Block - The Empowered Manager

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Copyright 2017 by Peter Block. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Block, Peter, author.

Title: The empowered manager : positive political skills at work / Peter Block.

Description: Second Edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2016. | Revised edition of the author's The empowered manager, 1987. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016033002 (print) | LCCN 2016036814 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119282402 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119282426 (epdf) | ISBN 9781119282419 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Organizational behavior. | Organizational effectiveness. | Office politics. | Executive ability. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Organizational Behavior.

Classification: LCC HD58.7 .B58 2016 (print) | LCC HD58.7 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/095dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033002

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To Peter Koestenbaum, a philosopher become intellectual entrepreneur and the finest friend the world has known.

This opening is designed to help you make a good decision about whether to read this book. Writing a book about organizations is not like writing an international spy thriller. In a spy thriller, you can begin by describing the fog slowly rising off the river separating two Eastern European countries. You can have a train hurtling through the night. In the corner of one compartment are two men, unconscious, one of them clutching a business card with a seven-legged toad embossed in green ink. A woman arrives on the scene, reaches calmly into her purse, and on it goes. In the spy thriller, all of this happens in the first paragraph. You are hooked and off you go, knowing that you have found just the book you were looking for.

Finding a book about organizational life that has meaning for you is not so easy. You shouldn't have to read a hundred pages to decide whether you want to finish such a book. I want to tell you who this book is for, who should not read it, and what to expect in the pages to come.

The Empowered Manager is written for two kinds of people: (1) managers involved in running an organization and struggling every day with how to create and leave behind an organization they personally believe in, one that expresses their deepest values about work, achievement, contribution, and the spiritual dimensions of life; and (2) those working somewhere in the middle of an organization and feeling powerless to make the changes they want and believing that some of their bosses are problems to be solved.

Our concern at the top of an organization is not only that the organization succeeds, but even more, that we leave behind a legacy that ensures strength in the future. To create and leave behind a strong organization requires building a culture in which people take responsibility for themselves and the organization. A culture in which dependency, blaming other groups, taking the safe path, seeking control for its own sake, and acting in self-serving ways are all minimized. That is what this book is about: creating an entrepreneurial spirit where all members of the organization feel responsible for creating a workplace they personally believe in.

Caring about these issues means we see ourselves as forces for change and improvement. It makes us somewhat radical in the midst of a workplace culture where the predominant concerns are safety, advancement, control, and the desire to hold someone else responsible for what is happening. In many ways this book is written for those with a conservative style and a radical heart. The radical heart keeps us focused on a vision of the future, on the opportunity, not the risk, of finding out what is possible. Our radical heart wishes to be practical but is willing to live in the wilderness, with its dangers, and it believes that organizations, as the primary meeting places for human beings, have only begun to reach their potential. Our radical heart, clothed in the company dress uniform of the day, wishes not only for high overall performance but also to work in a place where the best that life has to offer is expressed. If, as a manager, these somewhat idealistic, semi-spiritual, seemingly softheaded ideas have meaning for you, then you have found the right book.

For those of us who work for a living and are somewhere in the middle, my intent is to offer both a specific mind-set and practical ways to support the belief that we have some control over our destiny.

Working in the middle of an organization creates certain predictable dilemmas for each of us. The most difficult struggle is between serving our personal ambition to get ahead and, at the same time, doing work that has personal meaning in a way that maintains our integrity and optimism. It is easy and seductive at times to experience a sense of pessimism that the organization will ever become the kind of place we wish it to be. It often seems that other people are driving the business, not us, and that our survival is, in fact, in someone else's hands. How do we go about changing a culture that involves thousands of people, most of whom, from a distance, seem quite satisfied with things the way they are?