About the GO Society - A radio interview with Ken Shepard, Founding President of the Society

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Speaker B Welcome to the new Management Network with your hosts, Don and Bonie Folk. This program will help you get the competitive upper hand in your organization. Now here are your hosts, Don and Bonie folk.

Speaker C Hello, my name is Don Folk and I'm a management consultant in Toronto and I'm here with my professional and life partner, Bonnie Folk.

Speaker D Hi, I'm Bonnie. Welcome to our show. Our guest today is Dr. N. Shepard, president of the Global Organization Design Society, principal at the Canadian center for Leadership and Strategy, and a member of the new Management Network. Hi Ken, welcome to the show.

Speaker E Hi.

Speaker D Graduating from Antioch College, Ken was awarded a master's degree in city planning from the University of Pennsylvania and a phd in management from UCLA. Ken has worked as manager in the private, public and not for profit sectors and has taught at several universities. He founded and directed the management of Change program at the Niagara Institute, a canadian leadership development center for senior executives. During the last 20 years, Ken has worked as a management consultant in Canada and abroad, and he resides in Toronto. Today we are going to be speaking with Dr. Shepherd in the context of his role as founding president of the global organization Design Society. We are going to ask him about the society's work in bringing to world awareness and youth an improved and sane making approach to designing and managing organizations, these same organizations that so many of us work in and that directly and indirectly affect us all. Our show today will be a conversation in four segments. First, we'll learn a little bit more about Ken and find out what he means about when he refers to organization design and how organization design is experienced by people working at different levels of the organization, the relatively primitive stage of the field, and some foundational breakthroughs that promise to revolutionize the way we design and manage our organization. Second, we'll talk about how these important new ideas developed and how they spread around the world and how they've been used by some of the world's major public and private organizations. Then we'll talk about some examples of typical dysfunction, waste and deep problems that good organization design can solve, including current problems facing some of the world's largest corporations contributing to our current economic cris. Third, we'll discuss the history of the Go Society, the global organization society, its purpose of transforming how the world designs and manages organizations, and how it is different from many and many other professional associations. Fourth, we'll talk about implications for the future, not only for organizations, but also about how we appreciate and leave our lives, and how you can learn more about these ideas don will be leading off.

Speaker C Ken, please get us going by telling us a little bit more about yourself and your background.

Speaker E Okay, be glad to. For many years I was a manager who suffered unnecessary stress and frustration in really poorly designed and managed organizations. I mean, early on in my career I spent some several quite painful years in a professional organization of about 100 where because of poor design and lack of management practices, politics and waste really flourished. And only about a fourth of us, in fact did much productive work as a technically trained person. Promoted the managerial role without orientation or training and how to manage. I myself was most certainly part of the problem at midlife. I went back to get my doctorate in management at UCLA, and since then I've done some teaching and graduate management programs. I've designed and facilitated some executive development programs. I've managed and I've done a lot of consulting. My focus has been on organizational strategy and designing the organization structure to implement that strategy. About 1978, I heard a fellow by the name of Elliot Jacks present his concepts of organization design. His concepts set my mind racing to reflect and reinterpret my own career history and my management experiences in a very powerful new way. It was really sane making. It felt enlightening. I personally experienced such a significant jump. My effectiveness changed both as a consultant and I really never looked back.

Speaker C Can you tell us a little bit about the field of organization design and why it was that the jack's conceptual breakthroughs were so significant?

