You are bidding on The Self-Managing Organization: How leading companies are transforming the work of teams for real impact, by Ronald E. Purser and Steven Cabana, 1998, New York: The Free Press.

About the book:

The disappointing results achieved by reengineering, total quality management, and team-based empowerment programs dictate that a quantum change is needed in the way organizations are designed and managed. This groundbreaking book by organizational change experts Ronald Purser and Steven Cabana reveals how innovative companies are unleashing huge productivity gains by transforming the work of teams, designing them into a fully self-managing organization. Purser and Cabana show how authorizing employees to design, control, and coordinate their own work and workplace has enabled some firms to reduce manufacturing cycle times by 50 percent, cut costs in half, and most important, share knowledge more widely in the organization.

The authors demonstrate through in-depth case studies how democratic decision-making works today in such pioneering companies as Microsoft, Motorola, Lockheed Martin, American Express, Charles Schwab, Sequa Chemicals, Syncrude Canada, and Celgard. They provide detailed instruction in the core principles and methods of self-management, showing why employee participation is key to strategy creation and corporate redesign, and how relocating the responsibility for value-added work into the hands of the people who actually touch the product or provide the service eradicates the need for external supervision and costly bureaucratic overhead.

Self-management is the wave of the future not only because it improves economic performance, but also because it puts dignity, care, and meaning back into work. A step-by-step blueprint for designing and developing a self-managing organization, Purser and Cabana's findings are required reading for every forward-thinking manager.