In particular why another business book when best-selling books hold up companies, including Enron, as exemplary in some fashion before they go on to fail or underperform ? What is the point when so many iconic companies are in trouble today?

Why despite so much accumulated advice and good practice is there so much bad management practice around?

In the face of such tumultuous environmental change and organisational dysfunction, there are many voices calling for management re-invention and new paradigms. This obsession with novelty is delusional*. Bob Sutton says that anyone claiming invention of radical new models “suffers from arrogance, ignorance, or both.” The tendency in management literature to talk of 21st century management and new paradigms risks overlooking fundamental insights of trail-blazing theoretical thinkers from decades ago, from years of academic research and lessons learned from process innovation methods that took root in manufacturing from the 1980s onwards.

To be fair, there are workplace changes that really are new, like getting to grips with social networking and collaboration technologies. What are they? How are they used? Which technologies are used for what purpose? What are the social protocols associated with them? What are their implication for ways of working, and what does their use imply for skills development? Castells et al (2007) tell us that all technologies diffuse only when they resonate with pre-existing social structures and cultural values. Social networking and digital collaboration technologies might be new but knowledge around social and organisational issues are not.

We already know a lot about the social structures, organisational design and cultural conditions that have to exist to support these technologies in practice. We also know what issues are involved in making the transition to new ways of doing things. Technologies change but people essentially do not, or if they do they change much more slowly.

Many of the people promoting Enterprise 2.0 come from a technology background. While these professionals appreciate the need to understand how people engage with their work, how they work together, and what helps or hinders this, they may not be fully aware of the abundance of well-documented research that exists around work organisation design principles that would support these new technologies in use.

In his quest to lead the charge on re-inventing management, Hamel (2007) identifies what he sees as three of the most pressing challenges facing businesses today . These are:

“adapting to the pace of change, the need to make innovation everyone’s job, and the need to create a highly engaging work environment that inspires employees to give the best of themselves”.

The need to make innovation everyone’s job through continuous improvement is a core component of process innovation and control methods like lean and approaches to quality. There is a resurgence of interest in lean being linked to a “new era in management”. Fine et al. (2009) suggest that “substantial, scalable and sustainable” gains are achievable by focusing on the ‘soft’ side of lean. It is hard to see why this is news and it is also hard to appreciate how it is possible to do lean effectively, without integrating a culture of innovation and collaboration within everyone’s jobs. Lean requires all involved to think and act differently, actively participating in and taking responsibility for process integration and innovation. The clue is in the fact that many companies bring in external experts to instigate and oversee lean initiatives, which makes no sense if the people with the process knowledge, those doing the work, are not made responsible for sharing and applying that knowledge. Lean methods are receiving renewed attention in national and regional public sectors as the need to cut costs and demonstrate efficiencies following massive public spending, for example a focus on lean in the UK National Health Service.

Hamel is an influential management thinker. It is therefore disappointing that he makes no reference to the plethora of European research that exists on high-performance management systems (Cowling et al, 2008; Guest, 2006) and work organisation (Totterdill et al, 2009). These are rich resources for businesses looking for guidance on designing adaptive and emergent ways of working and managing, and finding help on making the transition to working practices appropriate for the environment the business is operating in. The lessons, principles and management challenges arising from the case studies Hamel references are necessary but insufficient. Among his “21st century management principles” are a number that can be traced back a long way.

That really is the point of the book I am trying to write (which is frankly driving me nuts). I am suggesting that there are first principles of organising. These have to be constantly assessed, interpreted and applied according to what is happening in the external environment and how most effectively to organise to meet customer expectations.

One of the principles Hamel mentions is variety and observes that “the broader the gene pool the better”. The gene pool from which this book draws is very broad indeed. It precisely because there is so much actionable knowledge being overlooked and not being heeded in practice that the book is being written.

The objectives of the book are to:

(a) review current workplace trends (in people, technology, place and space)

(b) review what we already know about effective management and high performance work methods

(c) show how first principles from what we already know can be discovered, interpreted and used in action to help businesses learn and adapt in today’s turbulent, fast-changing and connected business environment.

Whether it will make a blind bit of difference to anyone is debatable.

P.S. Contact me at @drmcewan if you would like the references

* Andrew Pettigrew and Evelyn Fenton (2000). The Innovation Organisation. Sage