Why Organisations Don't Work

This book has now been fully revised and republished on Amazon with a new title - "Reinventing management thinking - Using science to liberate the human spirit."

The revised book has 100 extra pages, nine new diagrams and three new tables and a new section on beliefs including self-belief as an obstacle to organizational learning.

If you want to improve things, first drill down to the root cause to see what is going wrong.

Jeremy Old takes this robust approach with organisational performance. He starts with the fundamental building block of any organisation - the human being and analyses all the reasons why they under perform both individually and collectively.

His 'thirty stressors model' provides managers with a comprehensive and easy to use tool for finding out why their organisation is not functioning in top gear and what to do about it. This powerful analysis of the failings of modern organisations resonates with anybody who finds themselves asking questions such as: why is it such a struggle to achieve anything worthwhile here; why am I so exhausted; why can't people seem to work well together; why is there so much conflict; why do people resist change; why do the wrong people rise to the top; why is the place riddled with political intrigue; why do we so often lose the plot from the customer's point of view?

Jeremy Old answers these perennial questions by applying systems thinking to modern psychotherapy and practical neuroscience. Be warned, this may not be a comfortable read for a lot of senior managers. This powerful analysis demolishes the case for top down command and control management and the prevailing target culture in the public sector and many large corporations.

An underlying theme is that the root cause of business failure and organisational dysfunction is the sub conscious stress response. Stress is the precursor to crass decision-making, operational mistakes and an array of sub-optimum behaviours found at every level of organisational life. Unfortunately, the stress response is often triggered by the thinking, behaviour, attitude and actions of managers themselves. This new understanding explains why so much of what managers do for a living unwittingly stifles innovation, disrupts flow, trashes teamwork, demotivates staff and works against organisational objectives.

You will see how organisational stress reduces our capacity to think coherently and how it harms our ability to work productively, creatively and compassionately. Most importantly, you will discover simple practical remedies for each stressor, most of which are essentially cost free.

Using his 'thirty-stressor' model of organisational stress, Jeremy Old recommends that the easiest and quickest way to motivate people is to avoid demotivating them in the first place. Enthusiasm, creativity, collaborative working and creative problem solving are instinctive survival traits that healthy human beings have in abundance, but only when they are not stressed. The thirty-stressor model can help you avoid these classic thirty mind traps so prevalent in organisational life today.

These new insights into the stress response and its harmful consequences are challenging accepted norms about leadership and the management function and are set to transform business growth and organisational competence.