Preface
The author mentions personal involvement in managing human resources of large firms after mergers and acquisitions. She entered the workforce as a "newly minted PhD" and quickly realized that all the theoretical knowledge she had learned in school was not as useful as her professors imagined.
There is great difficulty in getting the people to merge, and the traditional organization chart fails to document the real structure of an organization, which is often highly informal and entirely invisible. The key players are often not the department managers, but those whose job titles don't reflect their contribution to the organization in its full scope.
Moreover, people are uncomfortable admitting that. Managers still like to see themselves as eighteenth-century barons whose employees are merely minions merely do their bidding - and the "minions" are loath to admit how much of their job requires them to work outside of the organization's official hierarchy and procedures. Beneath the organization chart and protocols to which everyone pays lip-service, there is a much more complex network of relationships within a company that does the real work in secret.
Admittedly, management theory is evolving, but the author cast as critical an eye on the "new" theories of organizational management - and while they often acknowledge invisible leadership and the hidden network, they often failed to prescribe anything new, or anything particularly effective. Some are better than others, but all of them generally suffer from being rigid and top-down approaches to management practice, and as such none of these new tools was essentially different from the old methods they allegedly replaced.
In here experience working with organizations, the author has come to recognize the value of leaders - they are not merely coordinators who handle administrative tasks, but facilitate the work of their teams and contribute a great deal to the "lives and livelihood" of many people, the organization itself, and everyone it touches. Nurturing and supporting leaders, especially those who are not formally installed in positions at the top of organizational hierarchies, is critical to their success. To do so, it's necessary to understand how organizations really work - and put in place practices that support the leaders rather than provide obstacles to their success.
While the present book presents her own "bold new paradigm for leadership" she expresses respect for the existing body of literature. There is much value that remains even in theories that seem thoroughly flawed, and there are lessons to be learned from the past even while we consider it to be outmoded. It would be a mistake to discard them without careful consideration.
About This Book
The author admits that she rather extensively uses technology as a metaphor, as peer-to-peer networking among machines rather aptly models the way in which people network as well. However, the metaphor is not a perfect one, and should not be taken to imply that technology alone is a solution: software can help or hinder communications and information sharing, depending on how it is designed.
She also suggests what the book is not (a review of theories, a collection of case studies, or a scholarly treatise) but instead it is "a journey on a new road." (EN: Which is really not what it is, but maybe it is a book that describes what the journey might be.)
A rather nice bit: she describes a phrase carved on a bench in front of a grade school: "I believe in the sun even when it rains" - it's a phrase that she recalls in her own moments of doubt and will stand the reader well.