Speaker E Well, organization design, it's a fairly abstract concept. It's used and understood quite differently by people in different roles depending on where they are in the organization. The people at the bottom, middle and top really see it differently. Like most of us are familiar with the operations levels of organizations, those first three levels, the frontline first line managers and directors, their focus is it's on the short term. It can be for hours, up to maybe a couple of years. And people in those roles think about organization design to include how the work is organized efficiently, how problems are solved, how to improve the quality of first line management. Ideally, if it's well done, the focus is on continuous improvement. Here's where quality and six sigma and reengineering and many of those recent interventions have had their focus. But without an integrative.org design concepts to link these measures into the rest of the organization, their success rate has been a bit disappointing. Now, just above this operational level, at the next level up is the vice president level, the two to five year horizon. It's the first level of general management. We call it level four, people at that level need to do systems thinking, need to be capable of systems thinking. And organization design here is required to support designing and managing innovation and change, especially things like reengineering work processes to improve work across functions. And above. The VP, of course, is the president of a business unit. We call it level five, can either be a standalone business unit or part of a larger corporation. And here the president is focused on continuously redesigning the business unit strategy and structure to fit us. A changing environment, usually, and naturally with a longer time horizon, maybe five to ten years. And he or she needs to understand and design the business, its strategy, its structure, its staffing. And it's at this level that most people may be thinking about when they use the term organization design being the president's prerogative. But we have a lot of larger organizations beyond the business unit. Maybe we aren't so familiar with them, but some of the world's largest corporations like GE, Unilever, Shell, where those in corporate roles of their exec vps, their group heads, and then the CEO at the very top, they're at what we call level six, seven and eight. And they're primarily concerned with organization strategy and design issues of really the long term direction of the corporation. The key competencies and technologies they're going to be involved in they're going to need over the next maybe 20 years, and how to integrate businesses they've purchased, developing cultural sensitivities for their managers. Some of them work in 150 countries and up and to put together management teams and processes that work across those cultures. That's quite something. That's organization design. That's what they mean by design.

Speaker C Listeners who've been following this series will recognize that we've been talking in some other broadcasts about some of these same concepts. Herb Kopowitz was telling us about accountability and how that works. And if you did hear that broadcast, you'll recognize that he was talking about the same kind of levels that Ken is talking about. And earlier on, I did a program on talent management which was built around the same ideas. But Ken, as you talk about it, organization design sounds complex, almost overwhelming. So how do we get our heads around it?

Speaker E Yeah, it is. It's kind of abstract or arcane. It's a relatively new field within management. In fact, if you go to get an MBA, there's no course on, generally no course on organization design. So the field's basically post World War II. There was a guy by the name of Chandler who quite a scholar, who documented and wrote about the development of this massive new corporation, General Motors, and how strange these things were. And since then, the field has mostly been descriptive. It's practiced as an esoteric art practiced by top of the house managers and by their advisors. Who are these top of the house consultants? And herefore, it's really been a craft. It's been done by poorly defined rules of thumb, copying others. More of an art form than a science. And there have been many artisans, each with their own alchemy, each with their own fragments of truth, working on different parts of the organization, but really no way to fit things together. We get kind of a Rube Goldberg organization, patched and fixed with baling wire and duct tape. And people say, yeah, the layer. But no one has the definition of what a layer is or should be or tested concepts of how many layers or which ones to take out. So there was one remarkable meeting at UCLA, a conference where some of the great management thinkers came together. It was convened by Howdy Kunz, who'd written the article for the Harvard Business Review called the management theory Jungle. And the conference, howdy was saying, can we build toward an integrated theory of management? And most participants, after several days of discussion, says, it can't be done. But there was one voice at that 1961 conference that had the confidence that it could be done. And that was the voice of Wilfred Brown, then CEO of Glacier Metals Company in the UK, and 14 years into the world's longest organizational research project. Now, 50 years later, we in the Ghost Society, which we'll talk about later, feel that we have the research experience and the increased confidence that it can, in fact, be done, and our society is setting out to help do it.

Speaker C So what are these breakthrough concepts that underlie this approach to organization design and management?

Speaker E Well, they've gone by a number of names over the years. One time, they were called stratified systems theory. Today, a lot of people around the world call it requisite organization. Now, the first real breakthrough concept was to discover the natural and measurable levels of work complexity. Back in that time, post World War II, I think the british navy was said to have had some 30 some levels of authority. And Jax and Wilfred Brown, who I mentioned before, found that the fully developed business unit should have no more than five levels, and that the largest corporations in the world, or governments of the world's largest countries, really need no more than seven or eight levels. And Jax formulated a measure analogous to a thermometer to measure the level of work complexity at each level of work in the organization. So he now had the means to say for a given strategy, how many levels do you need and what should be done at each level? And if you are going to take out the superfluous levels, which ones to take out and how to fix it. That was a huge breakthrough. Now the second one was his discovery of the levels of human capability that mature progressively over one's life and the development of several methods. He also developed methods to assess that capability. So it turns out that these levels, it's really deep research into psychology and it really built on the work of Piaget, who worked mostly with children. But Jax extended this into adults.

