I am a management academic working between Sydney’s University of Technology and Copenhagen Business School. With two partners I founded and directed what became Australia’s best-known brand experience agency. While I was experiencing the pleasures and sorrows of being an entrepreneur, my ongoing love affair with research took the better of me. (I’ll blame it on my PhD in Philosophy). Today, I concentrate on researching organizations and working with managers and those who are managed around the globe. While I have an eclectic bookshelf behind me, my eyes are firmly focused on organizations: how do we manage them? How do we strategize their futures? How do organizational cultures shape insiders? How do brands engage with outsiders? What makes some organizations more innovative than others? And what ways are there to make organizations behave more ethically? These questions and our attempts to answer them aren’t totally inconsequential. Organizations form the soundtrack of our lives: chances are that you have been born in a hospital; you have been educated in schools and maybe a university; you spend most of your adult life working in an organization; and when you want to escape from the daily grind you find yourself talking to a travel agent, booking a ticket with an airline and staying in a hotel. When the final curtain falls, a funeral parlour or a church will take care of you. Welcome to our society of organizations. Organizations are not only ubiquitous and pervasive, they are also powerful. Organizations make decisions, from high courts to immigration offices, from credit rating agencies to airport security, and organizations take actions – rock bands, corporations, NGOs, governments and those who oppose them are in one or the other way organized. My suspicion is that our ability to create organizations has by far outperformed our ability to manage them. In fact, most of the time, organizations seem to be on autopilot, re-producing the conditions for their own existence with little concern for those who are affected by their actions and those who are formally in charge of them. Change for the better or worse occurs at the organizational level. That might not excuse, but at least explain my obsession with organizations.