The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy by Kenneth Cloke

by Kenneth Cloke

Brand New. Will be shipped from US.

Genres: Management, Business

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 4, 2002

Reviews

[Tamas Kalman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my bible. And if you are working for a company, any company, at any position, it should be yours too.

[Aashish · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is about competing management theories, and tries to establish why one form it, i.e. self managing organizations are better than all other forms involving active management control. To me, this book came across as a mix of excellent and vindictive.

If one reads this book without the first section, the ideas that come through will tend to be very refreshing. The authors talk about how motivating the employees and giving them better direction brings out their ideas, creativity and ability to think, resulting in the best evolving of the organization. The authors also put forward models of business planning, communication, transparency of goals and objectives and people management consistent with the premise of self managing organizations.

However when you read the first section, the focus is on rubbishing every management theory ever created. The authors go back in history to establish why managers naturally mean evil, linking the evolution of the etymology and the professional context to slave driving and so on. Everything that goes wrong in any organization across any time period across any stream is attributed to mere presence of the concept of management. If one knew nothing about business and read only this section, the most likely conclusion will be that every organization ever established has miserably failed to evolve, grow and distinguish itself and the blame rests solely on managers.

The authors try to simplify several contexts at all and try and fit one shoe fits all analysis, which is essentially their bias and supporting evidence for their hypotheses explained later in the book. By the time one gets to the exciting part, the negativity surrounding the build up is just so difficult to shrug off.

The book is not very old - 2007 vintage. The ideas which the authors bring forth are actually already in practice, though not always institutionalized. The focus should have been on scaling new concepts which are in line with business evolution rather than rewriting history. It appears that the authors had a great forward looking idea at hand. Instead they tried to write an time great omnibus with selective hindsight bias.