Speaker C And I see by our time that we're coming up to a break here. And I know that there was a third breakthrough that Brown and Jax talked about, but let's pick that up when we come back.

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Speaker B You're listening to the new management network bringing you practical insight into problem solving in a variety of business settings and management situations. Now back to your hosts, Don and Bonnie folk.

Speaker C Hi, it's Don folk, and I'm here today with Ken Shepard. And we were talking about Brown's and Jack's three breakthroughs that led to the structure of organization design that Ken is talking about. And we're just about to talk about.

Speaker E The third breakthrough, Ken, which was, well, it was Brown's and Jack's formulation of accountability and a set of effective managerial practices and that really help align the strategy, structure, staffing, work processes, compensation, talent, all that stuff into producing a completed system. It was a wonderful, insightful conceptualization of very light practices that can be learned and done, and managers can be held accountable for doing them. So in all these concepts and system are easy to grasp. They have lots of face validity for general managers at the VP level and above. They provide a light diagnostic framework a senior manager can carry around in their head without reliance on staff to diagnose design. And they can diagnose design and manage with much greater effectiveness. Personally, I found the system organized around levels of complexity of work and human capability based on this profound understanding of the time of intention and discretion over time. These really helped me to see the many fragments of truth I've learned in my doctoral program and management experience. And even in reflecting on my own career in a new light, I felt I knew when and where to use the various tools I had learned and which I should forget about.

Speaker C Well, how was this requisite approach to organization design developed?

Speaker E Well, it was a very unique time set of conditions. You can picture while the setting was post war Britain and there were no management schools there. I mean, that was before the NBA. The war had catalyzed a lot of innovation needed for the war, and many were very helpful about this new field of behavioral sciences. And the Tavistock Institute had just been founded, and people really wanted to build new, more participative and anti authoritarian ways of working together. Having just beaten Hitler and the Nazis, they were looking for new ways. And here was a very unlikely person. A british industrialist. Wilfred Brown, CEO and primary owner of Glacier Metals Company, was unique in being one of the only socialists owning and running a major company. He had been deeply affected by the miserable conditions he had experienced in Scotland during the Great Depression, and he wanted to find a better way for management and labor to work together in a company. He had already been reading quite widely. He was a self taught man, not no formal education and had been experimenting with workers participating in work councils at each level of his company for a number of years. And then he came across. He was impressed by a brilliant young clinician, Dr. Elliot Jacks, a Canadian by birth, but who'd been in World War II helping with the war effort there. He was a medical doctor from Johns Hopkins, a psychoanalyst. I think he'd studied with Melanie Klein and he had a phd in social systems from MIT. I think his dissertation was the culture of the factory, still a very famous concept. And he was a founding member of the Tavistock Institute dedicated to action research in improving human relations. Now Brown retained Jax to work. About half was, I think Jax did psychoanalysis in the morning and every afternoon he went to glacier metals and he worked as a consultant to Brown and then he worked with these work councils which were organized at each level of glacier metal. And he did it for the next 14 years. Now, working in this very unusual and long term collaboration, Brown and Jax, they experimented, reflected, they wrote a lot about solving problems at every level and they were both very pragmatic, committed. They were committed to learning through experimentation and observation and they really wanted to build an integrated management system. I think one of the things that really contributed, it was really unusual that both men had been through psychoanalysis. They both kept journals. They were both very reflective in looking at their own modeling and what they were doing and the effects it had. I think it made a great learning team.

Speaker C And so the two men working in one company over a long period of time to develop an approach that is now used in many countries around the world. How did this happen?

