UP THE ORGANIZATION

Rating:
Summary: It's all about Townsend(Robert) & his attitudes
Review: 3/25/03 Though my book disappeared at some point(purchased in the mid '70's..Townsend'w writings were so controversal ,that his ideas are those that whether you agree or not ,you don't forget..Statements like"playful indolent " referring to certain employees..sentences like why don't CEO's just pick up the phone..why do they need secretaries ? show how swiftly the corporate system would just be a back shed mom & pop organization with gluts of people unemployed and except for manual labor(streets,building repairs,UPS,Fed Express,USPS and farmers,the majority of people would be receiving govt. handouts,and of cours the handsomely paid CEO's and a few slave middle management and slave clerks....It's true the system is just 'a paper chase' but would an idle society be better ?,most readers would ask of Robert Townsend.

Rating:
Summary: It's all about Townsend(Robert) & his attitudes
Review: I recall when this book first came out, Townsend's assertion that secretaries were unnecessary caused a revolt among the secretaries at his company; they staged a benign strike, to demonstrate how the company would (not) function without them.

I picked up this book again many years later, and read the vignette called "Chairman of the Executive Committee." This is a title you give someone when you boot him upstairs, in preparation for retiring him. It's a nice-sounding title, it appears to be powerful, and in practice it means nothing.

Reading Newsweek Magazine one day, I happened to notice that Katherine Graham had been dubbed "chairman of the executive committee." I made a copy of that vignette from Up the Organization and mailed it to Ms. Graham (care of Newsweek), and asked whether she realized she had been booted upstairs to the holding pen. The note must have struck a nerve; I got no reply.

If you work in a corporation, you will enjoy this book, as long as they don't make you chairman of the executive committee.

Rating:
Summary: Up the Organization
Review: I seriously recommend this book to anybody who has a job, let alone anyone who is a manager.

You can dip into it at any page - it is an "alphabet book" - 1 entry for every letter of the alphabet. It has some great ideas, is very funny and is very readable.

The edition I read also had a special guide for women in the workplace. Although I am not a woman (- but then neither is the author), I found this section also very helpful and inspiring.

Although I have already read a borrowed version, I am currently here at Amazon buying a personal copy for my collection.

It is not on my "Great Books of All Time/Desert Island" list, but it is on my next-ranking, "Very Useful Books" list.

Basho

Rating:
Summary: The best. The absolute best.
Review: I'm mystified that this title is out of print, but it seems to be a pattern with Townsend's works; I noticed that a much more recent title of his (1995) is also out of print.

Whatever the reason, if you've been lucky enough to hear about this book -- and on the off-chance you're checking out what will likely be the lone review of it, way down here at Amazon sales rank 200,000-and-then-some -- DO NOT be lulled into the obvious conclusion, namely, if the book were any good it'd still be readily available.

Though written in an era long gone (late 60s/early 70s) the info here is timeless -- and NO, it's not a bunch of idealistic boomer-inspired BS ("boomer" as in "former hippie," which is what most boomers were when this book came out). While the boomers were still smokin' ganga and sitting in, Townsend had already reversed the fortunes of Avis Rent a Car, in a revolutionary manner that completely eclipsed anything the boomers might have been dreaming about.

Any manager who has not read the chapter "People" is just not qualified to manage them, it's that simple. It, like nearly every other chapter in this book, is the last word in how to begin thinking about business -- and the lessons will work for anybody.

Find this book. Check your local used bookstore, do a search, whatever it takes. But find it, learn from it, and start building the vibrant, meaningful, profitable business you had envisioned when you got started.

Thanks Mr. Townsend -- wherever you are.

Rating:
Summary: The original and genuine; accept no substitutes
Review: Organized in short, pseudo-encyclopedic sections arranged alphabetically, this book is funny, trenchant, irreverent, iconoclastic, moral, and practical. It puts a human face on capitalism as it's practiced in the real world of providing and selling goods and services (no, .coms, it's not ABOUT stock options and IPOs, it's about providing and selling goods and services). Anybody who's had an office job, especially in middle management, will recognize the joys and dilemmas posed herein; and reading this, they will soon know what to do about visits from the Board of Directors.

