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Preface

"First, we shape our structures. Then, our structures shape us."

—Winston Churchill

Organizations are the world's 21st-century dilemma. They are magnificent and mad, wonderful and wretched, crazy and compelling. They make so little, and so much, sense. Never before has humankind been able to bring together so many global resources within common form and purpose. Our ability to create organizations exceeds our ability to control them; they have power beyond imagining.

Organizations are a personal dilemma as well. We rely on them and rail against them. They promise us gratification; we promise to pay within ninety days. They lend us their resources in return for our loyalty. We search for our meaning through them as their suppliers, customers, workers, citizens, beneficiaries, and victims. We live in hope and fear of the consequences of their actions. We are living a science fiction take: "We have created a monster!" The monster may be called agency, or government, or health care, or education, or corporation. We all live and work around these beasts—all of them, but especially corporations because of their accelerating power in the transformation of the global marketplace.

This book's title alludes to the fairy tale in which a merchant gives his pure-hearted daughter, Belle, to the Beast in exchange for his own life. Belle, despite her initial horror, chooses to look for the best in the Beast and gradually finds it. In fact, she finds fulfillment where she at first felt revulsion. This book is for the Belle in each of us, encouraging us to face and find life where we stand, to choose in this moment to create the next. By choosing, we breathe the new life into organizations that we all so urgently need.

Who This Book Is For

Many of us are as intrigued with the potential of organizations as we are disturbed with the reality; we are drawn into relationships with these bureaucratic beasts out of attraction as well as necessity. Millions of us join our personal purpose with organizational purpose, hoping for the best and making the most of this uneasy marriage… for better or for worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health. We live in the struggle to find meaning within structures that were not built with us in mind.

Many of us recognize how essential organizations are to what we have achieved and what we will become; we see the immense potential they represent. We know they figure in the future of life on this planet. We are part of a highly educated workforce that each day steps into organizations that have not caught up with what we have learned about ourselves. We seek our actualization in organizations put together for other purposes; we feel our schizophrenia as our minds and hearts proclaim the possibilities and our organizations proclaim the limitations. We are seeing more attempts at creating productive organizations filled with human accomplishment and spirit, but there is so far to go. This book is for people who know this line of thinking and want to continue it.

Why Read This Book

We need new perspectives on what organizations are for and how to change them. Our organizational models of immediate gratification for the few are not working for the many. There must be ways of working that honor long-term aspirations and fulfillment. We need grand expectations, so big they cannot be realized in our lifetimes. We need to awaken to and work toward these immense purposes, measuring our progress toward fine aspirations for tomorrow—rather than continually gratifying ourselves today.

This book helps you step back from organizations to ask: Why do we keep creating these creatures that fall so far short of our dreams for them? What is our role in doing this? And the book helps you move in close to consider why you give so much of your life to these occasionally exhilarating and often frustrating beasts.

This book helps you imagine what people can do together and how they might do it. It engages you in thinking about what you could do at work, and offers you ideas on how to do it. It guides you in a personal and organizational exploration in search of purpose, contribution, community, and identity. Its many questions open you to answers you have not yet considered, while its content will inspire your daily work. It's a book to be read frequently over time, allowing its ideas to soak into your thoughts and actions. This book helps you embrace the organizational world as it is while working hard to change it.

How This Book Is Structured

As the title suggests, the organization is beauty and beast, not separate but joined within one form. This creates a necessary inner tension, which the organization is intent on resolving. The book is about using that tension to propel the organization forward toward its dreams while staying rooted in its reality.

Part One declares the beastly side of organization and asks us to face and, eventually, perhaps even embrace it. This part helps us acknowledge what we hate and love about these creatures, as well as what we gain and lose in the process. We will see how needs for achievement, stature, and predictability result in our complex bureaucracies. We come to a greater understanding of—and respect for—the power of the beast in ourselves. And amid all of the tension and struggle, Part One underlines the reality that organizations in some form are indispensable to a more productive and fulfilled human community.

Part Two begins the search for beauty and life in organizations. It helps us define the organizations and lives we aspire to over the long term; we will begin to seek beauty and life at work. Part Two helps us imagine the organizations we want to create, offering eight aspirations necessary for organizations to live not just next year, but for centuries. It helps us begin looking for answers where they might be found, rather than continuing to search in places where no answers are available. And since there are many encouraging signs of life in our organizations; a few of them are offered here.

Part Three is about the choices that bind the beauty and the beast of the organization together. It helps us recognize the necessary tension and vitality in this marriage and offers twenty renewal assertions holding organizations together for a better future. These assertions help us breathe new life into the work we are now doing—refreshing our meetings, reformulating our discussions, renewing our organizations.

Part Four offers three applications of renewal of life: within a large organization, within a work team, and within you, the reader of this book. These examples are intended to launch us toward our own aspirations, to put our ideas into practice.

Briefly, this book is about facing the organizational beast (Part One), searching for the beauty we aspire to (Part Two), and making the daily choices that renew organizations and ourselves (Part Three). It's about committing to the work world as it is, discovering what it can be, and delighting in our work of changing it.

Acknowledgments

If the chapters of this book were heavily footnoted, those notes would be longer than the book! The resources section at the end of the book lists a number of writers to whom I am indebted, but by no means all. If you see an idea here that relates to a conversation we have had or something you published, assume that you helped me learn what I've now written as my own.

Six reviewers read this book in a form that only vaguely resembles what you now hold in your hands. They struggled through seventy pages more than you will see; hardly a page of that manuscript did not receive a note from at least one of them. Their comments were profoundly influential and I am deeply grateful. I thank each of them: Stewart Lanier, Jennifer Leigh, Jeff Pym, Sheila Kelly, Frank Basler, and Allan Paulson. Sheila also edited the final draft and helped shape it to what you see—testimony both to her talent and to the strength of our marriage.

This is my third book with Berrett-Koehler and, as I have come to expect, Steve Piersanti and his staff have immersed me in their expertise and care. I am fortunate to be with a publisher—with an organization—that aspires to create what I write about in this book. Thank you all, again!

Over the last four years, I have been part of the Community Consulting Project, a small group of invested citizens that learns about organizations and consulting by working in Seattle's not-for-profit community. My work with voluntary organizations opened my eyes to possibilities for the corporate organizations I have served most of my life. I am grateful for what CCP has given me; I think it shows in these pages.

And lastly, I acknowledge the Woodlands Group; you can find all of their names on the dedication page. This small and voluntary organization has been meeting quarterly for close to twenty-five years. I have attended almost every meeting; you can imagine how important these people and our purposes have become to me. We have learned together about life and work in organizations, and in the process have become a small and loving organization ourselves. Our meetings have become a celebration of our lives, our work in the world, and our little community. This group lives and breathes the aspirations of this book.

Geoff Bellman

Seattle

November, 1999