Speaker E Well, I talked about how, well, one formally educated, one self educated through reading, both reflective, they were diligent writers and they were willing and able speakers. They wrote prolifically, they wrote articles, monographs, books. One of the earlier ones was Wilford Brown's book explorations and management which can still be found in some bookstores that was 61. And both traveled, they were willing to travel anywhere. They both traveled to the US and other countries to attend management conferences and to consult. And I think I told you that Brown went to that UCLA conference back in one. So this work had been going on, I don't know, ten or twelve years. And then the way it spread abroad, well, a research team from one of those major national trade associations in Japan which are so famous for really sparking the learning of japanese companies, they visited glacier in the early sixty s and they spent some time and studied the method extensively. They even hired one of the senior glacier HR managers and took the ideas back to Japan and disseminated them throughout the trade association. Some say that the popular Toyota way that we read about today has many of those elements, many elements that are consistent with that early glacier work. Then another thing about spreading it. Brown founded. There were no management schools in the UK at that time. Brown founded the Glacier Institute of Management in the early sixty s. First to educate his own managers at his own company. But then he opened it up to educate managers for major firms throughout the UK. And a bit later Brown, who was quite a leader in society, helped found Brunel University. It was a new red brick school. And as its chancellor he helped found an interdisciplinary program and he helped install Elliot Jacks as its chair to further this work they'd been doing. So the program was called the Brunel Institute for Organizational and Social Studies, Bios for short. And with a large team of well trained clinicians they worked on major contracts for the british health service, restructuring it a couple of times and many others, many other companies and government organizations all developing and applying these methods using action research. Then they also had doctoral students in the Brunel program from all over the world. And upon finishing, these graduates took the work back to their own countries where they taught in universities and started consulting. So there's centers in South Africa and Argentina, parts of South America. That was the way it spread. And so then the books. There was a major us consultant, Walter Mahler, M-A-H-L-E-R who in the early 70s worked with a bunch of Fortune 100 companies. He worked with GE, Exxon, Dupont. He read that explorations and management book and he took many of the ideas about levels in executive development into GE CEO at that time, Reg Jones. That was the early seventy s and helping to design GE's world famous management talent pool selection and development method. And it was with those methods that GE managed to select Jack Welsh who went on to really build Crotonville, their university and put in the courses so that managers learned the skills they needed before they were promoted to the next level. It's amazing that GE at that time had these five magical levels of the business unit and now they knew what managers needed to manage at each level and they put it in place. Another way it spread abroad. McKinsey consultants picked it up and some McKinsey consultants took it to Australia, to a huge mining company called CRA. And that led to one of the biggest projects in this field over a period of ten years, where it led to enormous increases in productivity and improvements in labor management relations. Another way it spread is the US army contracted with Jacks in the early eighty s and has used his methods for over 20 years in working with the general Officer corps. I think Colin Powell when he was there gave Jackson award for his work in helping the general staff. Another thing that happened here in Canada, Shell and Inco invited Jax to speak in the early seventy s. And it's kind of ironic that both Inco, a big mining resource processing company, and Shell have major requisite organization programs today. Also in the 70s, Imperial Oil, that's Exxon in Canada, invited Jax to review all of their restructuring plans. And word spread over to Nortel, another canadian company who used the concepts of the layer and to develop the broadband concepts. And that spread through many of the Fortune 100 companies back in the late eighty s and early ninety s. I think work spread probably to about 20 other major companies in Canada. So it's quite a hotspot here. More recently in Europe, the concepts have been used at Unilever and Tesco, one of the largest retail companies in the world. And Shell used these methods to reorganize 150 ish. I don't know exactly how many country vertically or integrated country business units they had, but they used Jack's methods to integrate into a fully integrated global oil company. And this work was done, I think from 95 to 2005 and was recently reported at a major us conference, the HR Planning association. Then recent world conferences on our practices brought together practitioners from up to 14 countries to Toronto to share their experiences and learn. And I think that's how it's spreading today. So that's a bit about how it spread.

Speaker C Well, these methods have spread very widely and can help us understand what ceos see in value in this levels based approach. Now we've got about a minute here before we go to break, so we may have to pick you up again after our next break to finish this segment off.

Speaker E Well good. Let me just make one point. It's not all ceos who like this method. It tends to be CEO. The top 10% of ceos who still read extensively, who are thoughtful and who demand they have a rationale for what they do. And also HR executives are attracted to this approach, but they almost always are well trained managers with operations experience, often in technical fields where there are good definitions in science. And they're not people who come whose careers have been solely in HR. So it's a thoughtful, reflective kind of person who picks this up.

Speaker C Well, we're needing to take a break now, and when we come back we'll carry on with Ken Shepard.

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Speaker B You're listening to the new management network, bringing you practical insight into problem solving in a variety of business settings and management situations. Now back to your hosts, Don and Bonie folk.

