Books by Robert Quinn
 

Quinn has developed an integrated framework for understanding and managing organisations, which embraces four competing and contrasting, yet complementary, sets of values. Beyond Rational Management develops and explores the “Competing Values Model” as a key tool in managing the paradoxes of organisational life – a capability which he sees as the essence of peak performance and mastery of management.

Quinn sees organisations as contradictory systems of competing values which need to be managed – all of which have merit. He is not suggesting, therefore, that one perspective is arbitrarily and universally “right” and the others wrong. All of the dimensions are important to the success of an organisation over time; and Quinn views these values, criteria and assumptions as oppositions solely in people’s minds.
 

Here, Quinn argues that real transformation must begin from within, by adopting eight principles that can make individual and organisational change happen:

• envision the productive community

• first look within

• embrace the hypocritical self

• transcend fear

• embody a vision of the common good

• disturb the system

• surrender to the emergent process

• entice through moral power.

The underlying theme is that individuals can make a difference.

This book,edited by Quinn, O'Neill and St. Clair, identifies a range of people- and process problems in organisations that "keep us up at night." The book identifies these problems before offering ideas for dealing with them effectively.and identifying areas for future research.

The book concludes by introducing the Competing Values Framework as the basis for creating the resposive organisation that the authors consider to be essential to performance in modern organisations. In doing this, they identify the potential pitfalls of responsiveness as well as its more obvious benefits.

I am not generally a fan of the 'design and build' school of culture change, or of the four-category models which typically accompany them. These approaches to cultural analysis have a number of attractions, such as:

• being relatively simple to apply and analyse;

• providing a means of comparing and contrasting organisations;

• raising awareness, by making implicit aspects of organisation more explicit.

However, there are also some drawbacks and limitations with these approaches, if they are misused, including:

• oversimplifying culture into, typically, one of four descriptive categories, which can be insensitive to those aspects of culture that actually make a difference;

• creating an illusion of knowledge about culture, which is incomplete or incorrect;

• offering no insights into the dynamics of culture or guidance on how to deal with it – that is, on how the observed criteria arose in the first place or how the desired shift to another ‘quadrant’ might be achieved;

• reinforcing the view that culture can be changed through a management imposed, ‘design and build’ approach.

The redeeming factor of this book for me is that it uses Quinn's Competing Values Framework as the basis of its diagnosis (see Beyond Rational Management, above).

Comments by  Chris Rodgers