1. The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, coauthored with John McKnight
2. An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture, coauthored with Walter Brueggemann and John McKnight
3. The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters
4. Community: The Structure of Belonging
5. Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used
6. The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise
7. Freedom and Accountability at Work: Applying Philosophic Principles to the Real World, coauthored with Peter Koestenbaum
8. Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest

To Peter Koestenbaum, a philosopher become intellectual entrepreneur and the finest friend the world has known.

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 first version of this book was written in 1987.

It was a time of crisis for U.S. industry. In the early 1980s, Ford Motor Company set an all-time record for losses by a major U.S. corporation. Harley-Davidson was three months from bankruptcy. The Japanese were producing quality products; the United States was not. It was a time of recession, financial crises, and growing unemployment.

One response to these difficulties was to focus on improving the quality of U.S. products and services. The quality movement accelerated and one dimension of that wave was that organizations began to look to their employees to improve the products and services. Quality control had traditionally been a staff function, meaning third parties examined the output of line workers to make sure they achieved quality standards.

A shift in thinking was needed. The shift––initiated by experts like Edwards Deming, Tom Peters, the Association for Quality and Participation, and many more––put quality in the hands of the workers. This gave rise to Quality Circles, Employee Involvement, Participative Management, Team Building, and Sociotechnical Systems. These approaches had one thing in common: They believed that the lower level employees, with some support from above, had the ability to right the ship. The idea of engaging line people close to the work was the centerpiece of the economic recovery. It worked. U.S. companies emerged from their low point and, as iconic examples, Ford Motor Company made an enormous recovery, and Harley-Davidson became profitable again and achieved one of the strongest brand loyalties in the world, much of it based on the employee-created quality of the product.

This was the context out of which the first edition of The Empowered Manager was written. The book validated the shift in control from top management to people closer to the work. It offered an alternative to the patriarchal leadership beliefs that achieved dominance with the rise of the industrial era. Before the book, the word empowerment was rarely used in a workplace setting. As the book was published, the idea was becoming popular as a way of capturing what was already occurring in the most progressive, and desperate, organizations.

Like many social movements, empowerment had its moment in the sun, from the mid-1980s until the early 1990s. The idea became popular, it was widely adopted, and business enterprises, government agencies, schools, hospitals, and other organizations listed empowerment as one of their core values. Whether the adopters believed in it or not, empowerment became part of the mainstream narrative.

That era has passed. As organizations began to believe the quality of their products and services was competitive, and the U.S. economy was solid again, the attention turned from best utilization of people to dominating markets and reducing the cost of labor. The top leaders, who were once chosen from marketing and manufacturing, then were chosen from finance.

So, why reintroduce the ideas of empowerment almost 30 years later?

The world is a different place now.

Markets have changed and become global. Technology has transformed the workplace. We work long distance and at home. Many functions that were once embedded in our institutions have been outsourced. We live in the romance of disruption, where whole industries are being turned on their heads. I rent my bedroom to a stranger and put a dent in the hotel business; I rent my car through Uber and Lyft and dent the taxi industry; I mortgage my house online and dent the bank; I shop online and my neighborhood stores are gone. My contact list, news, facts to be checked, and what my friends had for dinner tonight are all in my pocket, on my smartphone.

This market and business revolution determines how we manage and organize organizations that can be successful in adapting to all of this change. It has produced increasing pressure to cut costs, reduce labor costs, merge functions and institutions, and commodify our relationships with employees. In fact, they are no longer called employees; they are talent. Human Resources has become Talent Management.

Smaller, leaner, faster, agile mantras drive most work cultures. Business is now about the money. Government is now about lowering costs and privatizing as much as you can. Schools seeking reform are now about more technology, better measurement, standardized curricula, and racing to the top. Hospitals are growing into empires.

Customer service, a major calling card for the 1980s, has now mostly been automated. Every organization is driving us to contact them online, and the largest continuous concert in the country occurs while we wait for a human being to answer our 1-800 calls. The depersonalization of service has gone so far that some organizations advertise proudly that if you call them, a human being will talk to you. Just providing an actual person, to pick up the call sooner, is now a competitive advantage.

With all that has changed––with this culture increasingly enamored with convenience and speed, artificial intelligence, robots, online everything, and frictionless (meaning no humans) transactions––where is the employee now? Are employees even really needed now?

