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This is a wonderful book, a book you should buy.
The Paradox Principles has three principal authors and a host of contributors from a unit called the Price Waterhouse Change Integration Team. The name is impressive and seems to capture what they do. It is interesting to observe the changes going on in consulting firms. Andersen Consulting is now the nation's largest recruiter of MBAs. Price Waterhouse, which started as an auditing firm, has crept into computers and associated strategies, as well as change management. These shifts surely reflect the turmoil in American organizations as the end of the twentieth century approaches.
The years since 1980 have been exciting ones for consulting firms but anguishing ones for most traditional businesses. The profits during expansions in the business cycle often hid the underlying changes going on in some of these companies, many of them post-World War II icons. Bad strategies implemented in outdated organization forms blew up in a marketplace increasingly threatened by new, small organizations. The book picks up on this theme. The authors provide an out-of-the-box look at what is happening, because they have stories from dozens of settings. Most managers, though, have remained in the box. It is natural to close off the system, rely...