Books published by Organizational Dialogue Press

In the wake of spectacular economic scandals, there has been a surge in interest about rule-breaking in organizations and the question of how to prevent such violations. More and more organizations are setting up 'compliance management' positions that are responsible for monitoring compliance with rules, sanctioning deviations from the rules, and establishing and interpreting new rules. The motto here is: from now on, we'll do everything by the book! In this book, we show why the hopes associated with compliance management are often overstated, while the risks are typically underestimated. Compliance management needs to be managed and discursively designed; it cannot ensure complete control.

The belief that rainmakers bring rain is a superstition, but they are able to create cohesion among the people who believe in their powers. Stefan Kühl describes how the rainmaker effect works in the model of the learning organization. Many of the modern management principles that are billed as formulas for success - e.g., clear objectives, employee identification, participation, and continuous learning - fail to deliver on their promises. However, they do have other beneficial effects. They ensure that organizations keep evolving.

In the management discourse few words are thrown about more carelessly than 'organizational culture'. While the term is usually defined too broadly-including such phenomena as assumptions, values, traditions, articles of faith, myths and artifacts-this book applies a far more narrow concept. Organizational culture, or the informal structure of an organization, is a term used to describe the behavioral expectations in an organization that have not been decided on in a formal way but that evolved by means of repetition and imitation. This book shows how this narrow definition makes it possible to more precisely observe and understand an organization's culture and its changes. Management's only way for influencing organizational culture-and this may sound paradoxical at first-is to change the organization's formal structure as for example its incentive schemes, goal-setting processes, strategic directions or hierarchy.

The linear, goal-oriented approach to projects that is so popular in management literature is only appropriate if you are dealing with well-defined problems. For projects that address poorly defined problems, however, the principles of classic project management don't work; project managers attempt in vain to maintain a linear approach, even if targets, people affected and framework conditions cannot be determined precisely. We propose a fundamentally different approach based on current organizational theory: to start out with experiments, without predetermined conclusions. Projects are not evaluated by comparing the current status to the target, but rather by assessing whether stagnation has been overcome, conflicts put aside, and shared understanding about new opportunities has been created. Project groups and steering committees are not set up at all. Power "games" are harnessed and put to use, rather than prohibited.