Product Description

What's the best way to drive fundamental, transformative change within your organization? Envision your ideal solution: then, work backwards to where you are. It's called idealized design, and -- as executives in hundreds of organizations will testify -- it's one of the most powerful techniques you'll ever use. Authored by its legendary creator, Wharton Professor Emeritus Russell Ackoff, and leading practitioner Jason Magidson, Idealized Design covers every facet of this breakthrough methodology. You'll learn the fundamental differences between idealized design and traditional process re-engineering, and understand how idealized design eliminates many conventional obstacles to change. Start-to-finish techniques and examples drawn from hundreds of companies, non-profits, and government organizations will show you how to use idealized design to solve your own crisis of tomorrow...today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #232154 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780131963634
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Idealized design is a great concept: in order to find the ideal solution to a business challenge, you envision the perfect solution, then work backward to the possible. The authors appear to have followed that concept, asking themselves what the ideal business book should include. A thorough explanation of the concept and convincing proof of its value in a variety of situations and organizations? Check. An inventory of the ideal environment for performing idealized design experiments? Check. Case studies? Check. The development of idealized design is largely credited to Ackoff, a management professor emeritus and author of 22 books who is praised in the foreword as "no doubt one of the greatest management innovators of our time." The progressive concepts described here are useful to companies undergoing a difficult transition or wanting to push themselves to the next level. More impressively, this volume ventures beyond the business realm to explore how idealized design can be applied to larger social issues, such as a national health care system or a new electoral system. Regardless of whether the reader agrees with the proposed designs, those examples expand the interest of this book beyond its traditional category and readership. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From the Back Cover
What's the best way to drive fundamental, transformative change within your organization? Envision your ideal solution: then, work backwards to where you are. It's called idealized design, and -- as executives in hundreds of organizations will testify -- it's one of the most powerful techniques you'll ever use. Authored by its legendary creator, Wharton Professor Emeritus Russell Ackoff, and leading practitioner Jason Magidson, Idealized Design covers every facet of this breakthrough methodology. You'll learn the fundamental differences between idealized design and traditional process re-engineering, and understand how idealized design eliminates many conventional obstacles to change. Start-to-finish techniques and examples drawn from hundreds of companies, non-profits, and government organizations will show you how to use idealized design to solve your own crisis of tomorrow...today.

About the Author

Russell L. Ackoff is Anheuser-Busch Professor Emeritus of Management Science, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He was a member and former Chairman of The Wharton School’s Social Systems Sciences Department, as well as the Busch Center, which specializes in systems planning, research, and design.

Dr. Ackoff is author and co-author of 22 books, including Redesigning the Future, The Art of Problem Solving, Creating the Corporate Future, Revitalizing Western Economies, Management in Small Doses, Ackoff’s Fables, The Democratic Corporation, and his most recent books Re-Creating the Corporation, Ackoff’s Best, Redesigning Society, and Beating the System, the latter two with Sheldon Rovin. His work in research, consulting, and education has involved more than 350 corporations and 75 government agencies in the United States and abroad.

Dr. Ackoff played a key role at the University of Pennsylvania, both in the early history of the Operations Research Group and in establishing the Social Systems Sciences Graduate Group. Since becoming Emeritus, he has been honored by the establishment of the Russell L. Ackoff Endowment in the Wharton School and The Ackoff Center for the Advancement of Systems Approaches in the Engineering School, through which his legacy at the University of Pennsylvania continues.

Jason Magidson is director of innovation processes at GlaxoSmithKline. He has 20 years’ experience helping organizations create an environment where great product and service ideas are generated. His clients have ranged from IKEA and DuPont to startups and non-profits. Magidson founded ProductWish.com,

a Web-based clearinghouse for innovative product improvement ideas. He has written for publications including Harvard Business Review.

Herbert J. Addison is a consulting editor and writer who has served as vice president and executive editor in business and economics for the Oxford University Press, and director of its college textbook department.

Customer Reviews

A very interesting and likely helpful process for moving your organization into tomorrow
This is one of those books that I loved the first 2/3 of, but the last 1/3 is better off ignored. This book talks about a process that can get an organization into better competitive shape for the future by imagining the present as destroyed and we have to begin again with what we now know but with none of the inertia or baggage from the past. What would you then design?

