First Quadrant: GURU CONSULTANTS (Makes Things Simple and

Makes People Uncomfortable with Status Quo)

 

Hobbes, Thomas

1651/1958 Leviathan: Parts I and II. With an introduction by Herbert W. Schneider. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. Hobbes took the mechanistic metaphor and made it a recipe for the political economy of fear-ridden cogs in the machine of the state. Hobbes saw nature as the "war of all against all," what Nerlich (Ideology of Adventure) calls open competition? Hobbes saw war as the natural state, nature in a state of ceaseless conflict. Huge trading companies and a few nations in Hobbes' day would conduct the imperial war of conquest against all other nation states. The king could control the war of all against all by the use of fear.

 

Peters, Tom

Recent Tom Peters book such as Wow and the Tom Peters Seminar are not the be nice to people who work for you. These books are manifestos for downsizing and deconstructing the organization to prepare to the temporary workforce attached by subcontract to a small core of technical people.

 

Hammer, Michael & Champy, James

1993 Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. NY: Harper Business. This manifesto made down-sizing the organization a wall street obsession. A clear misinterpretation of Adam Smith's work; completely overlooking Smith's Moral Sentiments (available on the web); gave us more bureaucracy in a less adaptive theory of organizations; and by 1998 the fad was over, and Wall Street gurus claimed downsizing harmful to long term stability and organizational memory; Major consulting firms from Crosby to Arthur Anderson refuse to use the "R" word. ON the plus side, reengineering shook up the status quo and has trickled down to the university, where administrators have not read the Wall Street Journal's claim that we are now into post-reengineering.

 

Emery, Merrelyn (Ed.)

1993 Participative Design for Participative Democracy. Australia: Australian National University/Center for Continuing Education. 1st printing 1989. This book rocks the status quo and it makes things very simple. Either implement design principle 2 (DP2) or live the live of hierarchical mechanistic Leviathan in design principle 1 (DP1). Taking on Lou Davis' approach to Sociotechnical Systems (STS) for relying too much on Parson for the socio and too much on variance charting (the rage of TQM) for the technical; for not following the hard-headed science of Fred Emery; and anyone who (e.g. Marvin Weisbord) does not implement the Emery-search conference based in Stephen Pepper's "contextualism, this book is a must read. While Merrelyn will hate me calling her a guru, her workshops are filled to capacity, training consultants in DP!/DP2, the fundamentals of environmental scanning and the essence of purposive systems. While most of the STS large systems change approaches do action research still, they do not pick up the uncomfortable challenge of participative democracy, bottoms up change initiatives that an Emery workshop instills.