Six Silent Killers
Subtitle: Management's Greatest Challenge
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: CRC Press LLC
Place of publication: Boca Raton, Florida
Number of pages: 291
Subjects: The Dominant Cultures of the Workplace, or Why We Can't Get There from Here; The Difficult Agenda Ahead, or When the Simple is Complex
Genres: Organizational Development Psychology (OD)
Work titles: Oganizational Psychology, Business Management, Human Resources
First sentence: This book is about the new workforce that the post-industrial society has created.  This workforce is brilliant, gifted, well educated, and go greatly frustrated by its inability to make meaningful connection with its work because of an inappropriate workplace culture.  It is also about management, which appears willing but unable to manage, motivate, and mobilize this workforce to sustained productivity.  It now seems apparent that the key to economic revitalization resides in these workers.  Regretably, management has been unable to inspire thme to sustained productive effort mainly because it has treated these professionals as workers in the past.
Description: It is a breakthrough book on the complex organization in terms of work, workers, the workplace culture and the changing nature of management.  The management of "things" has been largely taken over by computers, while the management of people has changed radically from supervision and performance appraisal to self-management, self-direction, and self-leadership.  The failure of the complex organization to acknowledge this fact is the greatest threat to its future.
Notes: We are in a critical period of our working history.  The statement may ring as dull as a cliche, but it is unfortunately true.  We have lifted the working class out of manual labor into the ranks of the educated, and then expected it to remain passive, polite, obedient, and submissive to a conforming authority.   The spirits of workers have been elevated and then dashed by anachronistic management, and atavistic managers.  How?   By a management structure and style supported by cosmetic interventions, which change nothing.   Corpocracy did not anticipate knowledge power superceding position power in the conduct of work.  Nor did corpocracy anticipate that the Electronic Age, the Internet, or a whole new gambit of decision-making at nano-second speed would anihilate the function of management as it has been known and practiced.  Today, the best able to lead have never been trained in leadership, while those still leading are frequently poorer educated, less informed, and somewhat intransigent when it comes to sharing power, authority and decision-making.  This toxic recipe has resulted in many organizational failures, which are often displayed in the "Six Silent Killers."   Workers so inclined are as invisible as social termites, destroying the infrastructure from within with no one the wiser until it is too late.  This form of retribution is the personification of worker angst.
Table of contents: label: 1
pagenum: 1
title: Introduction; label: 2
pagenum: 7
title: The Dominant Cultures of the Workplace; label: 11
pagenum: 273
title: Afterword