The Empowered Manager, 2nd Edition

PrologueTo Read or Not to Read

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 View from the Bridge

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 ...