Speaker C It's Don folk, and I'm here today with Ken Shepard, and we're talking about global organization design.

Speaker E Sure, don, you were just asking about why ceos and what type of ceos like this? I was saying that it generally tends to be those ceos who are more read and think and reflect. And they may have been technically trained. They may have come out of engineering or some science because they know the power of something, being well defined and being tested and having a science base. They like that, and they're aware of the waste and destructiveness of management fads of the month. And they're looking for concepts with a base in science that's been researched, tested, that will endure. So they're capable of systems thinking, and if they are, they'll see it right away. This theory comes in like a strong beacon of light in the darkness of the management theory jungle. It really is an escape from the fat of the month. That's why they like it. It really provides leverage. It gives you the power to work strategically. You really implement your strategy, and you can do it with a lot less pushing rocks uphill. The reason they like it, it's a good theory that makes complicated work actually light and easy. Rather than carrying around 100 tools, I would rather have one integrated tool. And I think Jack system is like having a swiss army knife, as opposed to all the disorganized tools in different sizes, all with different handles and big work boxes you got to lug around in a wheelbarrow and with a lot of staff to help you. It's a light thing. And the other thing about these concepts, once you have them in your head, it's like a nonsense screen. There's no field so full of fads and pufferies and that of HR. And so many things in the marketplace that are being sold to HR and executives aren't worth much. And how do you make sense of them? Well, knowing this theory really helps you sort it out.

Speaker C So specifically, how might Ro serve the CEO in their role?

Speaker E Well, the CEO has really got to make all the systems work. It contributes really many strategies. There's a joke about spot strategic planning, and they call it spot, and that means strategic plan on top shelf. And if the CEO has done the requisite work and put these structures in place, implementing with accountability is fast and easier. I think that is the major lever. Some ceos use this theory to help benchmark where their competitors are. If their competitor has a function designed at a certain level, they know that if they're going to win, they're going to have to design their own function at a higher level than the competitor. And they can do it and use this theory to inform that. Then they can staff it. They can set the accountabilities and set up the work practices using this theory so that their strategy works. I would say that's key.

Speaker C Now, the RO concepts also help align. Can you talk a bit about that, Ken?

Speaker E Well, they all fit together. You're talking about if you know the level that a role is required, then you know the level of capability in the person. You also know the level of compensation that is fair and will be perceived as fair. That's what you're talking about. Exactly right. All parts of the system actually fit together. They can be measured and they have a scientific base to. So it's. Engineers really love this. I know you're an engineer and I know that's why you were attracted to it. Well, it's true.

Speaker C And I want to take some time here, Ken, to talk about the global organization design society.

Speaker E Can I say one more thing about, just before we finish that one quote, I really like to, as we've interviewed ceos around the world, why they use this thing and the insight that came from that. And there's one really powerful quote, and this one guy, he says, after we implemented the basic levels and accountability concept, it was like we had put the keystone in place. It's like everything we were doing was easier to implement. We had had a six sigma project we had launched earlier, but it was stalled for some reason or other. But after we did this requisite work, six Sigma took off. Everything was easier. That's the quote.

Speaker C That's the quote. Well, back to the society. Ken, I feel strongly about the society, as you know, because at the new management network we have quite a number of our people around the world involved at various levels in the society, and we see it as a really key research and development core of that aspect of our practice, dealing with organization and organization design. So we put a lot of effort into it, but nothing like the effort you've put as the entrepreneur driving it. So maybe you could tell us about the society, how it was formed and what its purpose is and what makes it so unique.

Speaker E Sure. Well, I told you that Elliot Jacks was here, was born in Toronto, but he came back here after working with the army for many years and had a number of major projects. And we discovered him and he put on major training courses for senior consultants and a lot of line managers over a period of about eight years. We had thousands of days of senior managers and consultants in training. And when Elliot died in 2003, we had kind of a wake, a memorial service, and we looked at each other and said, this work is too important to die. And we say, we're going to do something. And you were there, Don, and we sat, there was a group of advisors in Toronto and we decided to form your association. So it's an incorporated not for profit association made up of business users, consultants and academics. And our purpose is to really support the increase in knowledge and skilled use of these concepts around the world, both to those who already know it and to new people. And it's really our vision as we do our strategic planning. It's really over the next 20 years, it's to change the way the world thinks about designing and organizing their various public private sector, not for profit organizations and really transforming them in their effectiveness and their service to society. So that's our vision.

