Customer Reviews

Path Of Least Resistance for Managers: Designing Organizations to Succeed

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have spent 25 years growing a family business, read many volumes on leadership and management, completed an Executive MBA, and taken post masters work in leadership and organization development. This book provided me deep insight that I had not found in any of my studies. The understanding of structure I found in the Path for Managers gave me a new clarity of what it takes to design an organization to accomplish its most important goals. The insights are very practical in their application. I have begun to apply these principles, and the results have been profound. Organizations with structural conflict will never achieve the intended results, and when structural tension is created, the results build upon themselves. I give this book my highest recommendation. It will give you tools to align your organization with a vision, and to insure that the vision becomes a reality.

I have spent 25 years growing a family business, read many volumes on leadership and management, completed an Executive MBA, and taken post masters work in leadership and organization development. This book provided me deep insight that I had not found in any of my studies. The understanding of structure I found in the Path for Managers gave me a new clarity of what it takes to design an organization to accomplish its most important goals. The insights are very practical in their application. I have begun to apply these principles, and the results have been profound. Organizations with structural conflict will never achieve the intended results, and when structural tension is created, the results build upon themselves. I give this book my highest recommendation. It will give you tools to align your organization with a vision, and to insure that the vision becomes a reality.

Being simple and being simplistic are often not the same. It is shocking that humans condescend to complexity when "simple brilliance" will do. I believe Robert Fritz has done for business what Einstein did for physics. Some reviewers want more theories and more data, when a genuine and workable insight could change everything for their organizations or their lives. E=mc2 is simple, but it is by no means simplistic. For the manager or leader who wants to make sense of his or her organization's struggles, The Path of Least Resistance for Managers is just the ticket. Our own company, TrimTab Solutions specializes in bringing clarity and focus to organizations in transition or crisis. The insights of Robert Fritz are the cornerstone for what we have found to be the most profound and insightful approach to organizational transformation and sanity; it is simple, but not simplistic. The insights in this book, if applied, are destined to influence your organization because they follow the basics of a structure's influence on behavior. Change the structure and the organization will change...Change it intelligently and the organization will advance. Buy the book and step to the forefront of organizational leadership...but be forewarned: Bring a teachable spirit. Be willing to unlearn a few assumptions to make room for Fritz's simple and strategic insights. I wouldn't begin to think about change in an organization without answering the 11 Questions first (they're in the book). Finally, and for Pete's Sake, Peter Senge wrote the forward for his "friend and mentor" Robert Fritz. What further reason do you need?

After reading this book, I found the positive tone of most of the reviews here unbelievable. I did not feel that the book was "tremendously useful," "profound and practical," "a brilliant job," "thought-provoking," "absolutely breakthrough," etc. Inspired by the 2 June 2001 and 9 May 2000 reviews here, I compared the book side-by-side with "The Fifth Discipline" ("TFD") by Peter M. Senge. TFD outshines "The Path of Least Resistance for Managers" in the following ways: (1) "Path" presents basically a single idea about "oscillations" repeatedly; TFD contains numerous great ideas. (2) TFD gives examples of companies that did (e.g., Royal Dutch/Shell) and did not (e.g., People Express) follow TFD's advice; it is not proven that the ideas in "Path" will actually improve a company. (3) "Path" oversimplifies the complexities of companies, while TFD analyzes these complexities and suggests management techniques that address them. In summary, don't waste your time and money on this two-star book, buy TFD instead.

This is the best book I've ever read on business strategy and organizational design. If you've ever wondered why some organizations take three steps forward and one step backward while others constantly progress step after step after step, this is the book for you. It's clear and concise with powerful ideas and practical techniques.

Unlike most business books these days, this book is refreshingly fad-free, formula-free, and philosophy-free. Fritz writes in a straight forward, no nonsense manner. He doesn't seem to be "selling" anything, other than a very pragmatic approach to business design and planning.

As a management consultant, I find Fritz's structural approach tremendously useful with clients. In addition to being accurate and results-oriented, it's much faster than other approaches I've used. Why waste your time or the clients' time?

Peter Senge, in his forward to Robert Fritz's latest and highly readable book, praises Robert's ability to penetrate complex subjects and articulate simple principles that guide effective action.

