. It is said that these stones bring mental clarity, wisdom, and wholeness. As you go through this book you will find ideas that resonate for you, underscoring your own experience. You will also discover fresh insights and new ways of taking action. Gather these treasures and take them with you. Bon Voyage!
Billie Alban
Preface: Welcome to Productive Workplaces, 25th Anniversary Edition
This is a book about people who have sought for 150 years to improve life at work. For the last fifty, that has included me. Starting as a manager in 1959, I spent a decade in business, more than twenty years as a consultant, and from the early 1990s have co-directed a global nonprofit. I spent several months refining this new edition. I especially sought to highlight the influence of the past on today's paradoxes. Although the world has changed exponentially since I first wrote PW, my key themes endure like granite. So do principles of productivity, even when confounded by technologies I could not imagine a quarter century ago.
In 1985, I sent an early draft of this book to Eric Trist, a key figure in my story. A few weeks later I flew to Florida, where he was retired, to review with him several cases in which I discerned an emerging new way to improve workplaces. Eric asked a few questions, then replied with a phrase I had never heard. “What you need,” he said, “is a ‘conceptual emboldening.’ ” That startled me. I had not known such an act was possible. I soon understood that he was asking me what conclusions I could draw from my cases. On a piece of scratch paper I sketched what I had lived through in my work during the previous quarter century. Such was the origin of “The Learning Curve” that ties together the chapters of this book.
I will tell you in the pages that follow how experts solving problems morphed into everybody improving whole systems. You can see that these strategies are not mutually exclusive. Maybe you know them all. Indeed, what led me to this edition was that so many people had moved since 1987 toward “everybody improving whole systems.” To my handful of past cases, I have the good fortune to bring you forty more examples from colleagues around the world who replicated my experience and added wrinkles of their own.
Thus, I am able to tell this story anew. While the four learning curve strategies co-exist, if you aspire to dignity, meaning and community, you won't be satisfied until you get everybody improving the whole. Not if you seek the economic benefits from ever-changing technologies. If you have read a past edition, you will find the original shortened, sharpened, and expanded. If you are reading this for the first time, you too may identify with some of the characters you will meet and place yourself in this never-ending story.
The Times Keep on Changing. When I started managing in 1959, nobody had cell phones, pagers, fax machines, personal computers, CDs, DVDs, PDAs, Google, or Wikipedia. The now obsolete Sony Walkman would not be invented for twenty years. My “personal digital assistant” was a little black book in which I wrote dates in pencil because they were sure to change. Blackberries were something you put on pancakes. To research a topic, I went to the library, looked up sources in a card catalogue, and made notes on 5 by 8–inch index cards. I wrote whole books on a typewriter. I backed up with carbon paper, something you may never have seen. I thanked my stars for these efficient technologies, wondering how Charles Dickens found time to write thousands of pages by hand.
I began a love/hate affair with computers in 1961. My company became one of its industry's earliest users, and I met my first expert systems improver who told me of a customer glitch I wanted to solve, “You can't do that. The program won't allow it.” For decades I've been an early adopter, down to the iPad that contains drafts of this book. Without the Internet I could not have updated it. I have seen many life-changing technologies come and go—the linotype, monotype, key punches/verifiers, mimeograph machines, word processors, dot matrix printers, Polaroid cameras, and vinyl records. If you think Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are the last word today, just wait until tomorrow. The thing to remember is that technology, like money, doesn't care what you do with it. Make life better, fritter it away. Your smart phone couldn't care less.
So, while I have a lot to tell you about effective human interaction, I have little to say about online conferencing, social networking, and technologies not yet invented. Fortunately, so many media cover those topics you are unlikely to miss them here. I believe you can apply the principles I advocate anywhere, including on the Internet. Until the day you can access a website and get back all that you would want from face-to-face meetings, what I shall tell you is worth pondering. Task-focused work has little in common with social networking. If your success requires collaborating with others, you'll still long at times to meet them up close and personal.
