Fritz, Robert 1943-

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Fritz, Robert 1943-

PERSONAL:

Born May 2, 1943; married; wife's name Rosalind.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Newfane, VT. E-mail—seminars@robertfritz.com.

CAREER:

Management consultant and trainer, composer, and filmmaker. Founder of Robert Fritz, Inc., DMA, and Technologies for Creating; cofounder of Innovation Associates.

WRITINGS:

The Path of Least Resistance: Principles for Creating What You Want to Create, DMA (Salem, MA), 1984, revised and expanded edition published as The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life, Fawcett Columbine (New York, NY), 1989.

Creating, Fawcett Columbine (New York, NY), 1991.

Corporate Tides: The Inescapable Laws of Organizational Structure, Berrett-Koehler Publishers (San Francisco, CA), 1996.

The Path of Least Resistance for Managers: Designing Organizations to Succeed, foreword by Peter Senge, Berrett-Koehler Publishers (San Francisco, CA), 1999.

Your Life as Art, Newfane Press (Newfane, VT), 2003.

(With Bruce Bodaken) The Managerial Moment of Truth: The Essential Step in Helping People Improve Performance, foreword by Peter Senge, Free Press (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Robert Fritz is a management consultant and trainer, music composer, and filmmaker. As a consultant, Fritz works with organizations to employ his structuralist method. His clients range from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies. Fritz is the founder of Robert Fritz, Inc., DMA and Technologies for Creating. With Charlie Keifer, Peter Senge and Peter Stroh, he is the founder of Innovation Associates.

Fritz published his first book, The Path of Least Resistance: Principles for Creating What You Want to Create, in 1984. In 1989, he wrote a revised and expanded edition of the book called The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life. The book shows individuals how to make use of their creative abilities while avoiding the new age or human potential methods. Fritz admits that he is able to achieve this himself by finding examples in great classical music composers.

Joe Vitale, writing in East West, described the book as "profound." Vitale concluded that "Fritz's newly revised and expanded book clearly explains his concepts so that the reader can begin to establish a vision and move toward it," adding that "with the new edition of The Path of Least Resistance we can learn to do what Mozart and other greats have done in their work: we can create our life as a work of art."

Fritz published Corporate Tides: The Inescapable Laws of Organizational Structure in 1996. The book looks into structuring in organizations and the laws that it typically follows, making comparative references to the previous work of Joseph Jaworski, founder of the American Leadership Forum. Booklist contributor David Rouse said that "this book is Jaworki's highly personal story of the synchronous events in his own life that led to his transformation and made him a better leader."

Fritz adapted his popular first book for managers in 1999 by publishing The Path of Least Resistance for Managers: Designing Organizations to Succeed. Written with a foreword by Peter Senge, the book employs Fritz's structural consulting pattern for managers, illustrating how organizations which are not properly structured may obstruct organizational learning and the ability of one part of the organization to share its success with another.

In 2006, Fritz wrote The Managerial Moment of Truth: The Essential Step in Helping People Improve Performance with Bruce Bodaken. Including another foreword by Senge, the book suggests a specific method for managers to deal with their employees to improve their performance: use the truth. Fritz and Bodaken say that managers should employ fact-based discussions with their individual employees or teams on the range of trouble issues, and then follow this up with three actions in order to fix the performance problems or improve the quality of work. Bodaken recorded a twenty-five to forty percent increase in organizational capacity with this method applied at Blue Shield of California.

Booklist contributor Barbara Jacobs found that the case studies as well as "explicit directions throughout provide good models to adapt." Jacobs noted that the authors "demonstrate practical, realistic responses" to potential challenges to their approach. Jacobs described the book as "simple, straight, and comprehensive." A contributor to Publishers Weekly observed that Fritz and Bodaken published "an action-oriented communication technique they believe will improve the managerial process and thus a company's ‘performance, productivity, and creativity.’" A contributor to Business Week commented that "the authors contend that once you've initiated this approach, good things follow, illustrating their message with case studies from such companies as BMO InvestorLine and American Woodmark. Bodaken and Fritz make a good argument that, rising to Jack Nicholson's famous taunt in A Few Good Men, workers and even whole companies can not only handle the truth but profit from it."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Academy of Management Executive, November, 1996, Joseph P. Yaney, review of Corporate Tides: The Inescapable Laws of Organizational Structure, p. 112.

Booklist, June 1, 1996, David Rouse, review of Corporate Tides, p. 1652; April 1, 1999, David Rouse, review of The Path of Least Resistance for Managers: Designing Organizations to Succeed, p. 1372; May 1, 2006, Barbara Jacobs, review of The Managerial Moment of Truth: The Essential Step in Helping People Improve Performance, p. 58.

Business Week, May 29, 2006, review of The Managerial Moment of Truth, p. 106.

East West, November, 1990, Joe Vitale, review of The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life, p. 98.

Harvard Business Review, February, 2006, John T. Landry, review of The Managerial Moment of Truth, p. 70; September, 2006, John T. Landry, review of The Managerial Moment of Truth, p. 32.

Library Journal, May 1, 1989, Kevin M. Roddy, review of The Path of Least Resistance, p. 91.

Publishers Weekly, March 20, 2006, review of The Managerial Moment of Truth, p. 47.