Stewardship : Choosing Service over Self-Interest

New models of stewardship--both for the organization and the individual--offer equity and partnership for all levels of employees. By the author of The Empowered Manager. 20,000 first printing. $40,000 ad/promo.

Block ( The Empowered Manager ), a professional in organizational training, runs riot with assumptions about human nature. Reaching for the stars, he constructs a productive business/industry model under which increasingly empowered employee/workers establish a new category of partnership and accountability that will render traditional management hierarchies almost obsolete. In simple terms (not notably indulged in here), sales and service personnel will so promote the interests of customers, distributors and production workforce that overpaid executives will forgo wealth and power, re-address priorities and bend moral attitudes to this end as stewards of the common good. Though there will still, admits Block, be a place for bosses, their role will radically change when the subordinate becomes "the customer of the boss." 20,000 first printing; $40,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Stewardship is visionary, hopeful, and practical. Block calls for a whole new way of thinking about the workplace-and then takes the reader through very tangible steps for getting there."

"A revolutionary book that redefines what being 'value added' means in an organization and turns around the traditional thinking about who works for whom."

Block, author of The Empowered Manager (Jossey-Bass, 1987), which offers an individualistic approach to "empowerment," here explains this movement on a much broader scale, offering his original and profound new view on running organizations. Block shows executives how to move from controlling and directing to his vision of shared governance, partnership, and total ownership of a business by all team members. This concept represents no less than a complete redistribution of power and a total restructuring, which will probably confound most present-day managers. Block transcends all extant leadership literature with this primary source on the organizational dynamics of the future, which will soon be copied. He has heard an as-yet-unknown muse and conceived the organizational structure of the 21st century. Guaranteed to be controversial; strongly recommended.
- Dale Farris, Groves, Tex.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.