Foreword
This author maintains that growing organizations move through five
distinguishable phases of development, each of which contains a relatively calm
period of growth that ends with a management crisis. He argues, moreover, that
since each phase is strongly influenced by the previous one, a management with a
sense of its own organization's history can anticipate and prepare for the next
developmental crisis. This article provides a prescription for appropriate
management action in each of the five phases, and it shows how companies can turn
organizational crises into opportunities for the future growth. Mr. Greiner is
associate professor of organizational behavior at the Harvard Business School and
the author of several Harvard Business Review articles on
organization development.
