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Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot confront head-on
the key organizational issues that are threatening the very
existence of today's corporations. They sum up why bureaucracy
no longer works and show that "bureaucracy is no more
appropriate to the information age than serfdom was to the
industrial era. Only freedom and community will work."
In today's complex and intelligence-intensive
world economy, organizations can no longer rely exclusively
on the intelligence of those few at the top of the pyramid.
The amount of clear thinking required to deal with the multitude
of different customer demands, different ethnic cultures,
different technological advances, and different possible
futures means that everyone in an organization must be involved.
The Pinchots describe the "intelligent
organization" -- an organization that develops and
engages the intelligence, business judgment, and wide-system
responsibility of all of its members. By using the intelligence
of every employee, an organization can respond far more
effectively to customers, partners, and competitors.
In exploring how intelligent organizations
create the conditions for both freedom of choice and responsibility
for the whole, the Pinchots provide a far-reaching guide
to:
- establishing internal free markets
- freedom of enterprise
- liberated teams
- community in the workplace
- equality and diversity
- voluntary learning networks
- democratic self-rule
- multiple sources of authority
- 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.
Through these pioneering examples, the Pinchots
offer tools that people at all organizational levels can
use to bring freedom of choice, responsibility for the whole,
democracy, and high productivity to formerly bureaucratic
organizations.
Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot have started
and run four companies together, worked with more than half
of the Fortune 100, led school and community reform projects,
and collaborated in the writing of their influential book,
Intrapreneuring.
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