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Consider these recent incidents in three of today's "new" organizations: In a major high-tech firm, a design engineer spends a good chunk of time with someone from another division, sharing some preliminary solutions to a design problem her team has been working on for the past six months. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Today, as more and more work situations involve knowledge-intensive, fluid environments where the old principles of command-and-control are ineffective, those of us connected to such environments are scrambling to understand how to achieve effective performance in a game where the only thing we know about the rules is that the old rules don't apply. In this scramble, we are continually brought back to the most fundamental question of organizing: what actions produce value; what actions are irerelevant to or destructive of value? Dr. Fletcher's book has the potential be important in helping us to act purposefully and successfully to create effective systems in this turbulant environment.
What we see as `real work' reflects only a portion of the work-related activity in organizations. For the most part, it reflects the portion that was of interest to the employers who created the industrial system of the early part of this century. As we face the challenges of knowledge-intensive work in fluid, underdetermined and rapidly changing environments, we are being forced to create another reality of work. The critical factors for working successfully simply do not lie within the area lit by the spotlight of industrial reality. But how do we take off blinders we have worn for a century to see things differently?
I can think of no better way than to challenge our thinking with explorations of what, for lack of a better term, I might call alternate realities. Dr. Fletcher's book is such an example. While it is highly informed by theory, it is a case study and illustrates its points with dozens of concrete examples. For the reader with an open mind who is prepared to be challenged, this book should stimulate a better understanding of how we might come to see the critical-but-hidden qualities that determine the success or failure of knowledge-intensive work.
More importantly, Dr. Fletcher demonstrates that what is invisible is not merely overlooked. It comes to be invisible as the result of systematic processes that `disappear' it. The lesson for us -- whether we understand it specifically in regard to gender or with reference to other factors shaping work in our time -- is that we cannot merely change organizations by `thinking outside the box' (to use a particularly unoriginal cliche for original thinking). We must first learn to SEE the box, to see the forces that sustain the box, to resist and change those forces.
At the turn of the last century, work was re-invented by employers, workers and experts on organizing, who produced a new reality of work. At the turn of the present century, this process is happening again. In this book, Dr. Fletcher makes a potentially important contribution to this immense, but necessary, task.
Roy Jacques, author `Manufacturing the Employee: Management Knowledge From the 19th to 21st Centuries'
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