Beyond Management

Traditional management structures, systems,and tools, intended to make the first factories of the industrial ageefficient, are now obsolete. Applying them to knowledge-work has exactly the opposite effect, causing all kinds of breakdowns. This book explains why knowledge workers have to manage themselves and tells them how to do it.

In Beyond Management: Taking Charge at Work, Mark Addleson goes beyond the easy platitudes of most authors on collaborative work to dig deep into the underpinnings of exactly how people work together in peer-to-peer relationships and networks. From this foundation his suggestions are well grounded in research and practice, yet are practical and straightforward for managers and leaders to implement. He incisively drives home why the world of work must be understood as socially driven. His examples and pragmatic suggestions show how to use the way people naturally network and self organize to speed sense making, improve decisions and foster creativity. Well done! - Verna Allee, President ValueNet Works, author Value Networks and the True Nature of Collaboration.

Mark Addleson's Beyond Management shows us not only why the hierarchical bureaucracy of traditional management is expensive, inefficient and at odds with the needs of today's organization but also how knowledge-work canbe organized to establish the needed values of responsibility, collaboration, imagination, collaboration, flexibility, and accountability. - Steve Denning, consultant and author of The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century.

Beyond Management charts the new world of knowledge work, in which hierarchical organizations have been replaced by flexible, self-organizing networks. It is critical reading for anyone who wants to understand the nature of the contemporary workplace. -Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, author The End of History and the Last Man and The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

Exploring the social, creative, and cooperative nature of knowledge work, Beyond Management offers a deeper understanding of how to achieve organizational success. It is required reading for those who need to navigate the new world of work. - Janine R. Wedel, Professor, George Mason University School of Public Policy, author Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

Few books, much less those about management, look at the world of work adopting the 'view from practice.' This one [Beyond Management] does. And it finds that the practice of knowledge workers is so fundamentally about caring, meaning making, and 'organizing' as social activities that the traditional division of labor between those who organize and those who implement has become obsolete and indeed counterproductive. The challenge? Organizations have to rediscover the practice of organizing from the ground up. - Etienne Wenger, Researcher, consultant, and author Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity.

MARK ADDLESON is an Associate Professor of Management Economics at George Mason University School of Public Policy, Washington D.C., USA. Before joining George Mason University in 1994, Professor Addleson taught for more than 20 years in his native South Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand's Graduate School of Business Administration, where he was head of the General Management program. From 1989 to 1994, Professor Addleson was a director of Econometrix, a firm of consultants with clients across all sectors of the economy. He has consulted with many companies and public and non-profit organizations both in the United States and South Africa. Professor Addleson publishes regularly in academic journals and has authored books, newspaper articles, and papers presented at local and overseas conferences. He has been awarded numerous research grants and the Wits Business School's award for teaching excellence.