Beyond Workplace 2000

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

After sweeping layoffs and draconian downsizings, has the reengineering of America's corporations produced a leaner, tougher business environment? According to the Boyetts (Workplace 2000), ``America's workplace revolution... has only just begun.'' The authors assert that formidable changes in American society, including the impact of women and minorities in the workforce and the need for educational and training programs, will compel managers to develop new procedures to cope with economies in flux. The authors also investigate such topics as the impact of technology, the importance of core competencies, cooperation among employees and a sensitivity to products consumers actually want and need. Providing numerous case studies (e.g., Corning, Wal-Mart), this is a useful study of business leadership in a period of change. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Thoroughly researched with copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this sequel to the author's Workplace 2000: The Revolution Reshaping American Business (LJ 1/91) is an important contribution to management literature. Boyett carefully examines current management techniques and philosophies, including such trendy practices as Total Quality Management and "family-friendly" environments, and finds them wanting. He exposes hype and hypocrisy in today's organizations and suggests concrete ways to humanize the workplace and still have an organization that successfully meets the challenges of increasingly competitive environments. This book should find a wide audience among leaders of many different kinds of organizations. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Andrea C. Dragon, Coll. of St. Elizabeth, Convent Station, N.J.

David Rouse

With their "Workplace 2000" (1991), Joseph Boyett and Henry Conn were among the early trend spotters who depicted a future workplace that would be flatter and leaner and more "entrepreneurial," whose management would be replaced with visionary leadership, where employees would work as teams, and where learning would become a lifelong process. Now Boyett and his wife, a management consultant, provide countless examples of how companies have coped with those changes and look even further into the future. In the end, their vision turns out to be a useful synthesis of much of today's management literature, with depictions of agile enterprises, virtual corporations, core competencies, shared visions, self-leading teams, etc.