That life is speeding up is not a new observation. In the 1960s Eric Trist and his collaborator Fred Emery wrote a ground-breaking paper describing how outside events impacted organizations in ways that they could neither control nor ignore. Emery and Trist (1964) were the first to identify greater environmental uncertainty and interdependence among systems as conditions calling for responses few people knew how to make. What none of us appreciated in those years was that the velocity of change was accelerating at warp speed. The pace was outstripping our methods.
When I started consulting in 1969, business schools taught that big companies reorganized every seven years. They centralized in one cycle and decentralized in the next. For consulting firms this was a windfall. You took nine months to interview, diagnose, and write a report recommending to the client the structure they did not have, eighteen months to implement it, and had four plus years of stability before doing it again. The seven-year cycle became five years in the early 1970s, then three years, and by the 1980s reorganizations were as predictable as the seasons. Mergers, acquisitions, downsizings, globalizings, right-sizings. People were changing organization charts faster than they could photocopy them.
When I left the consulting business in 1992, the cycle was more like seven weeks. By the time you wrote a report, the scenario had changed. Companies and communities also were diversifying. Over the next twenty years I found myself helping people do strategic planning in many of the world's cultures. The meetings I ran grew more diverse with multiple ethnic groups speaking a Babel of languages, thrown together only by the task at hand, for example, improving economic conditions, extending health care, marketing new technologies, or reducing the risk of natural disasters. But what became of the stable old cultures that needed a jolt to unfreeze, move, and refreeze at some elusive higher level of functioning? One day I woke up and noticed I had restocked my tool kit.
I had worked by then in all kinds of systems with all sizes of groups. By the late 1980s I was certain my clients were infinitely more satisfied to the extent they could involve everyone in improving the whole. We are still learning how to do that. It takes everybody to maintain a satisfying equilibrium among economics, technology, and people. That, however, is only half the story. To sum up the rest of it, I paraphrase a wise teacher of traditional Chinese medicine, Dianne Connelly, to point out that this quest, online or off, will never be “a one-walk dog.”
Introduction: Getting the Most from Productive Workplaces
This edition brings up to date a practice theory for managing and consulting that I proposed in 1987 for a world spinning at warp speed. I call it “getting everybody improving whole systems.” By “improving” I mean equal commitment to economic viability, and universal life values—dignity, meaning, and community. I came to that conclusion while rethinking methods I had used during a quarter of a century as a manager and consultant.
Processes for involving everyone have proliferated like wildflowers in the last quarter century. So too have assaults on dignity, meaning, and community. Few jobs are secure in the 21st Century. The march of technology and globalization is a mixed blessing if you seek techniques equal to your values. The challenges of the workplace have never been greater nor aspirations higher. Researchers for years have confirmed the economic benefits of attending equally to the needs of customers, employees, and shareholders (Kotter and Heskett, 1992), of maintaining community by optimizing people ahead of capital (de Geus, 1997), and of focusing on purpose and values before profits as a key to superior market performance (Collins and Porras, 1997). In the 21st Century you can add the tensions among work, personal health, and family life, exacerbated by technologies that encourage working at home or on vacation (Fisher and Fisher, 2011). The “systems” view I have adopted can be summed up simply this way:
Purpose and Intent
In this book I present a history, principles, and successful methods for improving organizations caught up in nonstop change. I intend to show you that values matter more than techniques. I hope to encourage you to appreciate your own experience. This book summarizes what I have learned from mine.
I began thinking about these matters in the 1960s as executive vice president of a company in which conflict was so bad that people asked to have a wall built down the middle of a large, open office—a bit of Cold War Berlin in North Philadelphia. Into this hostile climate I introduced self-managing work teams. Output went down at first. Then it shot up like a rocket—40 percent—as the teams caught on to this new way of working.
