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Journey to the Emerald City: Achieve a Competitive Edge by Creating a Culture of Accountability
By Roger Connors and Tom Smith. Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall Press, 1999. 238 pages, hard cover, $26.00.
Reviewed by Janis R. Evink, Haworth, Inc.
Journey to the Emerald City builds on the concepts put forth in The Oz Principle, an earlier work by management consultants Roger Connors and Tom Smith that also uses examples from L. Frank Baum's 1900 classic story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, to help make its points. Despite its catchy title, this is a serious book about how corporate America can gain a competitive advantage by creating what the authors call a culture of accountability, with "people being accountable to think and act in the manner necessary for their organization to achieve results." It is the opposite of a culture of blaming and fingerpointing, where people seek to avoid blame rather than accept responsibility. Connors and Smith assign responsibility to all employees in their change methodology. Though they agree that change must start at the top, the authors stress that all employees should be involved if a true culture of accountability is to be established.
To illustrate how their approach can work in practice, the story of Cardiac Pacemakers, Inc., (CPI), a former subsidiary of Eli Lilly and Company, is used throughout to show how CPI formed...