Rating:
Summary: A Handbook For The Coming Corporate Revolution
Review: This book will take your breath away. It speaks in a clear, concise and direct way that makes you think differently. It is as timely as a book can be and it is shameful that it is out of print. This a delightful and profound book that contains good humor and amazing insight. Buy a used copy now and join the revolution Mr. Townsend tried to start...before it's too late. Unfortunately, it's brilliant practical advise will be difficult to apply very directly in today's corporate world. But that is only because the rising tide of corporate bureaucracy and self defeating attitudes that Robert Townsend was raging against has since grown into a title wave of self interest and corporate greed. It is time for us all to take a stand and understanding Mr. Townsend's dynamic principles will help us stand tall. This is a revolutionary handbook for those of us with a healthy discontent with things as they are...and I'm pretty sure that would be most, if not all of us. Read it, use it to change the way you think, make a commitment to fight back, and then apply it to the task at hand in whatever way you can.

Fabio - Is that anger or shame I hear in your review? You were on a roll but when you turned corporate dishonesty and abuse into a cheap segway into your own partisan politics your were guilty of the very thing you were condemning. Not a single honest CEO? Come on, it's certainly convenient to have someone to blame but Presidents and CEO's are not the guilty parties. This only happened to the corporate world because we let it. We won't make a difference by pointing a judgemental finger at who we would we like to blame. We are accountable, and we all let this happen, the only way to stop it is to make a commitment to do what we can to fight back. We are not powerless, the future is in our hands.

Read this invaluable little book and you will understand how we have all been lulled into the complacency that allowed things to turn out the way they have. It's time to take a look in the mirror, engage in a little introspection, learn to think differently, and then fight back.

Robert Townsend's unusual little book will help you do just that.

Rating:
Summary: A Handbook For The Coming Corporate Revolution
Review: This book will take your breath away. It speaks in a clear, concise and direct way that makes you think differently. It is as timely as a book can be and it is shameful that it is out of print. This a delightful and profound book that contains good humor and amazing insight. Buy a used copy now and join the revolution Mr. Townsend tried to start...before it's too late. Unfortunately, it's brilliant practical advise will be difficult to apply very directly in today's corporate world. But that is only because the rising tide of corporate bureaucracy and self defeating attitudes that Robert Townsend was raging against has since grown into a title wave of self interest and corporate greed. It is time for us all to take a stand and understanding Mr. Townsend's dynamic principles will help us stand tall. This is a revolutionary handbook for those of us with a healthy discontent with things as they are...and I'm pretty sure that would be most, if not all of us. Read it, use it to change the way you think, make a commitment to fight back, and then apply it to the task at hand in whatever way you can.

Fabio - Is that anger or shame I hear in your review? You were on a roll but when you turned corporate dishonesty and abuse into a cheap segway into your own partisan politics your were guilty of the very thing you were condemning. Not a single honest CEO? Come on, it's certainly convenient to have someone to blame but Presidents and CEO's are not the guilty parties. This only happened to the corporate world because we let it. We won't make a difference by pointing a judgemental finger at who we would we like to blame. We are accountable, and we all let this happen, the only way to stop it is to make a commitment to do what we can to fight back. We are not powerless, the future is in our hands.

Read this invaluable little book and you will understand how we have all been lulled into the complacency that allowed things to turn out the way they have. It's time to take a look in the mirror, engage in a little introspection, learn to think differently, and then fight back.

Robert Townsend's unusual little book will help you do just that.

