You
will not generally find me extolling books with titles which refer to
“reinvention” – we all had our fingers burned in the 1980s and 1990s with names
such as Hammer, Osborne and Gore overhyping
that particular concept.
But
Reinventing
Organisations – a guide to creating organisations inspired by the next stage of
human consciousness (2014) by
Frederic Laloux is that rare thing - a highly readable and inspiring book. It
starts with a strong attack on the
alienating nature of so much work in large organisations - and a question about
whether it needs to be so.
Highly-automated assembly lines began
to appear at the end of the last Century but it is only recently that David
Graeber and others have drawn attention to the scale of alienation (a staggering
80% of employees in the developed world find their work brings absolutely no
satisfaction). Indeed a new term - the “bullshit job” came into circulation to
describe the meaningless nature of most work these days.
Laloux suggests that organisations,
until now, can be classified into four types to which he gives colours - Red,
Amber, Orange and Green – with the guiding metaphors for these types (p 36 of
the book) being
-
“wolf pack”,
-
“army”,
-
“machine” and
-
“family”.
This all reminds
me of the four “Gods
of management” a joint creation of both Charles
Handy and the rather more neglected Roger
Harrison – whose fascinating “final reflections” (accessible by clicking the
hyperlink) speak to a wider theme which has become central to the redrafting of
my “Dispatches to a future generation”. But that’s for another post so let’s
move on…..
The core of Laloux’s
book consists of his portrayal of 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 for a long time to
focus on worker control (in a totally non-ideological way).
Perhaps the thrust of the argument challenged
too many people?
-
the theorists – for attributing so little to them. And
-
the ideologues who would have preferred some slogans…..
I referred yesterday to a much-hyped article – The
New Practice of Public Problem Solving – which I
hope to get around to discussing in the next post. But I felt that readers
should first be aware of the history sketched out in these two posts….
main Laloux website
- 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. And you can see Laloux in action
here
Reviews of Laloux book
- self-management bibliography http://www.organization5point0.com/literature/books
Other useful reading
-
Alternative
Models of Ownership (UK Labour party
2017) - basically about coops,
social enterprise and worker-controlled organisations,
-
Ahistorical
article https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42488947.pdf
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