I have a long-time friend who is an organizational design consultant. She has a masters degree from Columbia University, works for a boutigue org design firm, and studied with Warner Burke, the leader of the field. She taught me a lot over the years. If you don’t have someone like this in your life and you find yourself entangled in organizations (doing, for example, Enterprise IA) you should own the book she recommends: Warner Burke’s Organization Development: A Process of Learning and Changing.

It’s a small book, and not cheap, but probably available at your local academic library. It’s a primer, and a thorough one at that. It might help us stop whining about how organizations fail and instead learn how to fix them. It’s the first of my own little recommended book list that will hopefully unearth some different picks than what you’re used to seeing, the noise between bookshelves :) .