People are needed. And how we lead and manage them still matters, just perhaps not as much, and not in the same way. Michael Levie, who runs the CitizenM contemporary hotel chain, has an interesting slant on the place of people in a technologic age. He is investing in as much technology as possible in his hotels. Automatic kiosk check-in, iPads in the rooms so guests have one-touch control of the environment, including draperies, sound, TV, lighting, communication, and even what kind of art they would like on the wall. There is also extensive electronic monitoring so management can track hotel operations: how clean a room is, when it was cleaned, how long it took to clean it, the lighting, the food preparation, labor scheduling, the customers' TV and temperature preferences. Everything except what customers do in the room.

Here is the point: Levie says that all the technology serves to unburden the hotel employees from many of the repetitive functions of running a property in order to free them to maximize positive experiences for hotel guests. The idea is that if the hotels create a satisfying work environment for staff, they eventually have a similar impact on their suppliers. In other words, if the staff experience is satisfying, the customer experience will follow suit. Therefore his goal is to make jobs fun and interesting. Every morning the staff has a meeting to decide who will do what that day. Each member of the staff (they are called ambassadors) becomes trained in all functions: reception, room management, food and beverage service, bartending, group sales, and bookings. There is one specialist in the house: the maintenance person. The rest of the ambassadors get what we used to call job enrichment––and what we might now call empowerment. And it works. Turnover is one-third the industry average, and recruiting is a buyer's market.

The meaning of this is that no matter what realities work to make employees less important, or redundant, or temporary, or more marginal, there is always an opportunity and a need to create a culture that positively impacts performance, builds accountability, and is rewarding for everyone in the food chain, executives included.

The answer to the question of why empowerment and why now is that there is the need to organize human effort, despite any disturbance to the surface waters by radical innovation, modern tectonic shifts, technological innovation, marketplace expansions and contractions, cultural volatility, and all the science we can finance that is determined to replicate human beings and thereby replace us. There is a persistent requirement to care for the human being, even as they make themselves obsolete.

As managers, we hold a set of assumptions and beliefs about what makes for a productive and purposeful human system. These assumptions revolve around how much choice and control and value to give to people in an organized work setting, all of which are decisive in determining the nature of our workplace. And what is striking after a longish view of the workplace landscape over four decades is that the beliefs about organizing human effort have seen little change.

Most of our organizations are still functioning as though people were commodities and just another form of asset. Our contemporary organizations still believe that the vision comes from the top. That talent has to be carefully managed. That pay systems drive performance. That what you measure is what you get and that the future needs to have a blueprint (despite the popularity of Scrum, which is trying to shift that thinking).

This way of thinking is the cornerstone of the patriarchal mind-set, which is detailed in this book. Patriarchy holds that the leader, at the top, is foundational to success—the more heroic, the better. When you read about amazing companies and amazingly successful and sexy companies, like Zappos, Google, Tom's Shoes, Apple, and Facebook, what you read about is the founder.

The alternative is a partnership or entrepreneurial mind-set, which is the point of this book. Partnership is about placing choice and control close to the work, close to the customer, close to the student, close to the patient, and in the hands of people who do the work. It is not about style, or gourmet food in the cafeteria, or pets in the workspace, or any other engaging and exuberant forms of workplace culture. These are good things. Every workplace should be appealing, welcoming, and playful.

The effect of style, however, can mask the reality of today's workplace.

• One person now does the job that two or three used to do. This is the inevitable impact of mergers, contractions, and consolidation. Every acquisition is financed by reducing the number of employees. Wealth to the investors, vulnerability to the employee. It is called eliminating waste and creating efficiencies. We constantly ask people to do more with less. Part of this trend is to outsource as many jobs as possible. It reduces benefit costs and avoids all kinds of liabilities facing employers.
• There is constant investment in technology to more closely monitor employees. Truckers are now monitored on how many hours they drive, how much rest they take, and where they are on the route. The computers of work-at-home employees are monitored for every hour they are used for work. If you are an office worker, they are collecting data on how you spend your time and where you browse on your computer.
• The 40-hour workweek has disappeared, except in low-wage jobs. The smartphone is the modern shackle. People paid on salary are on call, like physicians, expected to answer a text or e-mail in a timely manner. Even if this is not policy, it is a ringworm in the mind of every employee.
• People at the top of organizations are more celebrated than ever. Business leaders are our cultural icons, regardless of how we whine about their wealth. It is no accident that making a lot of money in business is a key qualification to run for public office. Nothing wrong with this; it just exemplifies the permanence of our adoration of top management.
• Finally, and this is most telling, people seem as afraid about the stability of their jobs and how their bosses feel about them as they were 35 years ago. If our leadership and management thinking had shifted along with all the material changes in the world, there would be a chance people would feel more secure and connected despite it all.

