L'entreprise délibérée

The researchers behind this collective work consider with caution the liberated company movement. To boost engagement and performance, must we really liberate the company from hierarchy? Isn’t the challenge rather to free expression, to set up dialogue and coordination between the staff and their hierarchy?

The authors are convinced of the need to give back action power to the staff, but they wonder about the adequate response to propose. To do this, they go back to the foundations of any company: it is born out of the need to come together to see through a mission that is too complex to lead individually. This requires coordination and a structure. For these researchers, the company must remain under managerial leadership. However, we must give up what leads field employees to feel in a position of simple implementers, submitted to rules whose origin they don’t know. They must be able to discuss their work, how they would like to approach it, what frustrates them. They must be able to engage in discussions with their managers and the support functions, with an objective of continuous improvement. They must be able to adapt the rules wisely, to deal with a specific situation, manage the unforeseen, etc. This book presents different cases of intervention in companies to create and improve such spaces for dialogue. It presents returns of experience of the implementation of logics of subsidiarity.

A highly concrete and nuanced book.