My biggest surprise was the surge of energy and commitment among co-workers. Antagonists became friends. The psychic wall came down, followed by the real one. People built a community of interest around learning to care for customers. Absenteeism and turnover went to near zero. “I used to hate coming to work in the morning,” said Anne, a veteran who hadn't smiled in years. “Now I can't wait.” That's when I knew I was on the right path.
I saw self-managing teams as a way to increase business results by acting on my own values. I believed that autonomy and self-control were good for people. I had barely begun to connect productivity with dignity, meaning, community. Now, I have a serious case to make.
In 1987, the year this book first appeared, I took a leave of absence from my consulting company and joined Max Elden, an American professor, at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim. Then I resumed consulting for four years, after which, tired of writing proposals and hiring staff, I called it quits. I thought of an exchange with my friend Gunnar Hjelholt, the late Danish social scientist, just after he gave up his company in Copenhagen for a 14th Century farmhouse in Jutland. Why did he quit? “Well,” said Gunnar, “I was no longer lying awake at four in the morning worrying about the clients!” After more than twenty years of worrying, I too let go.
I had no plans other than to step off the merry-go-round. To this end, I joined with John Weir and Michael Merrill to offer several yearly “Men at Work” personal growth workshops. Interacting with a hundred men—executives, artists, consultants, businessmen, engineers, musicians, and teachers—I learned a lot about the theory and practice of personal change . I learned even more about myself.
In 1993, drawing on principles explicated here, Sandra Janoff and I started Future Search Network as a global nonprofit dedicated to service, colleagueship, and learning. While teaching “whole system” methods to thousands in subsequent years, I heard an oft-repeated theme: How can you be sure that people will carry out the action plans they make?
How Do You “Build In” Follow-Up?
I have pondered that question for years. I know one shopworn practice that doesn't work—external “coordination” by those not involved. I also can identify a guaranteed strategy with enormous benefits: interactive review meetings with “the whole system in the room.” This book documents both polarities. I doubt that anybody can “build in” a technical insurance policy that trumps people's willingness to stay connected and revisit worthy goals. The key leadership policy I advocate is involving those who do the work in planning and coordinating the work. The best methods tend to be simple.
At the turn of the millennium I began wondering what became of the organizations whose case studies formed the core of my first edition. What could I learn about continuity in a turbulent world by seeking out former clients in organizations I once had sought to improve? What became of them during the fifteen to thirty years after I left? Productive Workplaces Revisited (2004), was the result of that inquiry. Everything I learned then you will find here.
For this edition, I added another question. What are readers of this book doing to advance the practice today? But for Future Search, I had no recent hands-on consulting experience, but perhaps I could get those who did to help me update the book. My query to friends and colleagues produced forty engaging new stories, bringing to life a future I could not have predicted in 1987.
Who Might Benefit from This Book?
For all these years my readers have been managers, consultants, students, researchers, and teachers. Having played all these roles too, I have suggestions for each.
I want to show managers that working toward dignity, meaning and community opens the door to quality and output far beyond what most organizations settle for.
To consultants I suggest that we are in the midst of a revolutionary revisioning of expertise. So much work cuts across multiple fields that no expert can do it all. Treating every consulting engagement as a potential step toward helping people collaborate to improve whole systems is a service desperately needed.
To researchers, students, and teachers I say that no further research is needed to prove the efficacy of task-focused participation in democratic societies. There are no technical alternatives to shared goals, cooperation, and personal responsibility. What's needed are more people who will stick their necks out. That means learning as much about ourselves—our impulses, noble and ignoble—as we learn about other important subjects. A “whole system” includes economics and technology, which exist only in and for us. I urge those engaged in studying organizations to see self-knowledge as integral to systems. Without us, there are no systems.
