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Francesca Cardona has published a book on consulting to leaders and organisations written in accessible language with many illustrative examples. Suitable for beginners in the profession, but also inspiring for experienced consultants and managers. The book is divided into three parts: the first contains a number of reflections on the meaning of work in current society; the second initially reviews the basic concepts of the Tavistock tradition and then presents six chapters, each with its own theme developed by an organisational case; and the third contains four chapters on various challenges in the consultant role.
The context around work in current society is described as turbulent, changing, having fluid boundaries, and being a culture of performativity. Cardona refers to Lawrence and Armstrong's (1998) idea that under the conditions of globalisation it is no longer the organisation that contains the work, but the work that contains the organisation. Our relation to work is seen as a love affair “that brings passion and desire as well as turbulence, disappointment and despair” (p. 7) and the challenge of today is to make sense of the work, develop containing structure and attachment, to turn the turbulent love affair into a more stable relationship. It is worth mentioning that Cardona's analysis doesn't differentiate between subgroups in society, and you could say that it is a middle-class perspective she puts forward, but on the other hand, the target group of the book is leaders and consultants.
The other half of the analysis is dealing with women's “ambivalent love”, their relationship and relatedness to work. Here the dilemmas between work and family/motherhood are looked at and “twins in the womb” is suggested as metaphor: are there enough space and resources for both?
The themes in the second part are the influence of task on mental life in organisations, management in transition, shame, the interface between the personal and the professional, succession, the