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Corporate Failure by Design Why Organizations Are Built to Fail
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Book Code: Q297
ISBN: 1-56720-297-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-56720-297-7
328 pages, appendices
Quorum Books
Publication: 5/30/2000
List Price: $119.95 (UK Sterling Price: £70.00)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects: Reviews:
  • Jonathan Klein has produced an intriguing, thought-provoking book that considers carefully the present state and future of business organizations. The timeliness of the volume cannot be disputed. It is well documented and very logically presented....It is a scholarly volume yet very readable.... It should be available in academic and public libraries and read by anyone studying organizational behavior.
    —Personnel Psychology
  • Endorsement From J.D. Power III
    Founder and Chairman
    J.D. Power and Associates:
    A compelling chronicle and analysis about why industrial-era organizations are likely doomed to failure because of their inability to adapt to the rapidly advancing age of information. Reinventing organizations is not enough--they have to be virtually obliterated, then rebuilt through new relationships.
  • Endorsement From Ian I. Mitroff
    Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy
    University of Southern California:
    Make no mistake about it. Jonathan Klein's Corporate Failure by Design is an important book. Ideally, every manager and executive should read this book. If it helps to turn around only one organization, it will have proved its worth. Those who do not read Jonathan's book do so at their own peril.
  • Endorsement From Richard S. Hockett
    Founder/President Creative Business Solutions:
    This book is a MUST READ. ...with the release of Corporate Failure by Design: Why Organizations are Built to Fail, Dr. Jonathan Klein takes his rightful place among the best and brightest of business writers and analysts in the 21st century! No other author has used insight and research skills to so eloquently state the true dysfunctional nature of the organization, and the very fact that each organization is literally designed for failure right from the start. I guarantee that you will find Dr. Klein's book enlightening... a real eye opener!
Description: Based on data regarding corporate mortality, organizations are built to fail: a conclusion critical to managers, employees, stockholders, consultants, customers, vendors, competitors, and therefore all of us who transact with and depend on organizations. Yet, literature about organizational management tends to focus on education and inspiration, and to bristle with optimism about the potential success of applying its wares. Ignored, in virtually all of this literature is the reality that personnel may or may not be "inherently" self-interested, but certainly join business organizations in order to serve individual rather than organizational interests. Individual self-interest is advanced through control of various processes in order to rationalize that self-interest as a productive, organizational purpose, which not simply suppresses opposition but also conceals or even demonizes that opposition. These processes include such familiar organizational functions as individual and organizational goal-setting, job and organizational design, leadership, hiring, performance appraisal, compensation, promotion, communication, corporate culture, and change.

At all levels, therefore, the organization's long-term interest is undermined by the goals of the very members of whom it is comprised--it is built to fail. And through control of its various internal processes and elimination of opposition, the organization pursues self-destructive goals without knowing it.
Table of Contents:
  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • Failure in Purpose
  • The Corporate Suicide Mission: The Emergence of Organizational Purpose
  • The Structure and Content of Failure
  • The Enemy Within: Organizational Members and Their Jobs
  • Dressed for Success, Qualified to Fail: Staffing the Organization
  • Failure in Methods and Function
  • The Psychopathology of Leadership
  • The Training and Evaluation of Incompetence
  • Failure as Its Own Reward
  • The Process of Failure
  • Together We Fall
  • Partners in Crime
  • The Company of Strangers: Organizational Communication and the Lack of It
  • The Outcome of Failure
  • The Smoking Gun: Life Inside the Monopoly
  • The Ritual of Change
  • The Blind Leading the Blind: Learning How to Fail
  • The Agony of Defeat: The Hidden Costs of Organizational Failure
  • Beyond Failure
  • Learning from Failure: Saving Organizations from Themselves
  • The End of Organization as We Know It: Survival in the Postorganizational World
  • Epilogue
  • Appendices
  • Further Reading
  • Index
LC Card Number: 99-046053
LCC Class: HD58
Dewey Class: 658
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