All of this reality calls for a shift in thinking. A shift in mind-set and a commitment to build a sense of partnership and purpose with people at all levels at work. When we believe we have more control over our work, when we are participants in defining vision and purpose, when we operationally are better connected to our peers and other departments, our organizations simply perform better. This is why empowerment continues to be a solid strategy and an enduring challenge in the face of all the uncertainty and volatility swirling around us.

So, enjoy this updated and streamlined edition. And as a final suggestion, for the moment, if you want see a place where empowerment is really working, go to Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Eat and shop at one of the truly unique enterprises they have created.

This book is about empowerment, which is giving people as much control as possible over how their work gets done. One of the forces drawing us toward empowerment for people in the middle and lower levels of organizations is the fact that most large companies, because of technology, automation, and cost pressure, have for decades been reducing the number of employees as fast as they can, often eliminating whole layers of management in their attempt to be more efficient. Plus there has been a relentless growth of outsourcing and virtual jobs. People work at home, long distance, and in multiple time zones. We would think this would work to further disperse the centralization of power. That it would push responsibility downward and result in a direct assault on the bureaucratic methods and the patriarchal mind-set that characterize life in most organizations.

Reducing bureaucracy and building accountability requires more than simply reducing jobs and becoming more lean and agile. It requires a mind-set shift on the part of managers, workers, and people at any level. The attitude shift is toward feeling empowered to exercise choice in service of the business and themselves. At the deepest level, the enemy of high-performing systems is the feeling of helplessness that so many of us in organizations seem to experience. We are caught between the need for managers and workers to stand firm for their beliefs and yet realize there are always people who have power over us and can blow out our candle without even taking a deep breath.

The simplest way to capture the dilemma this book addresses is by telling you the story of Allan. Allan is a top executive who, for me, symbolizes both the deepest hope we have for what organizations can become as well as the harsh reality of what each of us confronts. When I first met Allan he was a group product manager for a large health care company. He was in his mid-thirties and responsible for the marketing of a line of health care products. Allan knew his business, and was very aggressive in both his approach to the marketplace and his approach to the people around him. He was constantly pushing for changes in the way the company did business. His product line consistently met its financial goals, but his rather impatient, task-oriented, and at times judgmental style of operating began to get him in hot water. He was told that he needed to become more of a team player, was pushing against the structure a little too vigorously, and if he could just ease up a bit, he would have a fine career with this company.

This dialogue finally reached a point at which a promotion was withheld because of the feathers he was ruffling. At the same time a proposal Allan had made to bring a new product to market was put on a back burner. In the face of these two setbacks, Allan bolted. He initiated a job search for an organization that would value his entrepreneurial energy and give him the opportunity to initiate a truly successful new venture. His search uncovered a pharmaceutical company that was looking to move into new businesses. The head of the company offered Allan the opportunity to study the feasibility of this new business, and if the company decided to move ahead, Allan would run the new division. Allan took the job, leaving the health care company with some bitterness and the belief that its bureaucratic mentality was the problem.

The pharmaceutical company decided to go ahead with the new venture and Allan was made president of the new division. Allan was determined to build an entrepreneurial organization in the midst of the conservative pharmaceutical company that he recently joined. His goal was to hire people who were willing to take the risk of an entrepreneurial venture and to create a culture that valued initiative, absolute honesty, and achievement. Every organization says it values these qualities, but Allan wanted to make these entrepreneurial ideals a day-to-day reality.

Over the next four years, Allan became first a client and eventually a friend of mine. With my role as social architect, we devised as many ways as we could think of to structure the organization to encourage people to feel empowered and responsible for the success of the business. A reward system was established whereby a significant part of each person's salary was based on the profitability of the division. Allan pushed decision-making to the lowest level. The staff made all its own decisions about equipment, structure, working procedures, performance criteria, and evaluation. Perquisites such as office size and decor, parking spaces, vacation time, eating areas, and the like were the same for everyone in the company, including Allan. Every action and policy was designed to create an alternative to the cautious, nervous, and political environments in which everyone had previously worked.

Despite some ups and downs, the strategy essentially worked. The division became profitable after two years and passed $40 million in sales in the third year. Needless to say, Allan was an ideal client for me and became a role model for many of the ideas that this book expresses. The experience with Allan gave me faith that it is indeed possible to create an organization of our own choosing even though we are surrounded by an organization steeped in conservative tradition. Throughout this process, Allan was forced to constantly defend and explain the way he was managing his division. The more successful the division became, the more attention it got, and the greater the discomfort his practices created among other executives in the company. But the bottom line was that he had created an entrepreneurial unit and even though the number of people in the division was growing rapidly, the spirit survived.

