Dysfunctions are perennial, and the tendency for organizations to screw up is perennial. Thus the need for troubleshooting. Though it focuses on the negative, it can do as much good for your company as all your efforts toward optimization, Nelson believes. The book, which includes companion software, amounts to a diagnostic tool kit. It gathers together techniques for analyzing how businesses work and pinpointing where problems are occurring, or where they're likely to crop up.
Case studies illustrate the material.
The book is geared especially for smaller businesses, which have fewer resources to devote to self-study. Managers need ways to rapidly diagnose such problems in their organization and to understand why they are occurring. He wanted a relatively quick method for doing that. So he developed CVAT, an acronym for Culture and Value Analysis Tool. CVAT profiles an organization's culture by ranking its institutional values and those of its employees.