Stewardship

January 4, 1993
Block ( The Empowered Manager ), a professional in organizational training, runs riot with assumptions about human nature. Reaching for the stars, he constructs a productive business/industry model under which increasingly empowered employee/workers establish a new category of partnership and accountability that will render traditional management hierarchies almost obsolete. In simple terms (not notably indulged in here), sales and service personnel will so promote the interests of customers, distributors and production workforce that overpaid executives will forgo wealth and power, re-address priorities and bend moral attitudes to this end as stewards of the common good. Though there will still, admits Block, be a place for bosses, their role will radically change when the subordinate becomes ``the customer of the boss.'' 20,000 first printing; $40,000 ad/promo.

June 15, 1993
Block, author of The Empowered Manager (Jossey-Bass, 1987), which offers an individualistic approach to ""empowerment,"" here explains this movement on a much broader scale, offering his original and profound new view on running organizations. Block shows executives how to move from controlling and directing to his vision of shared governance, partnership, and total ownership of a business by all team members. This concept represents no less than a complete redistribution of power and a total restructuring, which will probably confound most present-day managers. Block transcends all extant leadership literature with this primary source on the organizational dynamics of the future, which will soon be copied. He has heard an as-yet-unknown muse and conceived the organizational structure of the 21st century. Guaranteed to be controversial; strongly recommended.-- Dale Farris, Groves, Tex .

Copyright 1993 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 1993
Management theory for the 1990s is a paradigm in search of a label. "TQM" is touted everywhere; attention is focused on concepts such as "time-based competition" or "customer-driven marketing." Tom Peters gave us "Liberation Management" (1992); William Davidow and Michael Malone, "The Virtual Corporation" (1992). At the heart of all of these is the emphasis on service, the customer, and employee involvement, but Block, author of "The Empowered Manager" (1987), argues that each of these approaches is limited because resulting changes are more cosmetic than real. He borrows and expands on the religious and philanthropic notion of stewardship to explain his vision of a new management in which power, responsibility, and accountability are shared equally at all levels of an organization. He somehow successfully combines the practicality of an entrepreneur with the spirituality of a New Age philosopher, and his approach might inspire both the open-minded MBA and the idealistic frontline assembly worker. ((Reviewed July 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)