The Beauty of the Beast: Breathing New Life Into Organizations

We end up hating what we create out of love, and then we must learn to love what we've grown to hate. That's longtime organizational consultant Geoffrey M. Bellman's thesis in this slim, smart, plainspoken and occasionally overidealistic volume on embracing, in all their glory and nastiness, the organizations to which we've devoted our lives. In this way, we ennoble both them and ourselves.

The first section of Bellman's book aims to bring us to terms with everything we hate about organizations--be they corporate, institutional, governmental, or, um, our workplace--then urges us to look beneath the day-to-day workings of organizations and start imagining them at their full potential--what Bellman calls a quest for their "beauty and life."

Part Three offers 20 "renewal assertions" for sparking change within organizations--on personal, small-group, and systemic levels--and the final section actually gives some fairly concrete steps for turning those assertions into action. Throughout the book, astute self-questions prompt the process of reconciliation with organizations (even though they sometimes sound scarily like New Age exercises for interpersonal growth: "Describe your relationship with this organization as it has developed so far, beginning with awareness and moving toward love." Yikes!)

There is much to recommend here, though. If Bellman's style often evokes a gentle natured, Birkenstock-wearing family therapist, he does manage to lay out a clear path for rethinking and attempting organizational change without offering even one of those honeyed "real-life snapshots" that proliferate in this genre. That said, this book still seems best suited to those with the clout to effect change, be they CEOs, veeps, or even department supervisors. Bellman's slightly wide-eyed promise that we can all transform the organizations we're a part of if we only take a good, hard look at our own attitudes and assumptions seems oblivious of the fact that, usually, those most willing to give of themselves to an organization are already getting the most from it. In big organizations, as in dysfunctional families, sometimes the love you take just isn't equal to the love you make. --Timothy Murphy