Rating:
Summary: Want to howl with laughter? Read this.
Review: UP the organization - Robert Townsend

What a terrific little book this is: full of practical recommendations to avoid companies becoming brain-dead bureaucratic monsters, born from a genuine belief in work and in free enterprise, and, above all, as funny as Wodehouse or Charlie Chaplin. I swear, you will find yourselves laughing out loud again and again: read, for instance, the chapter entitled "Office party, how not to do the annual", with its crushing two final sentences: "Kill two birds by combining it with the annual quarter-century party. Then all your employees can see living examples (you should excuse the expression) of what twenty-five years in your outfit will do to what were once healthy human beings." This kind of laughter, I will agree, is bitter - if justified; but Townsend is also capable of gentler kinds of humour. "Once I was asked to head a new long-range planning effort. My wife listened to my glowing description of my new job. Next evening she blew the whole schmeer out of the water by asking: 'What did you plan today, dear?' Bless her." And there is his gift for epigram: "Campus recruiting: send the people who can't go." He means, send your really valuable employees: "Your man, who is on top of a job he believes in, will be worth 40 personnel-department zombies who improvise answers and deal in images". Besides, "your part-time recruiters will... come back refreshed from their trip behind the Beard Curtain. Who knows, they may even pick up an idea."
The weakness of this book is that it envisages the workers in the ideal company as a sworn band of Knights Templar under lifelong discipline to both give the customer the best possible service and to work in the most effective, time-saving, un-bureaucratic way possible. This is, of course, an ideal; but it is not the way people live. There is rather too much in here about working late and overtime; though admittedly Townsend is speaking of managers and such service providers as lawyers - and of emergencies - the underlying ethic does not really seem to differentiate between them and bottom-level workers. But in most people's lives, work is not the main consideration. Most people would, indeed, prefer to give good service than bad or none at all; most people do feel better eating bread they have honestly earned, than had by fraud or begging. But there are limits. It is hard, and I would say unnatural, for people to commit their lives to the success of their company, especially if someone else owns it. Of course, Townsend is a great supporter of shared ownership and reward schemes; but even that does not mean that the person with a one-millionth participation in General Conglobulation Ltd. can or should feel as committed to the company's future as the top managers and large shareholders. Besides, we have seen that share-ownership schemes and share issues can be easily abused by scoundrelly managers out to plunder the company.
Of course, Townsend would loathe that sort of thing. He condemns it explicitly and implicitly. The fact is that Townsend is so devoted to his view of honest dealing and committed work, that he actually becomes quite radical. He is biting about corporate racism and sexism, stinging about corporate abuse of power, and savage about the means by which companies abuse the legal system to avoid paying fines they had perfectly well deserved - and about corporate law-breaking in general. Communism - he says quite rightly (writing in 1970) - will not destroy the American system: what will destroy it "is when the American housewife discovers that Clark Clifford [a notorious firm of lawyers] arranged for her to pay half of the punitive-damage fines that General Electric got socked with for trying to defraud the American housewife... the moral equivalent of letting the meatpackers deduct as an ordinary business expense the cost of the ingredient they use to make putrescent meat look healthy". There is not even a drop of his usual laughter in such sentences; and he goes on: "Judging by the Allison case, where a known defective airplane engine caused the death of 38 people, corporate manslaughter costs about $200 a head... Does it alarm you to know that your industry does not have a single honest chief executive? Me, too."
It is tragic that this book should seem so much of its time - that is, of the past. It was published in 1970. Who, in this day and age, would dare to write or publish anything similar, except for an extremist? But Robert Townsend was one of the greatest CEOs in corporate America at the time. The corporate bureaucracy has triumphed, with its ultimate expressions - the "business" presidency of the hereditary oilman George W.Bush - pecking vulture-like at the entrails of free America; and throughout the world, it is no longer possible to imagine real opposition to the bureaucratic model of corporate power, except for beardies and unworldly types.
And that is a pity; because if this book does one thing for you, it is to make you realize that dishonesty, abuse of power, corporate brain-death, bureaucracy, nepotism and management perks are, quite simply, bad business. They not only defraud the public; not only diminish those who perform them; but they weaken and discourage the company itself. In the end, honesty, however difficult to stick to and unrewarding in terms of immediate ego-boost and advantage, really is the best policy; and the kind of corporate vanity expressed in the Bush economic policies is really ruinous to everyone involved.

Rating:
Summary: The best book about business I read
Review: Written the way one can understand and enjoy reading. No pseudoscientific jargon. A thin small book. Nevertheless contains all the essentials of a successful business. I read this book about twenty five years ago (in Polish translation) and consider it the best book about business I ever read. This book is out of print. Is this a reason for a massive failure of dot com's?