SETH ALLCORN is a principal of DyAD, a consulting firm specializing in organizational development and management, in Asheville, North Carolina. Author of eight books on management and organizational life and numerous articles, he holds an MBA and a doctorate in Higher and Adult Education. His most recent books include Managing People During Stressful Times (1997), The Human Cost of a Management Failure (1996), and Anger in the Workplace (1994).

Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Rationality in the Workplace
Irrationality in the Workplace
The Human Spirit in the Workplace
Secular Spirituality and Leadership in the Workplace
Secular Spirituality and the Nature of Followers
The Role of Leaders in Supporting the Human Spirit in the Workplace
The Role of Followers in Supporting the Human Spirit in the Workplace
Reflections of the Workplace
Knowing, Learning and the Human Spirit: Creating the Competitive Twenty-First Century Organization
Third Millennium Workplace Secular Spirituality
Suggested Readings
Index

There's more to work and the life of the organization than just numbers. In his new book on how people function in work settings, Allcorn calls it the human spirit. It too contributes to the life and performance of organizations, but like life itself it can die--or be killed. Allcorn argues that changes in how organizations are managed--downsizing, rightsizing, reengineering, and other catastrophic means--can have an unintended but devastating result. These factors can cause spiritual death--the end of that quality in people that keeps them alive, growing, and productive. Allcorn shows that management and the methods it uses to cope with organizational change must be adjusted to take into account a special kind of workplace spirituality and to nurture it, not destroy it. Indeed, he maintains that by appreciating the importance of the human spirit, and liberating the quality of spirituality into the workplace, benefits to the organization can be profoundly rewarding. Allcorn explains the practical, measurable results of this liberation, documenting his assertions in heartbreaking detail. Even the most tough-minded executive will soon come to consider this book as essential as a spreadsheet.
Allcorn asserts that while spirituality inevitably has religious connotations, in his use of the word, it is fundamentally secular and powerfully humanistic. Besides the rationality of numbers and the irrationalities common to a defensive workplace, there is something else that permits members of organizations to rise above workplace adversities. This creates organizational success. As employees are downsized out or just furloughed, the effect on the organization and those who remain is clearly destructive. The author concludes that the way for an organization to achieve success is certainly not by killing its people's spirit by firing them. Other means exist to preserve the organization, and Allcorn explores them in careful, useful detail.