PREFACE
by James A. Autry

I spent a lot of my life looking for answers. As a businessman for thirty-two years, including thirty years in management, I’ve started new products and renewed old ones, bought successful businesses and sold underperforming ones. I’ve hired people and promoted people; I’ve fired people and demoted people. I’ve managed a staff of ten, and I’ve managed a group of nine hundred.

For twenty of those years, I maintained the illusion that I could find the answers and be in control. When I finally realized that I couldn’t be in control and that, if I was patient, answers would find me, I began the most vibrant, creative, and productive years of my business and personal life.

In my current work with businesses of all sizes, however, I observe that the quest for answers and for control still dominates the thinking of most managers and would-be leaders. Despite all the talk about flattened organizations, dispersed decision-making and empowerment, it’s clear that most business people are just more comfortable with the old model.

The command/control system is a tough habit for business to kick. It seems almost comical these days to see on someone’s office wall a copy of the company’s Christmas tree organization chart. Anyone who has ever spent even a year in business knows that these charts don’t reflect how information and power flow in an organization. Yet there they are, like totems, for all to see, as if by seeing them the managers and employees will understand how the organization works.

The organization charts symbolize a larger problem. The charts reflect the ego’s short-term desire for power, which it thinks it will get by trying to control things. The top-down management model supports the ego needs of managers, particularly those who don’t trust their own abilities to help others become productive.

The great power quest provides a fertile opportunity for the increasing army of management authors and consultants. The result is an outpouring of books about management and leadership that now competes with popular fiction for bookstore shelf space. When one of these books appears, many executives jump at the latest promise of sure-fire prosperity, a new consulting group is born, and business people all over the country find themselves forced to embrace yet another management flavor-of-the-year.