Book Bytes: Journey to the Emerald City
By Lara Wright
Tech Week, 1999
This rather fetchingly named management book is refreshing, promoting worthwhile values and showing how they apply to organizational results. Far removed in tone from the Machiavellian business tomes of the "80s, and equally distant form the feel-good personal-success titles of this decade, Journey to the Emerald City actually tells frustrated managers what they need to hear: That belief statements are nothing to employees and listen to them. That most people say that they are open to feedback, but discount it when they get it. And that ultimately, a company can only succeed if each of its employees is personally invested in the company's success.
The book is a sequel to The Oz Principle: Getting Results Through Individual and Organizational Accountability. While that title describes the basic principles of personal accountability, Journey to the  Emerald City provides concrete instructions on how to implement the cultural change. Even better, a third of the book is devoted to accelerating that change, complete with practical ways to promote joint accountability and troubleshooting guides for every type of obstacle.
All right, you say, but what about this "Wizard of Oz" thing? The parallels drawn between the familiar movie and the workaday world are cute, but really just serve as sweetened intros to topics that can be surprisingly hard for people to face. The real guts of the book came in identifying things such as "surveillance-style management," "blame-storming," "filtering feedback," "entitlement attitudes," as well as their positive replacements. There are plenty of diagrams for those who like that sort of thing, but far more hard-hitting are the many true life anecdotes told by various CEOs about their organizations' cultural problems and how they managed to solve them.
Are you a part of an organization where employees complain that their contributions are not valued, that management sends mixed messages, or that blame and guilt, not pride and integrity, are the motivating forces? We like to think that Silicon Valley workplaces are more modern and freethinking than their competitors, but there are undoubtedly many that under-perform due to cultural shortcomings. Any manger with the power and the will to affect positive change would benefit from reading this excellent book.
-Sarah Ellerman
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Want more information?
Journey to the Emerald City: Achieve a Competitive Edge by Creating a Culture of
Accountability
By Roger Connors and Tom Smith
Prentice Hell Inc 1999; $26.00; 238 pages
IBSN 0735200521
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