Book Brief: Beating the System

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Beating the System: Using Creativity to Outsmart Bureaucracies

By Russell L. Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin

Berrettt-Koehler, July 2005

175 pages, $14.95


Who better to teach ways to defeat “the system” than the people who taught how to construct it in the first place? Ackoff and Rovin, retired Wharton School professors, provide a humorous account of various ways of either thwarting or circumventing bureaucrats. (The three options of choice: embarrass them, sap their budgets or make their work lives more difficult.) But the real benefit to reading this book is to make sure your organization is not subjecting your customers to needless bureaucratic hassles.

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