The
language of these books and articles about public management is utterly
soul-destroying! The series of posts I’ve just done required me to pull out and
flick through more than a hundred books in my libraries (real and virtual) -
and I had assumed that the next stage would be some selective, in-depth reading
– to extract some nuggets.
But
the baroque language and dead imagery of the books – even the best of them -
have my eyes (and very soul) glazing over.
So
I turned instead to a book whose title and sub-title rather put me off - Reinventing
Organisations – a guide to creating organisations inspired by the next stage of
human consciousness (2014) by one Frederic Laloux whom you can see in action here.
In
fact it was just what my jaded soul needed – highly readable and with many
inspiring stories.
You
can read
the book for yourself here – but you can get the gist in the summary given
in the hyperlink in the title above; and some good
slides here
The
book starts well with a strong critique of the alienating nature of so much
work in large organisations and a question about why it has so be so, It then
suggests that our collective history is not unlike that of our own personal growth,
with key points of our development when we became more aware of our
relationships with others….Laloux leans apparently for his approach on what is known
as “integral theory” - associated with someone called Ken Wilbur. The book suggests that organisations, until
now, can be classified into four types - Red, Amber, Orange and Green – with the
guiding metaphors for these types (p 36 of the book) being “wolf pack”, “army”,
“machine” and “family”. Reminds me of the four “Gods of management” of Charles
Handy and Roger Harrison – who are, however, not credited,
The
core of the book consists of his attempt to find organisations which had broken
out of the limits of this typology and were giving both customers and staff satisfaction. Twelve
organisations are identified and their history structure and processes
detailed. They are both profit and non-profit but have one basic feature in
common – they are all managed by the
workforce with senior executives (such as are left in a streamlined
structure) playing essentially a coaching role…..The most famous of these is
probably the Dutch nursing cooperative Buurtzorg
There’s
a lot of thought-provoking material in the book which, after an initial splash
3 years ago, has not been much heard of – despite it being the first management
book or a long time to focus on worker control (in a totally non-ideological way). Perhaps he offended too many people? First the theorists – for attributing
so little to them. And, secondly, the ideologues – who would have preferred
some slogans…..
A
good time, however, for the Labour party to issue this report (in June) on Alternative
Models of Ownership – basically about coops,
social enterprise and worker-controlled organisations,
I
mentioned a few posts back that even the last UK Coalition government was supporting
mutual structures for public services – although I
haven’t yet seen a report on the subsequent experience.
critical
comment on Laloux book
sympathetic
comment
self-management bibliography http://www.organization5point0.com/literature/books
main
website
No comments:
Post a Comment