Speaker C So then you've had this organization moving here with several phases in mind in terms of what the associate society is trying to do. Can you just give us a thumbnail sketch of that chronology?

Speaker E Sure. In the early days, we were kind of exploring, and there's a certain analogy and passion. I just want to tell a little story. Somebody handed me a book about William Smith, the surveyor in England in the early 18 hundreds who surveyed canals. And this guy discovered stratification in the earth. I mean, he discovered how to go down in coal mines and figure out that if he found a certain strata, he knew where he was in a particular area of the country. He made the first maps of the UK. Well, it wasn't in this guy's lifetime that he was appreciated. In fact, it took the third generation. Now, us sitting around that table, figured out we were that third generation. And these efforts and the research has been done over 50 years, and we're ready to go. And so what did we do? First thing we did the incorporation, and we put up a beginning website. We decided we needed a conference. We set up an international board, and we wanted to write a book. Because Jackson had been a clinician, he'd written these theoretical books. We wanted to write a book about practice. And so we put on our first conference in 2005 with people from around the world. I think we had something like 14 countries represented, and this was not your normal conference. All of these people were at vice president level and above, and they stayed. It was a long conference, and it was a different kind of conference is that everybody who came assigned permission for their words, their presentations, their images, all to be used by the Society for educational purposes. They basically gave away everything they brought to the conference very generously, and they were aware that we were going to video it and put it on the website and make it available. Managers around the world. And in this first phase, we put these things in place. Now, the second phase, we had another conference, and our board is going through a period of strategic planning. And here's where we got this great idea, by interviewing these ceos and listening to the practice that we're not a small silo of a particular approach. We really think we have the keystone elements of organization design, and we have evidence that linking to other major approaches. One is to the approach of Jay Goldbraith, who ties design to strategy. Another is to quality and lean. Six sigma. We've done the exploratory work. We know that if you do these together, they work better. So in this next phase, we've titled our journal organization Design. We're just founding it and putting out its first issue, and it's called organization Design. The tagline is toward an integrated approach to designing and managing organizations based on these foundational concepts I've talked about.

Speaker C Now, Ken, we have to go to a break here, but when we come back, I want you to tell us a little bit about the upcoming conference and some other things.

Speaker E Very good.

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Speaker B You're listening to the new management network bringing you practical insight into problem solving in a variety of business settings and management situations. Now back to your hosts, Don and Bonie folk.

Speaker C It's Don Folk and I'm here with Ken Shepard and he's telling us about the three phases of the global organization design Society so far.

Speaker E Sure. So I think I just mentioned the new journal and this hour we think that with our keystone things we can justify that our methods can really make an integrated approach to design effective. The other thing we're doing is moving aggressively into other languages. We're moving our conference offshore. We've held it in Toronto a couple of times now we're moving to Buenos Aires in 2009, to Melbourne in Australia in 2011 and then to Europe 2013. And our website we're putting in, we have versions of the journal in Spanish and Portuguese. We're increasing. We also use Google translators so people from any country. Basically the site can automatically translate pages into 35 languages. So we're putting quite a bit of effort into going global. So what about this conference in Buenos Aires? We're right in the middle of a potential global economic crisis. And what's really true is that Jackson Brown's theory can help explain why we're in the mess we're in. It's somehow in our short term stock market and the way we reward our executives, they're rewarded for this short term term thinking. So they tend to generate do things in the short term. There is no accountability in many of our modern corporations for the midterm or the long term. And there is no sense of felt fair pay and that short term rewards have led to short term greed. And no one is being rewarded for this long term thinking. So that theme is very much going to be treated. And we have some major colleagues who have done a lot of research on how executive compensation has gotten really out of line to destroy trust in society. The other thing, in many of the countries, well in Latin America, Africa and so forth, many of the businesses are small and medium sized. Businesses now requisite has been tried by the US army by a lot of large corporations, but it's also very effective in small ones. Actually the organization vistage or people know it by tech groups. These are CEO learning groups all over the world. There are quite a few at their international conference. I think several hundred of them went to sequential sessions introducing them to the Jack's work at their last international conference. And I just visited about eight different vistage or tech groups down in Pennsylvania where they studied the book thoroughly over a year's time, and many of them are starting to implement it in their small businesses. Well, the first issue of our journal is going to be putting requisite in small and medium sized businesses. So we're moving globally with language. We're moving to how requisite helps with some of the world issues and we're going to explore in our special issues the journal, how to apply it in places where it has not been applied before. So we're looking forward to this conference in Buenos Aires. We're also going to print our journal in English and for that conference in Spanish as well. So these are major efforts.