Peter Senge elaborates with a telling point: "...But this simplicity can be misunderstood. The difference between simplicity that trivializes and simplicity that illuminates defines genius. In this day and age of quick-fix nostrums and management books that excel at making trivial ideas complicated, it is rare to find simplicity based on deep understanding, verified from extensive first-hand experience.

In reading this book, I found what Peter Senge found - simple principles that penetrate to the very heart of the dilemmas facing most organizations today and that offer a highly practical approach to building an organization that works. And all of this 'how-to' information coming from an expert who spends most of his time actually building and creating.

I have put the principles I have learned from Robert Fritz's book into practice, in my work as an executive coach. The CEO's that I work with have unanimous praise for the impact these principles have had on their organizations and on their personal and professional lives.

You are indeed very fortunate to come upon both this book and this author. It is simply the most important business book I have ever read.

This is one of those rare books that is both profound and accessible. Fritz lays out, in a readable and understandable fashion, principles for understanding how our organizations work and further how to design organizations that succeed. Fritz writes with an elegance that makes this important subject matter easy to grasp. Some might confuse this elegance with a lack of depth but what on the surface seems easy has profound implications. There are many indications that we don't have what it takes to effectively design and navigate our organizations through changing times to the point where we sometimes see the very survival of once great organizations in question. Most recently mighty Nortel and Lucent come to mind. Fritz's insights about the workings and impact of structure may be the answer.

This book is set out in a way that we can begin to experiment with the ideas and see how they work. This is not a nice intellectual exercise but rather a powerful how-to manual. My own experience in road testing some of these ideas is very promising. It is obvious that, like music, this author's theory is based on practice.

This is a hopeful book. Modern organizations are relatively recent inventions that have become incredibly powerful and sometimes unruly forces. I am hopeful because I can see a way to bring order and design based on purpose and higher values to our companies.

This is in the top five most important business books I have ever read and very possibly leads that list.

What I enjoyed most about Robert Fritz's book is his emphasis on looking for patterns and trends present in every business. While during my career as a consultant, I have seen countless examples of "Oscillating" patterns in organizations that I have worked with. I used to write it off to poor performance in either myself as a consultant or my clients. After reading Mr. Fritz's perspective on why organizations oscillate, I understood why smart people do stupid things. Mr Fritz suggests that quite often, the cause is simple; competing goals that rob each other of focus, resources and energy. Mr Fritz's offers insights on how an organization can create real alignment and more importantly, involvement of the entire organization. It works! I've used it and continue to use to this day!

This book is a very quick read. It doesn't use the usual format for business oriented books. All effort is brought to bear in helping me, the reader, look at my situation or my client's situation in a different and clearer light.

I have read Mr. Fritz' previous books, "Creating", "Corporate Tides", and the original "Path of Least Resistence". The quality of my consulting has vastly improved primarily due to the insights I've gained from Mr. Fritz and his work. Mostly because the book has helped me gain a much clearer perspective of the underlying forces in play in my organization and my client organizations. More importantly the book offers a clear and simple approach to identifying the steps needed for my clients to create the type of lasting results they really want.

Isn't that what consulting and high performance leadership all about?

Beginners will pick up some basics, but people experienced in systems thinking or modelling will be dissapointed.

This book is really just an introduction to a very constrained set of systems thinking ideas. For people who have not seen the ideas before, it is a very straight forward and readable introduction.

However, for people who have already been introduced to these ideas, which includes anyone who has read any of Senge's books, this is 20 pages of ideas crammed into a 200 page book.

I would expect that anyone who would seek books out on this topic is already too knowledgable to find it of any use. If you are unfamiliar with the topics, however, it is not a bad first read (though I would still recommend The Fifth Discipline instead).

Robert Fritz takes a novel approach to corporate organizational theory by framing his book around the laws of nature. Fritz is especially attached to the law that states that energy follows the path of least resistance, and in this book, he urges managers to utilize this principle in reshaping their organizations. Once you get past this conceptual foundation, however, the advice that's offered here will sound pretty familiar to anyone acquainted with the basics of strategic planning. Form a central vision, create attainable goals, break goals down into smaller steps, assess your results, adjust your strategies; these techniques are all mentioned. But Fritz's adoption of scientific and engineering principles for management purposes, combined with the accompanying charts and examples, make the book an engaging read, despite the less-than-original conclusions. We [...] recommend this book to executives, managers and individuals who are looking for a new, if slightly theoretical, view of how to organize their companies or their lives.