I think the process put forward here can be quite powerful. The concept of formulating the mess and then planning the ends without regards to the past is terrific. Then you plan how to get there and while what you end up with will probably not be what you "idealized", it will almost certainly be innovative and far ahead of where you would have been with incremental change. The authors' concept of dissolving the problem by looking at the containing factors and making the problem disappear by changing the container is also especially good.

However, it is in part III where the authors discuss the "urban car" and a health system for all Americans that things fall completely apart. They let the "container" of left-wing politics enter their notions without letting the reality of the marketplace discipline their final recommendations. The car is embarrassingly idiotic and the health care system is nothing more than a single payer system with all the fantasies of its supporters put forward as facts. Maybe the containing problem for urban congestion isn't the car but the way we subsidize life in cities. Maybe the containing problem in health care is the way we call pre-paid health care insurance and we need to rethink what needs to be insured and what needs to come out of pocket, like almost everything else in life.

Anyway, I think the process is quite good and is very much worth examining. There is much to be said for the very effective notions about Positive Change I heard at the University of Michigan Business School which now has a Center for Positive Change. Idealized Design and Positive Change are not equivalent, but they both share the notion that fixing problems and incremental change are more traps than cures. The organization you are a part of and the products you sell or the services you offer all arose to meet past needs. It may be that they have outlived their usefulness and tweaking them just won't get you where you need to go. Visualizing them as gone can be a great beginning of thinking about where you need to be tomorrow. The book (at least most of it) can be quite helpful in getting a process into place to help create and implement such constructive and complete change.

How to adapt when you are facing the situation of adapt or die
In the modern world, you can send information around the world in less than a second. This has leveled the playing field across the globe, helping to create the growing rift in the earning power of Americans. The income of the upper half of the U. S. population continues to advance at a steady rate, but that of the lower half continues to decline. Even worse, the number of hours in the average work week continues to increase. All of this means that the old style of management that worked so well for so many years for American companies is now obsolete. The operative phrase is simple, "Adapt or die (quickly)!"
It is no longer reasonable to spend an extensive amount of time examining a problem from all sides, slowly working towards a consensus and then incrementally implementing the solution. One must be able to identify problems, create solutions and then execute them all within a very short time. This requires organizations to reorganize into flat hierarchies of decision making. The point of the authors is that this can and should be done in the design of everything the company does. This strategy of design extends to how the company is organized regarding the communication between personnel, to their relative locations in space, to how the products are built, how they are marketed, delivered and finally to how customer relations are handled.
Their phrase is idealized design, which is simply to design everything so that substantial changes are easy to implement. The explanations are done through a series of case studies, which are drawn from many areas of business, service and manufacturing. Two case studies are outside the business sector, one describes a non-profit academy for vocal arts and the other the White House communications agency. Clearly the most difficult task was that faced by the people in the White House communications agency. Theirs is a task where even the most apparently innocuous of errors can have dramatic consequences. Their schedule is often timed to the minute, and the wrong camera angle or the wrong word can give great offense to someone where offense is the last of all desired results. Implementing change in that environment is extremely difficult, after all you cannot ask the president to take a week off so that you can retool.
I was impressed by the information and advice offered up in this book, and I base this on two reasons. The first is that for almost everyone, the current reality is that they will have no choice. Nothing concentrates the mind like survival. Secondly, the advice is sensible, workable and can be applied across the entire organizational spectrum. I strongly recommend this book for all people who are major decision makers in their organizations.

Dispel Tomorrow's Crisis Today
Every organization faces interacting threats and opportunities. It is, perhaps, simplistic to argue the ideal solution to these problems is to imagine the ideal solution and then work backwards to today.

The authors refer to this six-step process as "idealized design."

* Idealization
1. Formulate the problem. Understand your organization's Achilles heel by preparing a systems analysis, an obstruction analysis, describe your organization's future without change and then project a scenario if nothing is done.
2. Ends Planning. This is the heart of the process. Once you understand where you are and where you want to be, identify the gaps.
* Realization
3. Means Planning
4. Resource Planning
5. Design of Implementation
6. Design of controls.

The authors include a chapter for government and another on the health-care challenge. They offer humane, effective and intriguing solutions to what often appears to be intractable problems.

"Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error," wrote Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, the German cultural figure. For many of us, it is easier said than changed. Idealized design offers a powerful tool for revolutionary thinking. Adding its tenets into our individual and organization thinking will help us adapt to today's environment of rapid change.