UP THEORGANIZATION*
-*How to Stop the Corporation
from Stifling People andStrangling Profits
Commemorative Edition
Robert TownsendForeword by Warren Bennis
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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UP THEORGANIZATION*
-*How to Stop the Corporation
from Stifling People andStrangling Profits
Commemorative Edition
Robert TownsendForeword by Warren Bennis
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Copyright 2007 by the Townsend Family Trust.All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-BassA Wiley Imprint989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com
Wiley Bicentennial logo: Richard J. Pacifico
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmittedin any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning,or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United StatesCopyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorizationthrough payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.,222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Webat www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to thePermissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030,201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty:While the publisher and author have used theirbest efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respectto the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim anyimplied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty maybe created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials.The advice andstrategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation.You should consult with aprofessional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any lossof profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental,consequential, or other damages.
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The chapter titled Further Up the Organization was originally published in the July 1970issue of Playboy.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Townsend, Robert, 1920-1998Up the organization : how to stop the corporation from stifling people and strangling
profits / Robert Townsend ; foreword by Warren Bennis. Commemorative ed.p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7879-8775-6 (cloth)1. Management. I.Title.
HD31.T67 2007658dc22 2007007195
Printed in the United States of AmericaFIRST EDITION
HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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www.josseybass.com
A W A R R E N B E N N I S B O O KThis collection of books is devoted exclusively to newand exemplary contributions to management thoughtand practice. The books in this series are addressed tothoughtful leaders, executives, and managers of all organizations who are struggling with and committedto responsible change. My hope and goal is to sparknew intellectual capital by sharing ideas positioned atan angle to conventional thoughtin short, to publishbooks that disturb the present in the service of abetter future.
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BOOKS IN THE WARREN BENNISSIGNATURE SERIES
Branden Self-Esteem at Work
Mitroff, Denton A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America
Schein The Corporate Culture Survival Guide
Sample The Contrarians Guide to Leadership
Lawrence, Nohria Driven
Cloke, Goldsmith The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy
Glen Leading Geeks
Cloke, Goldsmith The Art of Waking People Up
George Authentic Leadership
Kohlrieser Hostage at the Table
Rhode Moral Leadership
George True North
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v
CONTENTS
Contents, Commemorative Edition v
Foreword viWarren Bennis
Publishers Note xi
Robert Townsends Cure for Management xiiiHeartburnJim OToole
How Robert Townsend Talked Me out of xviiGetting an MBABob Davids
Up the Publisher: On Editing Robert Townsend xxiiRobert Gottlieb
Contents, Original Edition xxxi
Up the Organization, Original Edition 1
Appendix A:Townsends Third Degree 161in Leadership
Appendix B: No Reserved Parking:The Guerrilla 170Life of Robert TownsendRobert Townsend Jr.
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It was sometime in 1967 when I was teaching at MIT, andmy office phone rang. It was Bob Townsend. Not his sec-retary, mind you, but the real Bob Townsend. He wasalready known as something of a CEO icon(oclast), havingrevived a moribund car rental business,Avis, with the audac-ity of a kid with a spray can looking for trouble. Hed alreadytaken his famous jab at the #1 Hertz with the killer commer-cial, WERE ONLY #2, BUT WE TRY HARDER. Hehad just resigned and wondered if he should write a bookbased on his Avis experience. He didnt read business books,he told me; he thought they were written by monastic typeswho had never experienced the smoky complexity of realwork, who might not even know how to start a car, let alonelead people.The only exception, he told me, was my late men-tor, Doug McGregor, who had written an extraordinarilyinfluential book, The Human Side of Enterprise, which shapedthe foundation of the field nowadays referred to as organiza-tional behavior (OB). He had also heard that Doug insistedthat all of his Ph.D. students work every summer for a blue-collar manufacturing company. (I spent two summers at
Where Have You Gone,Joe DiMaggio?
FOREWORD
vi
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Dewey & Almy, a pesticide company in nearby Lexington.)Thats why Bob Townsend was calling meto learn moreabout McGregor and his ideas.
Bob asked if he could come to Boston sometime to talk.When do you have time? I said,Now. He knocked on thefront door of my house that same afternoon, a Friday, and stayedthe weekend. He was captivated by McGregors famous cate-gorization of human nature, for which he coined the termsTheory Y and Theory X. Perhaps overly simple? Bob didntthink so, nor did I.The two philosophies of leadership, almostManichaean in their dichotomous assumptions and metaphysics,are still evident today, despite Dougs encouraging optimism:
The ancient conception that people do the work ofthe world only if they are forced to do so by threatsor intimidation, or by the camouflaged authoritarianmethods of paternalism, has been suffering from alingering fatal illness for a quarter of a century. I ven-ture to guess that it will be dead in another decade.(The Professional Manager, edited by W. Bennis andC. McGregor, McGraw-Hill, 1968)
In this book,Townsend translates Theory X based onthree (dubious) propositions:
People hate to work. They have to be driven and threatened with punishment to
get them to toward organizational objectives. They like security, arent ambitious, want to be told what to
do, dislike responsibility.
Townsends rendition of Theory Y is based on three quitedifferent propositions:
viiforeword
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People dont hate work. Its as natural as rest or play. They dont have to be forced or threatened. If they commit
themselves to mutual objectives, theyll drive themselves moreeffectively than you can drive them.
But theyll commit themselves only to the extent they can seeways of satisfying their ego and development needs.
Before I wrote this Foreword, I played a little game. I putthe book in the palm of my right hand and stroked the edgeof pages from back to front. I then stopped at random andwrote down the lead or other sentences that caught my eye.Here are a few examples:
page xxvi: Big successful institutions arent successful becauseof the way they operate, but in spite of it.They didnt get tothe top doing things the way theyre doing them now.
page 10: Call yourself up.When youre off on a business tripor a vacation, pretend youre a customer.Telephone some partof your organization and ask for help.Youll run into somereal horror shows.Then trying calling yourself up and seewhat indignities youve built into your own defenses.
page 54: Billy Graham has a man named Grady Wilsonwho yells Horseshithowever you say that in Baptistat him whenever he takes himself too seriously. Perhaps thatis one of the reasons the Graham organization has been sosuccessful. Every chief executive should find someone to per-form this function and then make sure he can be fired onlyfor being too polite.
page 63: True leadership must be for the benefit of the follow-ers, not the enrichment of the leaders.
page 104: The world is divided into two classes of people: thefew people who make good on their promises (even if they dontpromise as much), and the many who dont. Get in column Aand stay there.Youll be very valuable wherever you are.
Foreword
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page 115: Secrecy:A childs garden of diseases. page 151: The best acquisitions will look overpriced and
