The Organizational Sweet Spot: Engaging the Innovative Dynamics of Your Social Networks

Employee disengagement is one of the most pressing problems plaguing managers today hampering the innovation capacities of countless organizations. According to recent polls, some 20 percent of workers report feeling disconnected from their jobs, in an environment of stagnating wages, massive layoffs, rising health care costs, and other factors that contribute to alienation, distrust, and apathy.

In The Organizational Sweet Spot, Dr. Charles Ehin takes a refreshing new look at what it will take to reengage disaffected workers and boost their resolve to advance novel ideas. Applying the latest research from such fields as evolutionary psychology, social neuroscience, organizational behavior, anthropology, and social network analysis, Ehin demonstrates how employee disengagement is rooted in a fundamental misalignment between people’s instinctive drive to develop their personal and group identities through informal or “emergent” relationships and the ways in which organizational goals and profit motives are executed through formal bureaucracy.

The challenge for today’s organizations―which operate under constantly changing conditions―is to narrow this gap, that is, to find the “sweet spot”, where the formal and informal elements of the organization overlap. Ehin provides practical tools for leaders to support this “shared access domain” to improve productivity, catalyze innovation, and inspire exceptional performance. His new model is likely to reverberate throughout current management thinking as we move toward creating more vital and meaningful workplaces.

Professor Charles (Kalev) Ehin is an accomplished author and recognized management authority. He is currently an emeritus professor of management at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah where he also served as the Dean of the Gore School of Business. After retiring from the United States Air Force, where he held various leadership positions and taught at the Air Command and Staff College, and prior to joining Westminster College he worked as an internal organization development consultant in the private sector.

Dr. Ehin was born in Estonia and during World War II his family was torn apart by the disastrous struggle for supremacy in Europe by two dictatorships, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1950 he was finally able to emigrate to the United States. The tragic events that he and his family experienced during the course of the war and their everlasting affects are chronicled in his book, Aftermath (Publish America, 2004).

Professor Ehin is also the author of several groundbreaking management books. Unleashing Intellectual Capital (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000―now available from Elsevier) broke new ground by introducing the duality of human nature to the realm of management and its impact on differing organizational contexts. His follow on work, Hidden Assets: Harnessing the Power of Informal Networks (Springer, 2004), makes it quite clear why people can be physically controlled but not managed. The Organizational Sweet Spot: Engaging the Innovative Dynamics of Your Social Networks (Springer, May 2009), pinpoints where most of the work in an enterprise takes place and how that "sweet spot" can be expanded.