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Industrial engineering. Total Quality. Shareholder
value. Systems integration. Empowerment. Reengineering.
For decades, business thinkers and academicians have proliferated
approaches and "solutions" aimed at addressing
the abundance of issues business leaders face every day.
And for each new approach, scores of books have been written.
Many provide invaluable insights within specialized areas.
A few are self-proclaimed "manifestos," claiming
to have a single, universal prescription for all business
ills. None have attempted to integrate the best thinking
of past and present into a single management framework.
Transforming the Organization does.
The framework revealed in this book is called
business transformation. It is a bold new view of business
proposed by two of today's most influential management thinkers
and practitioners, Francis J. Gouillart and James N. Kelly.
Drawing on decades of combined experience
in helping major companies turn themselves around, the authors
use real stories that guide the reader through "hard"
disciplines such as shareholder value analysis and activity-based
costing, and through "soft" disciplines such as
team-building, visioning, and individual renewal. Chapter
by chapter, the reader tracks the analytical and emotional
progress of a real CEO from a well-known company in the
midst of transformation, as well as the wrenching experience
of a production scheduler swept up in the transformation
process.
The authors make a compelling case for viewing
the corporation not as a soul-less machine made up of discrete,
replaceable parts, but as a living organism -- the biological
corporation -- complete with mind, body, and spirit
requiring comprehensive treatment, not organ-by-organ surgery,
to ensure overall health.
Gouillart and Kelly lay out the holistic
approach of business transformation in a four-part framework:
- Reframing the company's conception of
what it is, and what it can achieve
- Restructuring the corporate body to bring
it to a competitive level of performance
- Revitalizing the company's relationship
to the competitive environment, igniting growth in existing
businesses and inventing new ones
- Renewing individuals and the organization,
enabling them to become integral parts of a connected
and responsible world community
Their approach represents the difference
between reflexive, incremental responses to competitive
threats, and the proactive shaping and acceleration of corporate
evolution. Transforming the Organization is the comprehensive
guide that CEOs and managers need right now, and will turn
to for years to come.
Francis J. Gouillart is an authority
on business strategy and reengineering and is a leading
specialist in business transformation. He has directed and
consulted in large-scale transformation programs for companies
around the world and in virtually every industry. He is
the author of several books on strategy, including Strategie
Pour Une Entreprise Competitive, selected as the best
strategy book of the year in 1989 in France. He is also
coauthor of "Spend a Day in the Life of Your Customer,"
in the Harvard Business Review. Mr. Gouillart is
senior vice president of Gemini Consulting.
James N. Kelly is an influential expert
in the area of managing large, complex organizations and
has published widely on the subject, including in The
Sloan Management Review. He has
consulted on major transformation projects for companies
throughout Europe, the Americas, South Africa, and Japan.
He frequently speaks at management conferences around the
world on the subject of transformation, with special emphasis
on the subject of individual and organizational renewal.
Mr. Kelly is the cochairman of Gemini Consulting.
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