The Intelligent Organization

By Gifford Pinchot

Book Overview

Though bureaucracy appears on almost every "biggest problems with business" list, most management books simply suggest ways to make it work better. This book shows how to replace bureaucracy with fundamentally different principles for organizing and coordinating work. Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot confront head-on the key organizational issues that are threatening the very existence of today's corporations. They assert that "bureaucracy is no more appropriate to the information age than serfdom was to the industrial era. Only freedom and community will work." The Pinchots describe "intelligent organizations" that make full use of the intelligence of all employees. By developing and engaging the intelligence, business judgment, and wide-system responsibility of all its members, an organization can respond far more effectively to customers, partners, and competitors. The Pinchots provide a far-reaching guide to: o establishing internal free markets o liberated teams o community in the workplace o equality and diversity o democratic self-rule o multiple sources of authority o limited corporate government The Pinchots support the sweeping changes they propose with numerous examples of how these changes are already being implemented in such diverse organizations as AT&T, the Canadian National Railroad, DuPont, Russian entrepreneurial firms, Hewlett-Packard, and the U.S. Forest Service.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1881052982
• ISBN13: 9781881052982
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Insightful!

How can citizens of a society that exalts freedom consent to spend the majority of their lives laboring within organizations that are hierarchical, slow-moving and dictatorial? Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot raised that question in their heralded 1993 book and provided the following answer: Not willingly and not for long. The Pinchots were among the first management scholars to predict the demise of the military-style command structure, along with its inherent secrecy and Machiavellian political sniping. Although a slew of books devoted to the same theme have been published since, none have done a better job at explaining the potential of informed and engaged employees who don't fear their bosses too much to take decisive action. We [...] strongly recommend this book, which brims with meticulous case histories showing how teams, employee-owned companies and internal free-market competition have transformed organizations. (In fact, the Pinchots coined the term "intraprenuership" to describe this process.) While you might not be convinced that a company run by consensus can ever compete with one run by The Prince, this book gives you hope that it can.

Manifesto for Good People Trapped in Bad Organizations

The seven essentials of organizational intelligence include widespread truth and rights; freedom of enterprise, liberated teams, equality and diversity, voluntary learning networks, democratic self-rule, and limited corporate government. It was this book, and the very strong applause that the author received from all those attending OSS '96, that caused me to realize that the U.S. Intelligence Community is just chock full of very good people that want to change, but are not being allowed to change by the organizational circumstances within which they are trapped-frozen in time and budget.