书目名称 | Unmanaging | 副标题 | Opening up the Organ | 编辑 | Theodore Taptiklis | 视频video | http://file.papertrans.cn/943/942363/942363.mp4 | 图书封面 |  | 描述 | Within management thinking, behaviours have become repetitive, and organizational performance is stagnant or declining. We need to engage with each other as individuals. The author proposes new ways of harnessing people‘s storytelling instincts and capabilities to create a new medium of professional communication and collaboration. | 出版日期 | Book 2008 | 关键词 | management; organization; organizations | 版次 | 1 | doi | https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230589469 | isbn_softcover | 978-1-349-36470-1 | isbn_ebook | 978-0-230-58946-9 | copyright | Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2008 |
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Front Matter |
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Abstract
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Introduction |
Theodore Taptiklis |
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Abstract
I have become used to thinking that my working life began on November 2, 1975, the day that I started work as a management consultant1 at the London office of McKinsey & Company, Inc. This view is actually an edited recollection of my working life – I had six years of full-time employment before this date – but such was the power of this event that my self-story often begins at this date.
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Welcome to My World |
Theodore Taptiklis |
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In the heady atmosphere of 1975 McKinsey, we prided ourselves on being a tribe of generalists. The idea was to begin each assignment with a clean sheet of paper: to assume nothing, to have no prepackaged solutions, to treat every client situation entirely on its own merits. Our mantra was “fact-based analysis.” Our mission was to leave no data source unturned, to gather and process everything that could be written down and, through detailed deconstruction and analysis, be turned into an illuminating “fact.”
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The View From the Top |
Theodore Taptiklis |
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Thirty years later, after my own life experiences have led me in so many new and unexpected directions – and eventually, to a point far distant from the “business” career I was then beginning – I find myself to be curious once again about the world of management and its underlying beliefs. It now seems to me that there has been an enormous growth during this period – spanning many knowledge domains – in our general understanding of the human and physical environment in which we live and move and have our being. I will not attempt here a detailed history of Western intellectual thought and development over these years, nor try to document all of its formative influences. But there are some broad movements I would like to observe.
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Messy Lives |
Theodore Taptiklis |
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By 1994, our Sengean interventions at the life insurance mutual that employed me appeared to have run their course. But new problems were emerging. Our 150-year old enterprise was facing a crisis of identity. Demand for our core product, life insurance, was steadily declining. To many of our executives the grass looked greener over the other side of the fence, in the banking sector. And mutuality had now become deeply unfashionable. We seemed about to become engulfed by a worldwide tsunami of demutualization. Should this occur, the underlying ethos of the enterprise would be altered, utterly and irreversibly.
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Work as an Immersive Practice |
Patricia Benner,Hubert Dreyfus |
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Nursing, I believe, has an especially substantial claim for attention. To begin with, nursing practice is concerned with some of the most significant events in people’s lives. On the other hand, nurses and nursing practice “emerge” and become salient for most of us only at extraordinary times, and otherwise are generally self-effacing and largely invisible. The paradox of the salience of nursing and its hidden character is by no means accidental, as we will see later. But my point here is that although nursing has been largely unobserved and un-remarked upon in management discourse, it has in fact a great deal to offer to the wider world of management and organization.
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Feeling Forward, Responding in the Moment |
John Shotter,Ludwig Wittgenstein |
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In tracing the enlargement of my own thinking over the past decade, I next want to turn to the work of John Shotter. Shotter’s appearance in my story is not strictly chronological, since I have only recently encountered his ideas. But because I think he extends Benner’s perspective, and also because he forms a bridge to the ideas of both David Boje and Ralph Stacey, both of whom follow in turn in my story, this seems to be the best place to introduce him.
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The Movement of the Living Story |
David Boje,Mikhail Bakhtin |
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David Boje is one of the most original figures I have so far encountered in my journey. Boje is Professor of Management in the Department of Management at New Mexico State University, in a remote, historic and dramatically scenic corner of the United States. I had discovered Boje’s work through citation, just as I was reaching for ideas of storytelling and narrative in organizations that went beyond knowledge management and engineering-based views of human interaction. In 2003, I flew to Las Cruces in New Mexico to meet Boje: we began a conversation there that has continued ever since.
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Together in the Past and Future of the Now |
Ralph Stacey,Norbert Elias |
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Considering the work of Ralph Stacey is an even larger project than the discussion of my earlier three exemplars, because it seems to me that it makes more sense to think of a Stacey “school” or community rather than of one individual. Ralph Stacey is Director of the Complexity and Management Center at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire and is also Director of the Doctor of Management program run by the Center. Around Stacey are gathered a number of other writer-practitioners, notably Douglas Griffin and Patricia Shaw. Increasingly, graduates of and participants in the Doctor of Management program are also publishing. Together, this group is now producing a substantial body of written work.
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The Double Prison |
Theodore Taptiklis |
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All of the practitioners and thinkers so far discussed in these pages – Benner, Dreyfus, Shotter, Wittgenstein, Boje, Bakhtin, Stacey, Mead and Elias – are for me pointing in a common direction. They are all encouraging us towards a world in which we can move beyond the distracting fantasies, idealizations and isolating tendencies of our past, to seize and take advantage of the depth and breadth of the connections between us, so that we can put our collective energies and knowledge to work for all of the various purposes that galvanize us (in Shotter’s words, so that we can “go on” together). In different ways, each of these writers helps us to recognize the great extent of our interdependency, past, present and future, in contrast to the prevailing (and greatly limiting) view of the human person as essentially self-determining and “responsible,” above all else, for their own individual lives.
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Navigating Memory |
Theodore Taptiklis |
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It took almost seven years after the question had first formed – “What if you could find just that fragment of another’s life that would help you to decide what to do for yourself, just when you needed it?” – to become ready and prepared to test a practical means of answering the question in a real-world organizational setting. In between times there had been lots of exploration, and many false starts, but also some useful insights – some of which have already been described, like the introduction to the world of nursing and Benner’s work with narratives of professional practice. From nursing had come the idea of story. The fragment or glimpse would be a firstperson story from experience. Listening to that story, we surmised, we might be able to fit our own concerns to another’s struggles.
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Changing Conversations |
Theodore Taptiklis |
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So pervasive is instrumental management thinking, with its emphasis on the sunny uplands of an imagined future organizational state (reaching a goal; achieving change; becoming something new), that it is a rare phenomenon to discover its opposite: an organizational practice that is rooted in the reality of the present in which we already find ourselves.
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Unmanaging Ourselves |
Theodore Taptiklis |
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At last, I think, we are in a position to draw together the threads of all of the foregoing discussion in order to try to make up the fabric of a new management practice for organizations. We might perhaps preface this intention by describing the aims of this practice as making the fullest use possible of the talents and capabilities of all of the organization’s members, not only for the pursuit of the organization’s present purposes but also for the development of creative and original responses to the complexities of the societies that they serve.
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Going on From Here |
Theodore Taptiklis |
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This inquiry began a number of years ago, in the course of my professional life. Though it has led me in a number of unexpected directions and into new domains, it has remained focused – sometimes against the instincts of friends and associates – on the world of organizations rather than on individuals as members of society at large.
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Back Matter |
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