Rating: 
Summary: very useful and interesting way to look at organizations
Review: This is a business book for an English major! No really, if you like to think metaphorically, you will enjoy this book because it gives several models for understanding organizations. The organization as an organism, as a brain, as a physic prison, etc....At the end of each chapter, the author summarizes and then states the limitations and advantages of each metaphor. The final chapters are devoted to applying these approaches to real examples. As far as business books go, I found this one very interesting and more holistic than most. Maybe that's because I was an English major.
Rating:
Summary: very useful and interesting way to look at organizations
Review: This is a business book for an English major! No really, if you like to think metaphorically, you will enjoy this book because it gives several models for understanding organizations. The organization as an organism, as a brain, as a physic prison, etc.... At the end of each chapter, the author summarizes and then states the limitations and advantages of each metaphor. The final chapters are devoted to applying these approaches to real examples. As far as business books go, I found this one very interesting and more holistic than most. Maybe that's because I was an English major.
Rating: 
Summary: Head in the Clouds
Review: This is a fantastic book for those people who are slowly losing their grip on reality. While some of the basic underlying concepts are good I don't find myself practically applying the concept of psychic prisons to my organisation, nor do I view my staff as ameobas that make up a large organism. I have to admit though that I know of others who found the paradyme of organisations as instruments of domination highly arousing.
Rating: 
Summary: This book can profoundly change your thinking about orgs
Review: This is not a "three steps to understanding organizations" type book. The people posting negative reviews for this were looking for something simple and digestable - this book is not that. However, if you take the time, you will find it profoundly alters your thinking about understanding organizations. This book provides solid theoretical models for understanding what is occuring in organizations. I read this book over 10 years ago and STILL find it the second best and most enlightening thing I have ever read on organizations. This has dramatically aided me in being a very successful business consultant. The foundation of this book is the notion that you cannot understand complex organizations in any meaningful way through a single perspective. People in the organizations operate on many different perspectives. Each view of the world creates its own understanding of the organizational problems, solutions and daily pattern of interaction. This book provides you the tools for understanding organizations through a number of key perspectives or metaphors, and gives you indications on how to perform a multi-perspective systems analysis. If you spend the time with this book, you will find yourself able to understand your surroundings FAR better than your peers.
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