Book encourages firms in crisis to look inside

Faced with a crisis, corporations typically respond by naming a panel of outside experts or by hiring high-priced consultants. But according to MIT Sloan Professor Janice Klein, author of True Change: How Outsiders on the Inside Get Things Done in Organizations (Jossey-Bass), such firms could be much better off and could even avert the crisis in the first place by enabling "outsider-insiders" within their own organizations — and by listening to them.

Klein said her book is aimed at two audiences. The first are these outsider-insiders themselves, people who work for an organization and see firsthand its problems and systemic weaknesses but don't know how or are unwilling to bring such information forward. Klein's second audience is made up of "executives and managers who see the value of these folks, but are frustrated because they haven't been able to utilize them."