Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest - Softcover

Block, Peter

 
9781609948221: Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest
Softcover
ISBN 10: 160994822X ISBN 13: 9781609948221
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Revised and expanded: this classic guide to business leadership presents “an original and profound new view on how to run an organization” (Library Journal).

Despite all the evidence calling for change, most organizations still rely on patriarchy and control as their core form of governance. The result is that they stifle initiative and spirit and alienate people from their work. In Stewardship, Peter Block calls for a dramatic shift in how we distribute power, privilege, and the control of money. “Stewardship,” he writes, “is the willingness to be accountable for the well-being of the larger organization by operating in service, rather than in control, of those around us.”

Block has revised and updated the book throughout, including a new introduction addressing what has changed—and what hasn't—in the twenty years since the book was published. It also includes a new chapter on applying stewardship to the common good of the wider community. Speaking in practical terms about how stewardship transforms every function and department for the better, Block also offers tactical advice on gearing up to implement these reforms.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Block is the author of eight books and a partner in the training company Designed Learning. He is the recipient of many awards—including the Organization Development Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award and ASTD’s Award for Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning—and was named to Training Magazine’s HRD Hall of Fame.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction
to the Second Edition

What Has Changed?

REVISING A BOOK after twenty years is an occasion to reflect on what has changed in that time. There is, of course, the wish that the world had gotten better. You want to believe that there is less suffering, more kindness, and, for all peoples, a world of more possibility. This wish to see progress is even stronger considering the practice of stewardship, a clearly idealistic and spirit-based undertaking.

Stewardship as used here is meant to be a choice to (1) act in service of the long run, and (2) act in service to those with little power. In historical terms, this has meant to care for the well-being of an unborn king or the next generation. For today’s world, it translates into creating accountable and committed workplaces without resorting to increased control or compliance as governing strategies. This is not an easy assignment, considering the still-dominant paradigm of leadership, which is about good parenting and its stronger cousin, patriarchy. Patriarchal leadership, the common practice in most organizations, acts in service of the short term and works in the interest of those with high power, not low power.

Stewardship, then, is an intention to distribute power widely, especially to those at the lowest levels of the organization. It calls us to organize workplaces based on relatedness and collaboration as an alternative to the bell-curve ideology of competitiveness that is used to rationalize patriarchy.

Stewardship also is a call for a purpose larger than today’s drive for material gain, and it pays attention to supporting the common good for our communities, the earth, and people outside the usual cast of stakeholders. This takes us a step away from the individualism and self-interest that is so prevalent.

Against this backdrop, here are reflections on developments over the last twenty years that make stewardship an even more urgent form of governance.

It’s a Digital World

The biggest change in organizational life is that we have been beamed into all the joys and sorrows of the virtual and digital world. It is a romanticized world, riding on the wings of speed and frictionless transactions with no human beings involved. It is mesmerizing to grasp the world in a handheld device, much smarter than we will ever be. Technology is credited with bringing the world closer together, spreading democracy, changing the nature of business, supplying round-the-clock connectivity. Geography has been made obsolete. Here are some noteworthy aspects of this life in a work context:

• Workers are members of teams made up of people they have never been in a room with. This has given rise to the question “How do we build a team that never or rarely meets face-to-face?”

• We have willingly given up the forty-hour workweek. We are online and in touch and reachable most of our waking hours. If you ask people to park their cell phones at the door, 40 percent say that this is not possible.

• We work at home. Our bedroom has become our office. We can work in our pajamas most of the time. This allows us to move our residence anywhere, supposedly take better care of our family, and have more control over our time. We can also go to school at home, so our dining room becomes our classroom.

What is new is the wedding of futurism to what might be called “virtualism”: a vision of the future within which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.

—Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

• With a device in our pocket and plugs in our ears, we can have background music or be in phone contact all the time. You go to public places and you see that most people have something in their ear and are somewhere else. There is no longer a need to be here now. You can go anywhere but here, anytime you wish.

• We all participate in this electronic world, one where speed is a value in and of itself. If something is quicker, it is attractive. If we are quicker, we are attractive. Slow food is considered a revolution. Fast food, a value proposition.

• Controlling costs is now the dominant value for most organizations, replacing the priority once given to the customer and the employee. We can now outsource most every job and function (except top management) in order to reduce labor and benefit costs. We cut down on travel costs and training on the rationale that current audio and video technology approximates the sights and sounds of being in the room together in real time.

The virtual world is sold on these features. A promise of more freedom to the individual. Work at home, learn at will, and control your time. Get information you need on demand. Be a global citizen. All true. Big change in twenty years.

What Is Good for Business Is Good for the World

A second major shift is that the private sector has fully come into its own power to name the debate and create the context for what matters. It is the dominant sector. In other times, the church and the military set the tone for the society. Once it was the government and concern for the social good. Not so now.

The lens for assessing our common interests and institutional well-being is the business lens. It is the focusing device. This defines the conversation: Government is primarily assessed on its waste. The social-service sector is encouraged to merge, eliminate overlap, increase leverage and productivity. The private sector sings, “Why can’t a school be like a business?” Our answer to the “public education problem” is to institute variable pay for performance and stronger measurements as tools for reform. Pure business plays. Intuition and experience have been replaced by evidence. Evidence-based medicine, evidence-based learning, evidence-based decision making. All business terms. This language and reverence for business seeps into all conversation about a better future. We are also looking for businesspeople to run every institution: the hospital, the school, the prison, the government, social services, the church, even the Girl Scouts. We consider business success the ultimate credential.

This is not an argument against business, for businesses are the stabilizing institutions in most communities. They contribute to communities in many more ways than creating jobs. They are the institutions most open to change and adaptation to the new world. They also bring to the community talented and committed people. Businesses provide some of our best foreign policy too; the globalization of business puts a crack in the class structure, has fought racism, and helped create a middle class where none existed. The point is not to paint business as a villain. The point is to recognize its power to frame the culture, to frame the context for how we choose to be together.

In recognizing the power of the business perspective, we see how it affects not only the way we work but also who we are becoming. It defines our new heroes. The contemporary hero is now the entrepreneur. A single soul with faith in an idea that reinvents a marketplace, disrupts a whole industry, takes everything to scale, creates new needs, and provides an escort service into the future. This inventive instinct can also take over domains once reserved for God. We clone sheep today, humans tomorrow. We are in the process of creating synthetic versions of aliveness; we send avatars to meetings, watch a screen more hours than we can count, create video games to simulate experience. In all this we are witnessing the second creation of the world, as if to say, “Thank you, God, for your hard work and the good beginning; thank you for providing a good role model—we can take it from...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
160994822X
ISBN 13 
9781609948221
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
2
Anzahl der Seiten
312
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Eu comply OÜ
hello@eucompliancepartner.com

Pärnu mnt. 139b-14
Tallinn
11317
Estland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780369371751: Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest (16pt Large Print Edition)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0369371755 ISBN 13:  9780369371751
Verlag: ReadHowYouWant, 2013
Softcover