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These are books and audio recordings I have found inspirational and helpful in the past several years. There are Amazon.com links for those items available through Amazon.com. Please let me know of your favorites and new discoveries that are not listed.
The Path of Least Resistance for Managers: Designing Organizations to Succeed
Fritz is the founder of a field called "structural consulting" and has worked extensively with Peter Senge, himself known for his theories on "the learning organization." Fritz is also the author of Corporate Tides (1996), in which he explained the "laws of organizational structure." He calls this new book an updated, redesigned, and rewritten next-generation version of Corporate Tides. He explains that organizational structure may impede organizational learning, that achievement in one part of an organization may not be replicated because of organizational barriers. Moreover, he shows that success in one department of an organization may actually lead to difficulties or problems in another; Fritz calls this phenomenon structural oscillation. He explains the key principles of structural tension and structural conflict. He also provides examples that demonstrate why best efforts do not always result in success and suggests ways to redesign organizations so that they can succeed.
Janet McCallen Fritz and Senge work a lot together, and the influence of the Learning Organization is great in this work, which I found quite helpful. It’s especially helpful in analyzing why an organization might seem to repeat certain patterns over and over. His basic advice is to create a hierarchy of objectives to resolve oscillation. That is, you can prize and aspire to both A and B, but you need to know, when push comes to shove, whether A or B is more important. If you don’t, your organization will tend to maximize A for a while, until B’s proponents start fussing, then it will maximize B. And repeat the pattern. This produces oscillation, like a rocking chair. Knowing which is more important allows for forward progress.
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