The Open Organization: A New Era of Leadership and Organizational Development

Philip A. Foster The Open Organization: A New Era of and Organizational Development Burlington, VT: Gower Publishing CompanyPhilip A. Foster's resume could hardly be more clearly stereotyped. His master's degree in Organizational emphasized mentorship and coaching. His doctorate is in Strategic emphasizing strategic foresight. He is Thought Leader in Business Operations and Strategic Leadership and an adjunct professor at Middle Tennessee University. He has worked in the public and in the private sector including 13 years as an executive in manufacturing, media and business consulting. He caps it off by telling us that he has experience delivering curriculum at both [the] corporate and university level.Call me old-fashioned (a charge to which I cheerfully plead guilty), but I have seen advertisements like this too often. They typically precede or sum up a pitch by a motivational speaker or an alleged futurist who will turn up at an employer-sponsored event that promises to give employees from the middle-management to shop-floor (or online) workers a PowerPoint procedural about the frenzied world of organizational change and the challenges that face them in a volatile, globalized, high-tech environment in which tech-savvy teenagers seem to come from another planet and-whatever their origins-have enormous amounts of information at their finger-tips and extraordinary demands to make of the people whose task it is to provide them with services for which their appetite is unlimited. (They also seem to have trouble doing simple arithmetic without a calculator, finding Bolivia or a map or guessing when World War II ended.Connect these observations to a market mentality in which the customer is always right and we quickly understand that anyone who chooses to think too deeply about the implications of any policy or program is predismissed as a dinosaur and defined as shockingly obsolete in the world of Information Technology on super-steroids.Out of this welter of banality and misinformation (so to speak) have come hundreds of books, thousands of articles and uncounted numbers of second-rate experts who take it upon themselves to crunch explosive, transformational technological and organizational changes growing at an exponential rate into chunks of marketable wisdom. Such geniuses seem to create a paradigm about every other week (usually on a Tuesday morning). What they are peddling (to be kind) is mainly show business.Nonetheless, naive leaders of third-rate institutions are routinely hooked on the next new big and eagerly embrace it lest they dawdle, miss the chance and find themselves written off as an administrative eohippus in a stable of frisky pure-bred stallions gleefully dancing to the tune of the next big thing. At first glance, Philip A. Foster's book looked very much like a standard, garden-variety instance of this rather depressing sort of product.Normally, I'd have chucked the thing into the rotating file of amateurish and unsound contributions to the literature on careerism. It seemed like a book that could be quickly and easily read and would equip readers with the vocabulary that would draw notice at the next departmental meeting, regional retreat or senior corporate board room and then penciled in for a promotion to whatever their next step might be.Still, I don't like to toss anything aside without giving it a fair chance. So, I flipped to the Table of Contents and to the Index to see what, if anything, was up. (The lack of an index, of course, is the death kiss for almost any book other than a murder mystery or the kind of romance novel that commonly pollutes the book racks in the smaller airports.)When I tried to give Dr. Foster's opus a quick once-over, I was strangely entangled. It was not exceptional except in that it was exceptionally unexceptional. It offered a sort of template, an almost Platonic form or archetype of its species. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.