How to manage change, how to manage life: Ichak Adizes, the organisational therapist

Ichak Kalderon Adizes is a Holocaust survivor born in 1937 in a country known today asNorth Macedonia. He has made presentations and advised government leaders within at least nine countries (see Adizes, 2004b: xviii) and written twenty-eight management books, translated in total in thirty-six languages. He has consulted to Fortune 100 corporations and established the Adizes Institute in 1971 (www.adizes.com).

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Adizes has a PhD from Columbia University Business School. He served as a tenured faculty member at the UCLA Graduate School of Management (now UCLA Anderson School of Management) from 1967 to 1982 and has taught at Stanford, Tel Aviv University, the HebrewUniversity and within Columbia University’s executive programs. He is recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the International Academy of Management, of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor (which distinguishes exceptional civic, cultural or professional contributions toAmerican society made by immigrants and their descendants) and of the Russian Quality Award and Makarenko Medal. In 2017, Adizes was named one of the “Top 10 communicators in theWorld” by PRovoke Media, alongside the Dalai Lama and Pope Benedict.

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If testimonials and endorsements of well-known management writers, CEOs and heads of government are to be the evidence base, Adizes (with his team) has achieved remarkable results. His achievements have been in disparate industries and contexts (from banking to food services, from aircraft manufacturing to the performing arts and creative endeavour), incorporations large and small and to the benefit of stakeholders in commercial and not-for-profit sectors (ichakadizes.com/testimonials). Commentary on his work and intervention protocols has been featured in such leading broadsheets and practitioner periodicals as Inc.Magazine, Fortune, The New York Times, The London Financial Times, Investor RelationsDaily and Nation’s Business.

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Whilst Adizes’ contribution to management thought and practice is conspicuous in certain circles, his name does not appear in mainstream management textbooks and within scholarly literature. Despite the accolades and the fact that his thinking about leadership (in particular) is being now taught in Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East (e.g. Bar Ilan University), the full corpus of his work is not well-known within Western business schools. More generally, Adizes himself is somewhat under-recognised as a public intellectual or leading management thinker.

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The purpose of the present article is twofold. First, it exposes Adizes’ main conceptions concerning organisational health, change management and corporate lifecycles. Second, it presents and defends an argument about why Adizes’ insights have not fully broken into main stream academia. The conclusion offers general reflections on Adizes’ life and work and what these mean for executive education. The structure of the article reflects transparently its objectives.

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To provide context for what is to come, exposition of three consequential problems with mainstream twenty-first century management and workplace superintendence theory is required (Adizes’ own view of what is wrong with the academy is discussed in the latter part of this article). First, so-called theory coming from business schools is mostly irrelevant to that which managers need to concern themselves (Joullié & Gouldx, 2022, 2023). Second, theory itself, the holy grail of mainstream academic research, even when relevant to a real- world workplace problem, is often not presented (packaged) in a way that is especially helpful to managers (Joullié & Gould, 2022; Tourish, 2020). Third, aside from concerns about the way it is communicated, theory about management phenomena is typically of low quality, being often bereft of implication for understanding, let alone prediction. Specifically, the Adizes case draws attention to the triumph of internal over external validity within the academy, what Hambrick (1994: 13) called the “closed incestuous loop” of management research. Indeed, following publication of the Ford and Carnegie Foundation reports of 1959, management theory has mostly been derived from application of a conception of the scientific method suited to physical phenomena (physics, chemistry and the like). Its relevance to workplace phenomena entails a strawman portrayal of human and workplace life (Joullié and Gould, 2023). In literature, these three kinds of criticisms are growing in both their frequency and sophistication.

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Read the full article HERE