How I wish that the story ended here, but it doesn't. As I was completing an earlier version of this book about people taking responsibility, being political in a positive way, and not getting caught up in the negative politics surrounding them, I got a phone call from Allan.

He had just had a meeting with his boss, an executive vice president of the parent company, and been asked to resign. He was told that top management had been growing increasingly uncomfortable with him, that the chemistry wasn't good, and that top management had decided to replace Allan with one of his subordinates. In the previous six months, Allan's division had come under increasing scrutiny and Allan had evidently responded with considerable aggression, some anger, and probably more than a little arrogance––all qualities we tend to associate with entrepreneurial, individualistic people. Allan took his exit quite well. He was getting weary of having to defend his actions and, in fact, took more pleasure in creating a business than in maintaining it.

I, however, took his demise quite poorly. How could he do this to me? Here I was writing a book using him as one of my positive role models and he goes and gets himself fired. The least he could have done was to wait until the early version of the book was published before he crashed and burned. I did not express my self-centered concerns to Allan on the phone at that time. I expressed my support and wished him well, knowing that he would land on his feet, which he did. Two months later, he finalized a deal whereby he would start up another health care company for some venture capitalists and he would have total control over the business and no accountability other than profitability. A couple of ventures later, his business went public and Allan did well.

His problem was solved, but the dilemma that is the focus of this book is not. Allan's dilemma in the pharmaceutical company is the same one facing anyone who manages a group as part of a larger organization. There is a bit of Allan in each of us. On the one hand we have strong beliefs about how we want to manage our own unit; on the other hand we have people above and around us who wish us to be much more traditional and cautious. They counsel us to be patient, to be sensitive to the wishes of people in power, and they remind us that change is all around us, but to get on board and be a team player. The meaning of Allan's story is that it speaks to a hope and a fear in each of us. The hope is that we can totally be ourselves and act according to our own beliefs and wants and still be valued. We have hopes to improve our organization and make it a place where people take responsibility, where reasonable risks are valued, where getting results is more important than pleasing others, and where substance is more important than form. At the same time, we fear that this is not possible. We are afraid that Allan's ending will be our ending, except that we will not land on our feet. We will land on our knees and stay there. Especially when we see the middle class and upwardly mobile careers shrinking all around us. Our primitive fear in organizations is that if we stand up, we will be shot. This book is about standing up without getting shot.

The goal, then, is to present a way of transforming organizations with the attendant risks, in a realistic and helpful way. Making changes in organizations in a way that maintains support from those around us is what empowerment is all about. The first step in taking the best of what Allan offers—his courage, his vision, his willingness to risk—without stepping on the rake of our own arrogance and aggression, is to begin a dialogue about the political nature of institutions.

There is no more engaging and volatile aspect of work life than the dimension of organizational power for which the word politics is shorthand. In most places, people are not comfortable discussing politics openly. We know it is woven into the fabric of our work, but to get reliable information about it is next to impossible. In fact, the first rule of politics is that nobody will tell you the rules. When it is discussed, it is basically a negative process. If I told you that you were a very political person, you would take it either as an insult or at best as a mixed blessing.

The breeding ground for organizational politics as we know it is the patriarchal mind-set that pervades life in our workplaces. The essence of a patriarchal way of doing business is the choice for safety, predictability, and control. In our search for positive political acts we are forced to confront those forces in the organization that support patriarchy and make the internal entrepreneur a rare species.

This book offers an antidote to the patriarchal mentality that is bred in organizations. Patriarchy is a state of mind and exists regardless of the size of the organization or the level at which you work. The core of this mind-set is to believe the world and its people are fundamentally chaotic and self-centered and therefore have to be contained and directed. This wears the badge of strong and tough-minded leadership. It is also a belief that whenever there is a bump in the road, other people are the problem. Patriarchal beliefs are elusive because we always think they characterize someone else, never ourselves. Thus, efforts to improve our organization too often involve discussion of people outside the room we are in at the moment.

This attitude that it is not my fault

Reawakening the original spirit of creating something meaningful means we have to confront the issue of our own agency or independence. To pursue autonomy in the midst of a dependency-creating culture is an entrepreneurial act. This book is, in fact, written for those who think of themselves as being in the middle and who wish to create a culture and workplace of their own choosing.

Part One outlines how the patriarchal mind-set has come to drive most organizations and introduces ways of creating an environment and culture that support empowerment. It describes what drives us toward a bureaucratic, negatively political journey and outlines what the alternative, the more entrepreneurial and positive path, would be. Part Two discusses what we as individuals can do to reduce our feeling of futility and make our workplace an expression of our deepest values.