Book Review
Organizational Jazz: Extraordinary Performance through Extraordinary Leadership
David Napoli, Alma M Whiteley and Kathrine S Johansen
ISBN: 978-0-9757710-6-8; 2005; xii+244 pages; Verdant House, Maleny QLD;
Paul Waight
School of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Arts, Business, Informatics & Education, CQ University, Mackay QLD
Organizational Jazz offers the reader a less conventional lens focusing on what Napoli, Whiteley and Johansen term ‘Extraordinary Leadership', and its effect on organisational performance. The volume reflects on the difficulty of managing organisations using traditional methods based in the organisational principles of Weber, the management principles of Fayol and the work design methods of Taylor. Instead of these traditional approaches the authors suggest that managers should pursue management and leadership skills based on the dynamic concepts proffered by Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline 1990), Margaret Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science 1994) and Ralph Stacey (Strategic Management and Organizational Dynamics 1993) and others. To back up this proposition, the book focuses on examples of the application of these principles in various Australian organisations. The book concludes with a more detailed case-like discussion of three organisations that have applied these principles and techniques in diverse circumstances and industries.
The title of the book gives a hint as to its contents. In the preface, organisational life is equated in terms of jazz - 'stability in the tune and uncertainty in the improvisations' (p.x). The analogy is quite appropriate; organisations by and large exist in uncertain times, and whilst pursuing stability in various forms, must contend with massive uncertainty both externally and internally. The book attempts to explain how newer theories of organisation might be applied to the task of operating in an environment that is more likely to be chaotic than stable.
The book consists of fourteen chapters with nine being devoted to the exploration of management and leadership, and the final five devoted to discussion of organisations that have applied some of the new theories and practices in the face of increasingly complex operating environments. In the first two chapters, the authors point out that traditional ways of looking at strategy and leadership are inadequate in an environment where change is one of the few certainties. The focus then becomes, how can organisations be managed in operational environments that lack certainty, and the level of agreement between key players is low?
The third chapter progresses the argument relating to certainty and agreement, and demonstrates how in environments where there is a reasonable level of certainty and agreement, 'mechanistic management' might well be appropriate. The authors point out that in all organisations, there is a need for some level of mechanistic management in areas such as health and safety, legal compliance and the like. The suggestion is that mechanistic management underpins the organisation's 'licence to operate'. In examining the tenets of mechanistic management, the authors note the limitations of such processes, and introduce their alternative based on systems theory and complex adaptive systems theory (chaos theory).
Chapter four is titled the 'Transformational Edge'. A description of complex adaptive systems is tied to the leadership requirements of organisations that are operating 'on the edge of chaos'. The chapter only briefly describes the underlying principles of chaos theory, and many readers might need to look further for a more robust explanation of its application to management and leadership. Napoli and colleagues map the concepts of mechanistic management and extraordinary leadership on a two dimensional grid with 'agreement' and ‘certainty' forming the two axes. In conditions of close agreement and prediction close to certainty, mechanistic management processes are legitimate; as organisations move away from certainty and agreement they move towards the edge of chaos. According to the authors, the bridge between the two is the concept of 'Extraordinary Leadership'. Whereas mechanistic management is described as 'licence to operate - control, limits, predictability, permission'. Extraordinary leadership is to do with ‘performance, innovation, growth, willingness, discretionary energy, responsiveness and judgement'.
Extraordinary leadership is discussed in detail in the two-part chapter five. Part 1 discusses the idea of boundaries and guidelines instead of rules and regulations, issues of relationships and trust, the use of budgets as a guide to action not a rigid blueprint, the ideas surrounding communities of practice, networks and partnerships, the principles of the learning organisation, and a broad-based view of performance management. This chapter briefly touches on the growing importance of personal competence (especially in areas such as emotional intelligence), the need to foster and maintain multiple relationships that are outside the formal organisational structure, and an appreciation of the 'shadow organisation'.
The second part of chapter five continues the discussion of the elements of the ‘new' leadership model, with an exploration of the roles of vision and values, trust and support, identity and purpose, personal responsibility, and the need to be customer focused. Again, familiar concepts are being discussed, but the contrast between the assumptions of mechanistic management and those of 'extraordinary leadership' give food for thought, with many useful and interesting sources cited.
Chapter six is titled 'Extraordinary Leadership Workshop' and discusses some of the ways in which the authors have used the concepts of complex adaptive theory and systems theory to help several organisations reconceptualise the role of leadership, and to move to a new way of performing in a complex, ever-changing environment. Whilst there is some descriptive material here, the chapter seems somewhat disjointed, and I'm not sure that a clear picture of the intervention process emerges.
Chapter seven introduces the PATOP model; Philosophy, Assumptions, Theory of Organising and Practices. This is a useful concept that allows managers to examine the alignment of their organisation, and identify areas and issues that might need modification.
The final two content chapters, 'Learning Through Reflection' and 'Constraints - Shackled by Bureaucracy' summarise the main arguments of the book, and in the constraints chapter, further issues relating to bureaucratic organisational structures are discussed.
This section gives further food for thought regarding the inability of such structures to meet the needs and demands of the current environment. The argument against hierarchical, bureaucratic organisations is neatly summed up in the following statement: 'The desire for stability, certainty, and predictability can only be found by looking inwards and upwards in a hierarchical structure. This becomes seductive. The alternative is to look outwards, where customers are living with unpredictability and change as their currency' (p.199).
The final five chapters give various perspectives of how some to the principles expounded in the volume have been applied to organisations. The three examples discusses offer an interesting diversity with a high volume coal terminal, a steel rolling mill, and a cemeteries board used to demonstrate how organisations can benefit from using leadership principles based on the ideas of chaos theory, systems theory and the concept of the learning organisation.
Overall I found the book to be an interesting read. However, whilst the material appears to be aimed at practitioners rather than academe, the underpinning theoretical perspectives of complex adaptive theory and systems theory have not been clearly explained. As I am reasonably familiar with the theoretical underpinnings, and the concepts put forward by Stacey, Senge, Wheatley and others, I could follow the main arguments, even though in some places this was not as easy as it could be. For those not familiar with chaos theory as it applies to organisations, or Peter Senge's 'fifth discipline' (systems theory), fitting the ideas into some sort of framework might be problematic. But on the whole, the book may prompt an exploration of, or a revisit to, some of the more interesting speculation in the field of management and leadership.
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