We end up hating what we create out of love, and then we must learn to love what we've grown to hate. That's longtime organizational consultant Geoffrey M. Bellman's thesis in this slim, smart, plainspoken and occasionally overidealistic volume on embracing, in all their glory and nastiness, the organizations to which we've devoted our lives. In this way, we ennoble both them and ourselves.

The first section of Bellman's book aims to bring us to terms with everything we hate about organizations--be they corporate, institutional, governmental, or, um, our workplace--then urges us to look beneath the day-to-day workings of organizations and start imagining them at their full potential--what Bellman calls a quest for their "beauty and life."

Part Three offers 20 "renewal assertions" for sparking change within organizations--on personal, small-group, and systemic levels--and the final section actually gives some fairly concrete steps for turning those assertions into action. Throughout the book, astute self-questions prompt the process of reconciliation with organizations (even though they sometimes sound scarily like New Age exercises for interpersonal growth: "Describe your relationship with this organization as it has developed so far, beginning with awareness and moving toward love." Yikes!)

There is much to recommend here, though. If Bellman's style often evokes a gentle natured, Birkenstock-wearing family therapist, he does manage to lay out a clear path for rethinking and attempting organizational change without offering even one of those honeyed "real-life snapshots" that proliferate in this genre. That said, this book still seems best suited to those with the clout to effect change, be they CEOs, veeps, or even department supervisors. Bellman's slightly wide-eyed promise that we can all transform the organizations we're a part of if we only take a good, hard look at our own attitudes and assumptions seems oblivious of the fact that, usually, those most willing to give of themselves to an organization are already getting the most from it. In big organizations, as in dysfunctional families, sometimes the love you take just isn't equal to the love you make. --Timothy Murphy 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 thisthese 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 twenty 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 fromand more responsible forcreating 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 themand to exercise those choices for positive results.