You might appreciate this book if you are …
Looking for guidance in helping large, diverse groups pursue big purposes;Wondering what happens to “interventions” years later;Curious about what I learned during two decades of community and nonprofit service based on principles gleaned from three decades in businesses and medical schools; orAmong those readers who asked me over the years to sign well-thumbed, annotated copies of earlier editions. I have got a great deal of job satisfaction from meeting you. You remind me of my life-changing encounter with Douglas McGregor's Human Side of Enterprise in 1966, enabling me years later to write this book.Three Major Themes
Productive Workplaces has three themes woven into a counterpoint of history, case studies, criticism, and guidelines for action. One theme is that people hunger for community in the workplace. Those who find it are happier and more productive.
My second theme is that the world is changing too fast for the short half-life of expert problem solving. Involving people and experts together in improving the whole is the way to solve great handfuls of problems as they arise. Systems “thinking” lives only when people experience systems for themselves.
My third theme represents a fresh interpretation of Douglas McGregor's (1960) dichotomy between Theories X and Y. He called these assumptions about human nature, X grounded in laziness and incompetence, Y in self-motivation, achievement, and growth. After a hundred projects with thousands of people, I changed my mind in the 1980s about Theories X and Y. These are not polarized “management styles.” They symbolize an inner dialogue we are having with ourselves—between parent and child, hard guy and soft guy, decisive self and passive self. Managing this dialogue—not techniques, strategies, or models—represents our main challenge in building more productive workplaces. Changing our workplaces is inevitably bound up with changing ourselves.
These themes mark my journey down a path as old as the Industrial Revolution. Elton Mayo (1945), founder of industrial human relations, noted how “science and industry put an end to the individual's feeling of identification with his group, of satisfaction in his work” (p. 6). But engineers had noticed the effects of alienation—accidents, low morale, low output—more than half a century before that. I write as a practitioner committed to involving people in continuously renewing their workplaces. I see myself on an endless road toward practices grounded in dignity, meaning, and community, central to economic success in a tsunami of global upheaval.
Overview of the Contents
Part One. Here you will find a chronicle of the way 19th Century methods gave way to 20th Century practices, preparing the ground for large-scale participation today. I retell stories from management history to support my contention that no good alternatives exist for worthy goals and employee involvement. I offer new interpretations of how the first consulting engineer, Frederick W. Taylor, and four social scientists, Douglas McGregor, Kurt Lewin, Fred Emery, and Eric Trist, translated values into action, I hope to convince you that building on their innovations is a critical 21st Century challenge.
I explore how Frederick Taylor's “scientific management” lost credibility as it metamorphosed into engineering solutions for what Taylor considered people problems. Organization development (OD), a social science of managing change derived from Kurt Lewin, took a similar turn whenever its advocates based solutions on feelings, human relations, and participation unconnected to markets and technology. Likewise, descendants of Emery and Trist—enamored of sociotechnical methods—sometimes lost sight of individual and group skills even as they designed work systems tied to consumer needs and technical flexibility.
Part Two. Here I take up my own evolution toward effective practices. I present six cases in which my colleagues and I helped to diagnose and resolve commonplace dilemmas—employee turnover, costs, production, staff-line cooperation—in the 1970s and early 1980s. I then critique this practice against a backdrop of accelerating change. Here I demonstrate my second theme—the inadequacy of expert management and consulting methods for coping with fast change. Through these cases I illustrate an evolution of practice from participative problem solving toward whole-systems improvement.
Part Three. Here I critique my cases and offer a “21st Century practice theory” for managing and consulting derived from the principles and practices in Parts One and Two. I outline simple criteria for assessing the potential for action—leadership, a business opportunity, and energized people. I propose three guidelines for success in high-risk projects: getting the whole system in the room, focusing on the future, and helping people do it themselves. I include cases from primary medical care and steel-making to illustrate how involving diverse parties in looking at the whole changed my approach toward consulting.
Part Four. Here I illustrate an attempt to apply the foregoing principles and methods to the year-long rescue of a Canadian medical products company.
Then I lay out three methods I found worth knowing—team building, participative work design, and strategic planning with Future Search. Since the early 1980s I have considered the latter a learning laboratory for large group processes, applicable to social, technological, and economic dilemmas today. Team building, a basic management mode for more than fifty years, ought to be in everybody's tool kit. Work design keeps evolving with permutations like process improvement and total quality management; techniques aside, nobody has a good substitute yet for involving the people who do the work.
