Global Forces: A Guide for Enlightened Leaders – What Companies and Individuals Can Do

Citation

Egan Strang, C. (2001), "Global Forces: A Guide for Enlightened Leaders – What Companies and Individuals Can Do", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 33 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2001.03733dae.001

Global Forces: A Guide for Enlightened Leaders – What Companies and Individuals Can Do

Global Forces: A Guide for Enlightened Leaders – What Companies and Individuals Can Do

Bruce NixonManagement Books 20002000ISBN 1 85252 353 0£14.99Keywords: Vision, Leadership, Moral responsibility, Organizational behaviour, Stakeholders

Bruce Nixon describes himself in his introduction to Global Forces as a "courageous optimist" and his positive approach to his subject is conveyed throughout. His central argument is the need for those within organisational systems to individually and collaboratively take on responsibility for creating sustainable businesses where there is an environment of self-learning and creativity, authenticity and respect. The major plank he proposes for reaching this state is through forming a stakeholder culture which works with the whole system rather than with parts of it. Bruce Nixon touches on some of the problems that this approach faces, but so lightly as not to do them justice given the importance he places on it. For example, there are a number of interesting studies which have found groups who take considerable pride in doing a good job whilst actively opting out of a stakeholder approach.

Without a doubt, Nixon's aims of organisational life where a holistic approach is taken, resulting in sustainable and fairer organisations, and his identification of a wide range of the issues inherent within globalisation are to be applauded. But less so the 160 pages he takes to itemise each topic followed by what are in essence lists of facts. Additionally, this approach of breadth rather than examining the complexity of the issues does not do justice to the arguments contained within them, for example, the issue of relieving Third World countries of their debt when the very financing purchases their survival in some instances.

In the opinion of this reviewer, the first two-thirds of Global Forces would have been eminently more readable if Bruce Nixon had been more succinct and, additionally, if he had reduced the "bittiness" of his writing style through more effective presentation of the material, including greater use of graphs, flow charts, bar graphs, pie charts, etc., and through the inclusion of extended appendices.

It is only in the last third of Global Forces that Nixon moves on to the subject of the sub-title of his book, What Companies and Individuals Can Do, which is disappointing. Here, his main focus of some 40 pages' length is on how to set up and run large groups drawing on, and developing, the original 1960s work of the Tavistock Institute. He then introduces, briefly, a few techniques including the design he developed for his first foray into cross-cultural work within a Japanese-British workforce, a rudimentary approach to conflict management, as well as a "strategic leadership model" that will be familiar territory to those working on strategy development. Within these process descriptions, there are a fair number of comments such as "people have to be safe to be who they really are" without the text moving significantly forward. He invites chapter contributions from others, which is attractive, including one (Nicholas Janni) on the importance of the "whole person" (i.e. integrating the emotional, mental, physical and spiritual), although it is difficult to know how to use this thinking other than to recognise it.

As a reference, for both an outline of the main global factors which impinge to the detriment of people's well being and an approach to the design of large group work, this book will prove useful. It would have been greatly helped if the first two-thirds had been sizeably curtailed (or the emphasis of the book changed with a greater analysis of the complexities involved), and if there had been a considerably extended "tools" section with the same attention given to other models as Nixon gives to that of large groups.

Caroline Egan Strang