Geoff Bellman writes about this love/hate relationship we have with organizations. They are wretched and wonderful, mad and magnificent, crazy and compelling.

The Beauty of the Beast helps managers, consultants, workers, and students of organizations see what they love and hate about these creatures. Bellman helps us imagine the organizations we want to create, the kind we would be proud to present to future generations. He stimulates our thinking about what we can do as individuals who work together in these modern monsters. And he helps us aspire to our own greatness as we work with these powerful creatures. He helps us figure out what to do.

Building on his thirty-five years of organizational experience as a manager and consultant, the author:

• Defines what is required for an organization to live for generations, exploring those keys to life often ignored in the rush to make profits or meet budgets
• Offers eight aspirations that are a framework for daily decisions in organizations of all kinds
• Presents twenty assertions that help your organization use what it has learned in its past to support its leap into the future
• Gives examples that help you imagine how you might put your aspirations and ideas into practice

The ways we go about changing organizations, Bellman asserts, usually don’t work. Our change efforts often fail because our expectations are too modest. We need grand aspirations, so large that they cannot be realized in our lifetime. Working toward great purposes offers us some chance of finding personal fulfillmentand creating organizations we can be proud of. Bellman shows how we can reach toward our potential through the organizations we serveand in the process redesign our organizations for tomorrow.