Part Five. I have added a new chapter on choosing among “large group interventions,” identifying these as evidence of a paradigm shift toward “getting the whole system in the room.” You cannot hope for constructive change unless people experience themselves as part of a larger whole. Finally, I review what I learned from ten cases in earlier editions and the implications for practice today.
In a new concluding chapter, I tell my personal “aha,” after all these decades, that the future never comes. The bottom line is ridiculously easy to say and ambiguously hard to implement: discover your own values and act on them every day.
What You Will NOT Find in This Edition
A decade ago, when Jossey-Bass asked practitioners and college teachers to suggest revisions to Productive Workplaces, some noted “dated references and outdated examples.” I have remedied that here in part with the help of colleagues whose recent experiences appear throughout. Remember, though, that this fix lasts only a few eye blinks. I hope you still find the stories, cases, and research here relevant, and that you will join me in the possibility that values and principles have no “sell by” date. Various people suggested a long list of characters they wished I had included, from B.F. Skinner to W. Edwards Deming. One wanted more on Mary Parker Follett, a pioneer whose bold ideas I cite more than once.
Follett, a contemporary of Taylor's and Lewin's, wrote about the power of groups decades before “group dynamics” existed, of the integration of systems years before Ludwig von Bertlanffy's general systems theory, and of the value of diversity in organizations before most of us were born (Tonn, 2003). If you like history, you will find intellectual roots for team building, work design, and even Future Search in Follett's writings going back nearly a century!
That I have not put in more on Follett and the others is a choice, not an oversight. I wrote about people who directly influenced my work as I was doing it. This is an idiosyncratic, intensely personal book. This edition likewise reflects my experiences and passions with the notable addition of readers’ stories.
Appreciating the Limits
If you decide the practice I describe fits for you, the formula is as plain as a Shaker table. Focus on worthy purposes. Get the right people in the room. Help people design and control their own work. Resolve to be a leader who does that or to work with those who do. Involving everyone, though, only succeeds under certain conditions. The money, in for-profit and nonprofit alike, has to come from somewhere. When society can no longer pay for goods and services, those who provide them must change what they do or look for other work.
If you want to walk easy in your skin, don't expect eternal life for your beloved methods, norms, and processes. The cosmos cares not one whit for people's struggles to get “change” accepted. All changes change. Anything you do today to enhance productivity in parallel with dignity, meaning, and community is existentially valuable. You cannot control what people do afterward. Perhaps this book will help you walk easy.
One of my favorite jazz pianists, Teddy Wilson, had a knack I have envied since my youth. He had an awesome left hand and could keep many improvised lines going without losing the melody. I have enjoyed weaving together themes from management history with my own practice in this fugue on productive workplaces. I also have found the lyrics extraordinarily hard to write. I am describing circles, wheels, and spirals in a medium that only permits straight lines. I hope that what comes through is the music and that you will find it natural to add your words to mine.
Marvin Weisbord Wynnewood, Pennsylvania
May 2011
Part One
Mythology and Managing
A baby has brains, but it doesn't know much. Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.
–The Wizard of Oz to the Scarecrow, Baum, 1900, 1958, pp. 113–114
I open this edition with two chapters that form the bookends for this volume. Chapter One summarizes ten myths I have revised after fifty years of managing, consulting, and running a nonprofit network. They constitute advice to myself for leading in an era of accelerating diversity and change. You may agree with me or not. You cannot escape acting on your assumptions.
Chapter Two describes how I first learned to manage, discovered self-managing teams, and began on this journey in the 1960s. Had I not been socialized to “bottom lines” for a decade, I could not have written this book.
In the remainder of the book, I will show how my encounters with key figures in management history influenced the way I managed and consulted, and how, working in corporations and medical schools, I came to devise a practice theory I thought better fit conditions of increasing diversity and nonstop change. I also describe how I and others have applied it with surprising results around the world.
