The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

Preface to the Fourth Edition

Robert J. Glushko

• Preface to the First Edition

• Preface to the Second Edition

• Preface to the Third Edition

A year ago I wrote “for a book to be republished in a third edition barely two years after its first is highly unusual, but we were compelled to update the book by the extremely positive reception it has received.” I also wrote that each new course that adopts the book “ratifies the idea that multiple perspectives can reinforce a shared focus on organizing, while at the same time highlighting the concepts, technologies, and methods that distinguish those points of view.”

It is happening again. In the last year the idea of data science as a new career field has led many universities to add new courses, modify existing ones, to hire new faculty, and even to change the names of schools or departments. Many people teaching with or studying The Discipline of Organizing have suggested that the book incorporate more discussion of data science concepts, and we’ve done that in this 4^th edition.

The new methods and tools of data science and machine learning let us organize more information, to do it faster, and to make predictions based on what people have clicked on, bought, or said. Data science introduces new considerations of scale and speed when massive computational power and new statistical techniques are harnessed to organize and act on information.

But this is not the first time that new ideas and technologies have challenged how people organized and ...