Alan Pavey
Most organisations don’t call for help because they fully understand what’s wrong. They call because somebody’s raised a grievance, a manager’s lost control, HR is firefighting, the board is confused, a senior person has become 'indispensable', or operations have quietly turned to shit.The Corporate Exorcist is a darkly funny, brutally practical guide to finding the people, politics and operational problems quietly screwing up businesses, charities and boards.Drawing on years of real-world experience in HR, operations, investigations, management, governance and organisational repair, Alan Pavey looks beyond the obvious problem. The difficult employee may not be the real problem. The manager who 'can’t cope' may have been given an impossible job. The executive everyone relies on may actually have become a dangerous single point of failure. And the board that says it was 'aware' may discover that being told something and actually understanding it are two very different things.This isn’t a conventional HR textbook, and it certainly isn’t another worthy management book full of diagrams nobody will ever use. It’s about what really happens inside organisations when communication breaks down, authority becomes blurred, managers stop managing, bad processes become normal and everyone starts blaming everyone else.Using composite cases, forensic thinking, practical examples and a healthy amount of swearing, The Corporate Exorcist shows how to separate symptoms from causes, follow the evidence, work out who really has power, identify what’s actually gone wrong and fix the bloody thing properly.If you’ve ever looked around a workplace and thought, 'How the hell is this still functioning?', this book is for you.