Speaker C That's great. I have the privilege, Kenneth, sitting on the board of directors of the society, and I've been party to this process of trying to think through the vision going forward. But maybe you could say a few words for our listeners about what that vision is and if you're successful with it, what will have happened in the next 20 years?

Speaker E Well, I think, don, I really appreciate you being on the board because you're one of the most senior management consultants in the field with a long term view. We have a very senior board. It's quite unusual. And we do have discussions on this longer term. And we have a vision of really changing the paradigm of how it's like Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions. Right now we live in a world that's burdened by the Hays system, by mechanical, transactional things that really burden us down with all kinds of nonsense. And we see moving to a new way of designing very effective organizations where people have room to really use their discretion, where managers are held accountable for being effective and good managers and supporting participation by their people. So it's a vision of very different and very effective organizations. The other part of the vision is we think if this really is elaborated well, it has implications for how labor law is put together, how our young people are taught about organizations and about talent and developing their talent, and it has implications for individual career planning. I'll tell you, the people I've met who work in requisitely structured organizations say they're sane, they feel productive, they feel they can stretch and use their talent, that talent is recognized and promoted, that pay is fair, and that, well, they're happier with their strategy, they're happier with the structure. They're happier with the way people are placed in roles. They feel their roles are clear. There's more trust. I don't know what else you can say. They're just better organizations. So that's our vision, and we're trying to bring that to the world.

Speaker C So, Ken, we don't have too much time left here today, unfortunately. But I'd like you to give us a thumbnail sketch here and how our listeners all over the world can learn more about the society and particularly its free resources and why managers should be interested in accessing these materials.

Speaker E Well, sure. That was one of the things we talked about when we founded the society. Management books can sell for anywhere from fifty dollars to one hundred dollars apiece. And if you picture yourself as a manager in some country in Peru or in Africa, by the time you get a book, months have gone by and it may have cost you 100 and some dollars. So what we did is we went to the founders of the field, still alive, and got them to dedicate or give permission for us to digitize their books and make them available. Entire books around the world free. We have many dissertations, the original research. We have our new book. You can buy it from Amazon for $65, but you can download it for free from our site. So if you want to learn about this and get the insights, what I would do, I'd go to the site, and there's a very Ken craddock, who used to work with Deming and who did the amazing thousand page bibliography about requisite first of all, you can download his bibliography, but better than that, I think as an introduction, he and Herb Koblowitz wrote frequently asked questions. And that is one of the best short overviews of the field. You could read that, then you could download our book, and then you could just scan and have a great time on the site.

Speaker C And that's at www.globalro.org. And Bonnie, I think we've got to bring this interesting discussion to a close and over to you.

Speaker D Well, thank you. And thank you, Ken. I've enjoyed this conversation about organizational design and the in depth background you covered and the insight you bring to the whole field of organization design. We encourage you, the listener, to explore this subject further with Ken at [email protected] that's Kenshopard Kenshepard at Global R o or with dawn and me. Email us at folk at Vanet, CA. That's Fowke at vprvictor ianet, CA or by telephone at 1803 872165 now, next Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. Pacific or 02:00 p.m., Eastern, Don and I will be in conversation with Edwin Wang of raise International in Beijing about management challenges in China rising exploring the revolution underway in management in China and how western ideas are being absorbed and enhanced in the leading chinese enterprises.

Speaker C And that's it for our program for today.

Speaker D Thank you for joining our show.

Speaker B Thank you again for joining us. As an important part of the new management network, we hope you picked up some tips and plans to help you improve your management technique. Remember, for more information, visit new Hyphen Management Network.