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The past decade has seen a plethora of approaches on how to respond to the changing times. All are meaningful, but useless unless alignment is an underlying theme. What is the essence of alignment? What is it that organizations do to create alignment? Examines the history of organizations with a major success story, such as Wal‐Mart and Semco, and identifies the crucial factors. Describes the growth of a Lawson Mardon Group operation which set out to follow these principles.

This paper aims to demonstrate how commercially effective business coaching can and should be implemented.

Drawing on both external sources and personal experience both as a coach herself and as the Director of Coaching for a specialist coaching company, the author discusses the main obstacles to successful coaching and how they should be overcome to maximise the return on investment for the sponsoring organization.

The piece delivers accessible suggestions for increasing the return on investment of coaching programmes.

With these suggestions in mind, the common pitfalls can be avoided, allowing companies access to the best, and most profitable, coaching.

Where other authors examine the benefits of coaching in terms of productivity and personal benefit for employees, the author brings into play the often‐forgotten commercial element, explaining how to ensure that the coaching implemented is a success in every sense.

Builds on work within The Lawson Mardon Group – one of the world′s largest packaging firms. Reviews, in particular, discontinuous change and the relationship between responsiveness and organizational learning – the latter expressed as a model identifies different organizational development patterns and the shift demanded in organizational assumptions at each stage of development. The underlying concepts are of special interest to practitioners in that the material goes some way towards describing not only the evolution of the learning organization, but where processes such as TQM and autonomous work groups fit into the overall journey.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

SOCIAL scientists have not yet been able to formulate any general laws about behaviour in industry that are capable of broad application. In recent years, however, they have made many useful case studies of which the one just published by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research is typical. It is an approach to the problem which can do much to increase the understanding of the way in which people react to common industrial situations.

In the last‐issued volume of his monumental History of the Novel, Dr. E. A. Baker remarks that librarians do not expect to be thanked for their services and then, characteristically, proceeds to thank some dozen or so. Whatever our expectations are, we are none the less appreciative when a writer does express his debt; it helps us, it justifies our work. Few tributes of late have been more graceful than this paid by Mr. J. D. Griffith Davies in his useful and attractive Honest George Monk, which has lately come from Mr. John Lane: “What I should do without the kindly help of my friend, R. J. Gordon, Librarian of the Leeds Public Libraries, I really don't know. Like some fairy godmother he produces for my use the rarest books; and his keen personal interest in all forms of research, and the unfailing courtesy of his colleagues, makes the Reference Library at Leeds one of the homeliest places for work.” It is worth while to compare the expression here with the words Mr. Berwick Sayers has written at the end of his preface to the 1937 edition of Brown's Manual.

A WEEK or two ago The Municipal Journal, in chronicling the opening of new libraries at Barrow and Bethnal Green, expressed the opinion that libraries “were having a new lease of life.” The phrase is a curious one, as we were not aware that libraries were in a state of senility, although we were vividly aware of their imperfections. It is, nevertheless, true that there has been unwonted library activity of late, and library matters now receive some real attention in the public press. The latter may be due in some measure to the recent publicity campaign of the Library Association. Still, that does not account for the fact that many places, hitherto not quite awake to the value of libraries, are now asking about them, as Sutton, Weymouth, Marylebone, Coulsoon and Purley, while others are pressing for development, especially in the direction of Children's Libraries.