Organization Development Tools

The Consultant's Big Book of Organization Development Tools

: 50 Reproducible Intervention Tools to Help Solve Your Clients' Problems


The Consultant's Big Book of Organization Development Tools provides consultants with tools, interventions, and activities they can use to solve individual, team, and organizational performance problems.

This book offers incredible value for the consultant looking to use structured interventions as a vital part of the consultation approach. Many of the tools consist of a simulation or other structured activity consultants can use with leaders in the client organization to address the soft issues in a nonthreatening way. And most include downloadable, customizable handouts that they can freely reproduce and use with clients.

About the Author

Dr. Mel Silberman (Princeton, NJ) is a best-selling author of training and development books and professor of adult and organizational development at Temple University.

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

Peter Senge, founder of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management, experienced an epiphany while meditating one morning back in the fall of 1987. That was the day he first saw the possibilities of a "learning organization" that used "systems thinking" as the primary tenet of a revolutionary management philosophy. He advanced the concept into this primer, originally released in 1990, written for those interested in integrating his philosophy into their corporate culture.

The Fifth Discipline has turned many readers into true believers; it remains the ideal introduction to Senge's carefully integrated corporate framework, which is structured around "personal mastery," "mental models," "shared vision," and "team learning." Using ideas that originate in fields from science to spirituality, Senge explains why the learning organization matters, provides an unvarnished summary of his management principals, offers some basic tools for practicing it, and shows what it's like to operate under this system. The book's concepts remain stimulating and relevant as ever. --Howard Rothman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A director at MIT's Sloan School, Senge here proposes the "systems thinking" method to help a corporation to become a "learning organization," one that integrates at all personnel levels indifferently related company functions (sales, product design, etc.) to "expand the ability to produce." He describes requisite disciplines, of which systems-thinking is the fifth. Others include "personal mastery" of one's capacities and "team learning" through group discussion of individual objectives and problems. Employees and managers are also encouraged to examine together their often negative perceptions or "mental models" of company people and procedures. The text is esoteric and flavored with terms like "recontextualized rationality," but the book should help inventory-addled retailers whom the author cites as unaware of their customers' desire for quality. Macmillan Book Clubs selection.

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