Bullish on Uncertainty
How Organizational Cultures Transform Participants

Studies how two highly successful Wall Street investment banks managed the uncertainty of their high-velocity environment through different work practices.

Alexandra Michel (Author), Stanton Wortham (Author)

9780521690195, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 10 November 2008

278 pages, 3 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.38 kg

"...This book and the “Tale of Two Banks” is a “must read” for everyone living the current economic crisis. Scholars, employers, employees, and students alike will find this material accessible, thought provoking, and certainly informative. Society’s current need to understand the economic crisis will be well served in reading and discussing this book..."
--Susan L. Cook, Metropolitan State College of Denver, Journal of Language and Social Psychology

Bullish on Uncertainty provides rare insight into the secretive world of Wall Street high finance, which has shaped influential business, governmental, and cultural leaders and keeps supplying new business practices to other organizations in dynamic and complex environments. The book studies how two highly successful Wall Street investment banks managed the uncertainty of their high-velocity environment through different work practices. One bank chose the familiar route of decreasing bankers' uncertainty. The other bank used the novel and effective practice of increasing bankers' uncertainty to make them more alert to new situations and more likely to draw on the bank's entire range of resources. Through vivid accounts of newcomers during their first two years, the book traces how the two banks' initially similar participants were transformed into fundamentally different kinds of persons by the different kinds of work practices in which they participated.

Foreword Kenneth J. Gergen
1. Bullish on uncertainty
Part I. Work Practices: 2. Practices that reduced cognitive uncertainty at Individual Bank
3. Practices that amplified cognitive uncertainty at Organization Bank
Part II. Psychological Transformation: 4. Recruiting
5. Individual-centered transformation
6. Organization-centered transformation
7. An alternative approach to organizational and psychological transformation.

Subject Areas: Business & management [KJ], Occupational & industrial psychology [JMJ]