The Minding Organization: Bringing the Future to the Present and Turn Creative Ideas Into Business Solutions

by Iris R. Firstenberg and Moshe F. Rubinstein

Book Overview

Advancing the trend of seeing organizations in biological terms, this volume takes the next step beyond the learning organization. It's about creating an organization that behaves like a human being - instantly able to adapt to new and ever-changing conditions. Moshe Rubinstein calls this a minding organization, where the right hand literally knows what the left hand is doing. In a minding organization, all parties involved in a project - whether...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471347817
• ISBN13: 9780471347811
• Release Date: August 1999
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.6" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Relevant and vital

I read this book about four years ago and frequently return to Professor Rubinstein and Firstenburg's excellent discourse on creating creativity within an organization. Their instruction on chaos versus order is worth the price of the book. Written in a no-nonsense and straight-forward fashion, this book will help open-minded leaders in any industry. Highly recommended.

The Care and Feeding of Intellect

According to the authors, "To keep up with the complexity and uncertainty of an unconventional and largely unpredictable global business world, organizations must embrace a new metaphor that will transform an organization into a minding organization. The minding organization behaves like a living organism, in which adapting is central to vitality and control." Agreeing with Drucker that organizations must manage the implications and consequences of a future that has already occurred, the authors suggest a number of strategies which will "bring the future to the present and turn creative ideas into business solutions." Their book is organized as follows:Chapter One: The Minding OrganizationChapter Two: Transforming the Organization into an OrganismChapter Three: Adapting and PlanningChapter Four: Structure, Creativity, and Error: The Foundations of the Minding OrganizationChapter Five: Chaos to Order to Chaos: Embracing UncertaintyChapter Six: Expanding the Imagination: Frames as FiltersChapter Seven: Kniht [Think] Backward: Visit the Future in the PresentChapter Eight: The New Leadership: Operating on the Edge of ChaosChapter Nine: The Minding Organization in Action The authors provide a rigorous analysis of each component of a process by which to "bring the future to the present and turn creative ideas into business solutions." At the conclusion of Chapter Six, they suggest that the minding organization "creates chaos deliberately up front by starting with divergent concurrent perceptions and encourages errors to surface early when the costs of detection and correction are minimal." Immediately in the next chapter, they explain that the "frames" we create "filter the world for us, allowing us to manage the tremendous amount of information available." They then examine various "filters" which could prevent us from formulating the aforementioned "divergent concurrent perceptions." The sequence of the authors' ideas thus flows logically from one chapter to the next.In the final chapter, the authors identify thirteen "precepts" of the minding organization. By now they have explained the interrelationships between (indeed the interdependence of) these precepts; they have also provided a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective plan by which to apply those precepts to the needs of any organization, regardless of its size or nature. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to read two books written by Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline and The Dance of Change. Rubinstein, Firstenberg, and Senge no doubt agree with Derek Bok's observation, when criticized by parents of Harvard students after a tuition increase: "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." In the minding organization, education is alive and well...and given its relative cost, a bargain.