National Network for Equitable Library Service

"The ways we go about changing organizations usually don't work," asserts Geoff Bellman. Our underlying assumptions predetermine the results and preclude the broad success we so desperately seek. Change efforts often end up off-track because of small expectations. What is needed are grand expectations, so big that they cannot be realized in many lifetimes. It is only when people awaken to and work toward these immense purposes that they have the chance of finding fulfillment. Organizations are the perfect place to do this-these "beasts" which we create and curse, love and hate, that are so essential to our lives. In The Beauty of the Beast, Bellman shows how we can explore our huge potential and shift our daily organizational focus to one of long life and fulfillment-and in the process redesign our organizations for tomorrow. Bellman examines why we keep creating these creatures that fall so far short of our dreams for them. He reveals how to recognize the beast in ourselves, showing how organizational control and hierarchy multiply our natural and less constructive inclinations many times over. He points out that the problem is not the existence of organizations but in the ways we imagine them. Bellman asks us to consider what we want to pass on to future generations, helps us imagine the organizations we would be proud to create, and challenges us to take action from where we are today. He offers 20 renewal assertions to help us in redesigning organizations for tomorrow. These solid guides (with related questions for work groups) open the organization to new possibilities, helping us to embrace the organizational world as it really is while working hard to change it. In the process we will also change ourselves, as we ultimately feel less distant from, and more responsible for, creating those troubling structures we love to vent about. The Beauty of the Beast will help people see their daily work in a new and larger perspective. It will help them embrace the real organizational world while they work at renewing it. And it will help people to recognize the choices available to them and to exercise those choices for positive results.