Quantum Organizations

Today's executives and managers face an unprecedented challenge. They must find innovative ways to meet the demands of the complex and interrelated problems posed by new technology, globalization, rapid change, and intensifying competition. Empowerment, work engagement, training and development, organizational learning, and other change initiatives have attempted to offer practical solutions to this challenge. But what has been lacking is a completely integrated approach for leading, managing, and organizing for the new millennium. QUANTUM ORGANIZATIONS presents a new paradigm that can help today's executives see, think, and act in new ways that enhance organizational success and personal meaning. Management expert and top-selling author Ralph Kilmann brings together more than three decades of research and consulting experience in this groundbreaking book to provide a practical guide to achieving the essential transformational changes the new realities require. Making use of 107 full-color illustrations, he uses both art and science to illuminate the new paradigm for accelerating self-awareness and self-transformation. Writing with a masterful command of the sweep of human evolution and the awesome discoveries of the new sciences, Kilmann shows why the old concepts that served the industrial age must give way to altogether new categories--a new paradigm for the age of global interdependence and self-aware consciousness. He clearly explains how to use this new paradigm to see the increasing interconnections among industries, markets, organizations, and organizational members; radically improve infrastructures, systems, and processes; create new levels of organizational success and economic value; and reach new heights of personal meaning, fulfillment, and enlightenment.

At several points during the past 30 years of my professional life, I developed a deep-felt need to "put it all together," to integrate all my separate pieces of management/organizational knowledge, and to see all my ideas become whole. It is, for me, identical to becoming a whole person rather than being a collection of fragmented selves. My strength as a scholar/practitioner is seeing the subtle links among seemingly separate things, the interconnections among diverse ideas, and the relationships among culturally different people. During the mid-1990s, I was about to start on my next integrated effort. This time, I wanted to be even more comprehensive, inclusive, integrative, and revolutionary. This led me to the new, 20th century physics. The new physics led me to the unique role of consciousness. From there, I explored spirit.

The book took me a full two years of effort. I wrote this book to fulfill a professional dream. After 30 years of dedicated work, I integrated the essence of all my theoretical and practical knowledge into a universal framework. If it gives other people a tremendous range and depth of knowledge for their organizational and personal lives, then I will be pleased and fulfilled.

This book presents a systematic approach for transforming old Newtonian organizations into new quantum organizations. In one book, the reader will find all the essential concepts and methods for understanding and transforming any organization into a self-designing, self-managing quantum organization--an organization that feeds on self-aware consciousness and further develops self-aware consciousness throughout the universe.

To help you understand and incorporate these insights from the new science to the three key areas of organizational transformation, I used my graphic arts skills to create 107 elaborate full-color illustrations to visualize the key themes.