Chapter One
A Mythology of Organizational Change
Mythology—The body of stories associated with a culture, institution or person.
–The Visual Thesaurus
I begin this 25th Anniversary edition with ten stories I no longer believe. I gathered them during fifty years of working with businesses, medical schools, social agencies, and communities. Myths are real and they shape your behavior. I reframed mine over many years while interacting with students from computer science, criminal justice, education, engineering, finance, government, health care, marketing, manufacturing, and sales in Seattle University's Organization Systems Renewal master's program (formerly at Antioch/Seattle) and in Benedictine University's doctoral program in organization development (OD). Nearly all sought OD training because they wanted better myths for their lives and work. Several students have rewarded me with their stories for this anniversary edition.
Perhaps my description of the myths I have given up will help you put your own in perspective. Consider this a primer on how I would manage or consult today. Rather than save all my advice for later, I offer you “Alternative Stories” to whet your appetite for what follows.
Myth 1: Changes Are Sustainable
Sustainable change is an oxymoron. For years I believed I had a responsibility to “build in” follow-up mechanisms with organizations. These were intended to reinforce new leader behavior, solidify learning, make collaborative problem-solving instinctive, and promote a new culture as a “way of life.” Hierarchies were to be flattened like pancakes. In the 1970s I learned to admire companies like Hewlett-Packard, whose founders had cooked up an attractive recipe. My follow-up practice was long on team meetings, task forces, training, coordinators, and coaches. It fell short on longevity. Half the organizations I consulted with in the 1970s and 1980s no longer exist. Nor does H-P in the form I once admired. No organization lasts, no matter how dazzling your “interventions.” Of the thirty companies that became the modern Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1928, only General Electric is still listed. If you invest your life force in sustaining change, the only thing you are likely to sustain is a bruised ego and impaired idealism.
Alternative Story. I recommend seeing whether you can sustain new practices from one meeting to the next. Organizations change one meeting at a time. Their destinies entwine in a maelstrom of markets, technology, and world events that nobody controls. Your best strategy will always be to help people do the best they can now with what they have. If you seek a new “culture,” make every meeting congruent with the culture you seek. You can have it all now. Not the outcomes, but surely the processes you advocate. The goal of all projects ought to be giving these people, in this room, at this moment, opportunities they never had before. That's structural change. It's controllable. Keep doing this, and you will be sustainable, no matter what happens after the meeting. If you work at “building in” sustainable behavior in turbulent workplaces, you may burn out before the organization does.
Myth 2: Training Will Fix It
In the 1970s I believed with multitudes of colleagues that training everybody transforms organizations. We trained tens of thousands to supervise, manage, appraise, cooperate, set goals, give feedback, and participate in decisions. Such training took place in peer groups, lest people embarrass themselves with those above or below. Training was intended to help people change the way their companies operated. We kept getting people ready to do what they never did. Indeed, many people transformed their relationships with spouses, children, and co-workers. Their companies—a tangled maze of policy, procedure, programs, controls, and technologies—went on doing whatever they did before. Individuals receive enormous benefits from training in leader behavior, self-awareness, cultural sensitivity, and personal skills. Organizations should offer all they can afford. Do not mistake training for organizational change.
Alternative Story. All people already have skills and knowledge they cannot use at work. They are blocked by job descriptions, their place in the pecking order, the location of their desks, the size of their turf, restricted information, and limited influence over working conditions. These structural issues cannot be altered through skills and awareness training. People improve organizations using what they already know to influence policies, procedures, systems, and structures. People motivate themselves doing projects that have consequences for the whole. Paradoxically, when you empower people to act together on business tasks, they often change their behavior. Measurable outcomes follow employees’ influence in the design, control, and coordination of their work. Then training can be of enormous benefit. Fix structures first. Then watch how many people “straighten up and fly right.”
Myth 3: Profit Rules
