HOW TO RUN ANY ORGANIZATION

In many ways this handbook just about lives up to the conspicuous promise of its title. It's a text easy to take, even if the advice it offers may not always be so. And though it's a text on management, its specific instruction approaches the utility and simplicity of a cookbook. All organizations, whether the crew of H.M. S. Bounty, a local school board, or Chase Manhattan Bank, are fundamentally social systems designed to carry out definite purposes, the avuncular Professor Caplow notes. If that is so, then there are methods common to all organizations which will best achieve the group's collective purpose, satisfy the leader and his followers, and overcome dangers and difficulties. In chapters devoted to the dynamics of authority, communication, productivity, morale, and change, Caplow offers operating instructions and pertinent examples for the manager charged with running an organization, whether in the kindergarten room or the executive suite. Not many of the conclusions reached are instinctive and fewer are obvious. Cabals and totems, rewards and punishments, recruitments and firings, occasions to lie low and times to raise hell, and all an organizations' seasons are treated with assured practicality. The arcane study of management emerges in this book as accessible to a wider audience.