With compliance now its main goal, human resource management has become a hodgepodge of unconnected functions and tasks. Williams argues persuasively that lost in the day-to-day effort is another, equally important goal: employee and organizational development. One result is that human resource management has lost credibility as a profession and in its own way, much like many of the organizations it serves, has become dysfuntional. To correct this imbalance--compliance over development--and in fact to salvage the HR profession itself Williams challenges HR people to abandon their search for power and money in organizational life, and instead to redirect their efforts to helping, truly helping, employees realize their potential in organizational settings. With surveys, checklists, advice, and revealing anecdotes drawn from his own extensive academic and consulting experiences, Williams provides a provocative, controversial analysis of the new crisis in human resource management, and a workable set of strategies to help HR professionals emerge from it.

Williams begins by calling the human resource function a bogged-down process. He identifies the problems this causes, and articulates a need for a new set of synergistic processes that will pull HR people out of the past and into the future he envisions for them. In Part II he digs into specific strategies to accomplish the HR makeover. He identifies a new role for HR, traces a process of change, and illustrates the effects of technological advances on the entire HR restrategizing effort. Part III tells HR professionals how to do it. In what he calls a series of workshop chapters, Williams helps HR people reassess their position in their own organizations, determine whether they are on the wrong paths and if so how to get off them, and then provides ways to reinstate the development function to its rightful place as equal in importance to compliance.

For organizational and personal change to happen and be sustainable, there must first be a system of thought balanced against action. Williams and his concept of "congruence" provide an alternative to the often chaotic, unbalanced ways in which change is currently understood and its accomplishment attempted. He challenges the organizational model of compartmentalized structures, offers a persuasive refutation of the fashionable paradigm of organizational transformation (one based on dominance and control), and argues a provocative notion that innovation is actually the successful result of reworking what has not worked before. A new look at the processes that create organizational movement, Williams' latest book is a guide for leaders, managers, consultants, and corporate practitioners, and a new way for students, teachers, and researchers to rethink the entire change process. Williams has found through his own experience that people focus too closely on the "action" behaviors of organizations and too little on the thinking behind them. The result is that gaps open up and create pitfalls in our efforts to achieve excellence in human and organizational performance. Williams suggests that organizations innovate themselves into failure. To counter this, he provides a true systemic approach to enhancing organizational performance, a system of what he visualizes as "congruence," a way to fit thoughts to actions. It is as much a way of thinking, says Williams, as it is a method toward goals--goals that are clear and essential to the survival of any organization. Drawing liberally upon his own expertise as a teacher, consultant, and therapist, he helps others to appreciate the successes thatcan be realized when balance and the alignment of thought and action are achieved, and when the search for change becomes a planned, focused, and systemic endeavor.

Dr. Williams contends that over the last 20 years a change has occurred in organizations that has created a syndrome of dysfunctions that are neither good for businesses nor for the people who work in them. Williams sees businesses as living entities, and argues that how they act and react will have an impact on their employees, and often a devastating impact. In much the same way as businesses make decisions, people make choices, and seldom are these decisions and choices congruent. Unless disparate self-interests and goals can be reconciled--unless a partnership can be restored between people and their organizations--not only will employees be damaged, but the success of their organization, upon which they depend for their livelihoods, will be jeopardized. How this dangerous situation came about, what it means, and how it can be remedied is the subjet of Dr. Williams' book. Research-based and always in touch with the realities of commerce, Dr. Williams will make business people aware that organizations and their people must become reunited, and then show them how it can be done.

Dr. Williams makes clear he is not simply speculating or theorizing. His goal is to make management aware of the dysfunctions that are damaging their organizations, and how these are reflected in the behaviors of their employees. When he calls for a focus on humanity, spirit, and context, Dr. Williams is actually offering a workable, real-world strategy to breathe new life into organizations of all kinds--a strategy he calls The Trinity Process. Its purpose: to help management restore the essential partnership between organizational entities and the people who make them succeed or fail. In Part One he shows what it means to be part of any organization and, with anecdotes and cases from his own research, helps readers grasp the dynamics of their own organizations. In Part Two he proposes new or reframed paradigms that provide an underpinning for the reestablishment of equality between organizations and their employees. Then, in Part Three he presents The Trinity Process itself. The result is a remarkably lucid, readable, engrossing exploration of organizational life today, important reading for decision makers in all types of organizations, public as well as private, and for academics concerned with how organizations behave.

Not only in corporations but also within governments and not-for-profit institutions, organizational violence is on the rise. Drawing on his extensive experience as a consultant and human resource executive, Dr. Williams looks at the nature of violence; identifies its tenets, vessels, structures, and processes; and then offers ways to create what he calls an aura of calm, a state within organizations that is essential to ending violence. The book concludes with a detailed questionnaire, which the author has devised and tested and which manakement will find valuable in its effort to assess the extent of violence within their own organizations and then end it.

This book explains in theoretical and practical terms the creation of effective change within organizations. The book states that dysfunction is a current fact of life, creating chronic problems for people and organizational systems. The author describes the basis for dysfunction and develops an effective belief system that can guide personal and organizational functioning. Specifically, the author defines the parameters of creating effective balance and, through three primary cases (city government, utility corporations and gay/lesbian organizations), shows how dysfunction can guide personal and organizational action.

The author displays an abiding belief that change should occur only when people and systems begin to experience dysfunction. He describes a process for change and effectively walks the manager, professional, consultant, student, or faculty person through creating balance, change, and congruence for the long term.