Product Description

Just as people have personalities, Bridges explains organizations have character.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #141533 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-25
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From the Publisher
"Today we can say that William bridges 'wrote the book' on organizational character just as we can say he 'wrote the book' on change. I have been using the insights in The Character of Organizations with assurance and great success for years. In this book, he offers helpful information on organizational character so that we can use it in a responsible, effective way for team building, career transition, leadership development, and change management. His writing is direct, crisp, and contemporary, with examples that speak to all of us in the field. Our clients who live in the 'real' world will find it a practical guide once they have learned about type and their organization's character. This book needs to be a part of your tool kit if you want to extend what you already know into more powerful applications for organizations."--from the Foreword by Sandra Krebs Hirsh

This book is the foundation of a larger training program by Bridges and his associate Chris Edgelow, called Working with Organizational Character. It includes a facilitator's guide, participant workbook, and the Organizational Character Index.

About the Author
William Bridges, Ph.D., principal of William Bridges & Associates, has been a leader in the field of transition management since the publication of his best-selling book TRANSITIONS in 1980. A frequent presenter and keynote speaker, he has worked for over twenty years with organizations and individuals to help them manage more positively through change. Bridges and his firm have provided assessment, training, and consulting services to hundreds of organizations, including Amoco, AT&T, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, Motorola, and the U.S. Veterans Administration. Author also of MANAGING TRANSITIONS, JOBSHIFT, and CREATING YOU & CO., he has become one of the most widely read and quoted experts on what's happening to jobs in today's organizations. He has been listed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top ten independent executive development presenters in America.

Customer Reviews

Myers-Briggs for companies - surprisingly effective.
Criticisms that this book merely recycles standard Myers-Briggs ideas are misplaced. Most people familiar with ideas of psychological type might agree there was *some* case for an analogous approach to organisational character, perhaps at the level of the four categories of temperament. However, William Bridges succeeds in showing how applying the sixteen types of Myers-Briggs type theory can highlight essential and distinctive organisational characteristics. Most of his examples, although dated, seem compelling. There are a few issues: I suspect that most people would consider Hewlett-Packard to be SF, rather than ST, as Dr. Bridges has it (p. 25). And even for a book first published in 1990, the omission of Microsoft is a little surprising (INTJ?).

The other dimension of organisational analysis covered in this book is that of organisational development and lifecycle. Again, Dr. Bridges leverages type theory to develop some interesting ideas as to the different type-characteristics exhibited from organisation conception ("the Dream"), through maturity ("Becoming an Institution"), to organisational death. Given the extent of merger and acquisition activity in recent years, I was surprised to see how little attention Dr. Bridges gave to managing the cultural and developmental issues which surface when different company characteristics collide in M&A, (about half a page).

Finally, there is a deeper theoretical issue as to why Jungian/Myers-Briggs type theory - developed from Jung's theories of the human psyche, should be expected to apply to organisations at all. Do organisations assemble themselves around the type of their founders, does the type emerge as a side-effect of the types of employees who are best at tackling the company's problems, or is there a supra-human theory of "organisational psychology" trying to get out here? The book alludes to the existence of these kinds of problems, but does not really add much to our understanding.

All in all, this book will add value to anyone who already has a feel for the Myers-Briggs approach to personality types, and who is interested in effectively dealing with organisations.

a little hokie
I sent this book back - Its basically the myers-briggs at the organization level. It goes through characteristics of the ENTJ organization for example. My problem with it was that the people make the organization and the culture and unless all the same types of people are being hired or cloned and all the people in the org are primarily the particular type then the concepts fall apart. The other thing that bugged me was that the leadership generally sets the tone for the organization so if the leader is a certain personality type then that will probably prevade the organization so there's no need to look at the organization's type but instead to look at leadership and see what type of culture/values they portend andthen work at that level to make change. Anyway, I didn't find this book useful at all - just another spin on myers briggs

Insightful!
Organizations have their own personalities, as William Bridges demonstrates by applying the most popular personality test ever devised for humans to groups of people working together. Bridges developed the “Organizational Character Index” (OCI) from the ubiquitous Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. While OCI thus far lacks the rigorous testing of hundreds of certified Myers-Briggs trainers, intuitively the model makes sense. Bridges provides a useful way of thinking about organizational styles and tries to understand the nature of departments within organizations. Abundant examples, lists and charts help illustrate the principles. We...recommend this book to managers and human resource professionals seeking insight into the nuances of organizational development, provided that they are willing to spoon through a certain amount of alphabet soup. (Note: Though this book has a 2000 copyright date, with the exception of a new forward by Sandra Krebs Hirsh, it is a republication of a work written in about 1990.)