The headline is from Gary Hamel and Bill Breen’s book, The Future of Management, which I have been critiquing and reflecting on in my past few posts.

My overwhelming impression of the book is that while there is much to agree with, it is far too long on overstatement and short on substance. Specifically, it suffers from a lack of recognition of the plethora of research that exists on management innovation.

There is a wealth of EU and UK nationally funded research into new ways of working and managing. For example, I was involved in both of these EU funded research projects into new ways of working and new organisational forms: here and here. I would thoroughly recommend anyone who is interested in sourcing some actual research on management innovation to read Andrew Pettigrew and Evelyn Fenton’s The Innovating Organisation (international survey data collected at two time points and eight longitudinal case studies). If anyone is a glutton for any more punishment, they could have a look at a major research programme funded by the ESRC some years ago into The Future Of Work. The research involved twenty two universities in the UK and was conducted over six years.

Overstatement

Well, of course overstatement for effect  can make a point. It can also distort and be counter-productive.  As just one among many examples, on p.136, Gary Hamel and Bill Breen say:

“In most organisations, control is exercised via standard operating procedures, tight supervision, detailed role definitions, a minimum of self-directed time, and frequent reviews by higher ups”.

No, approaches to control and co-ordination are much more varied than this caricature and I will come back to this in a later post. And again on p.151, their ‘principles of modern management’ are offered with no evidence that these principles, culled from the earliest theorists, actually represent what is happening in organisations today.

By the way, Professor Hamel says on p.241, “In the end, isolated initiatives and one-time projects are no substitute for a sustained, company-wide campaign of breakthrough management innovation. Today, I know of no company that has mounted such a crusade”.

Well, I do. Try this small manufacturing company, Dutton Engineering. When I did some interviews there in 1998, the teams on the shopfloor were autonomous, self-organising and had significant responsibilities for management tasks. Or how about BT, who appear ad nauseam as an example of a company that used property rationalisation to change its management culture. This is a brief account of an interview I did with a senior BT executive.

Edvard Munch’s The Scream

This is what I feel like sometimes. We already know so much but this has been largely overlooked. Of course management needs urgently to change. But what’s the point of reinvention (which Professor Hamel urges) when we already know how to put in place management systems, working environments and governance principles that are associated with effective business performance, including workforce autonomy and self-determination? We already know how to design systems and high-performance working practices that are based on using and developing people’s skills, knowledge and creativity, which fulfills their desire for learning and meaningful work.

Democratising Possibilities Of Social Computing

The emergence of social networking and collaboration technologies really do present wonderful new oportunities to ignite collective intelligence and to power the sort of self-management we already know how to support.

One of my favourite quotes on the potential of social computing comes from Rex Lee, Director of Collaboration Services Group, Bell Laboratories. This is what he has to say:

“Many of us who push the concepts of social computing and Enterprise 2.0 are often referred to as evangelists … what we are evangelising about isn’t a bunch of technology. It never has been. It’s about human potential. About a more efficient and effective way to collaborate. Collaboration in the ENTIRE reason a company exists”.

That’s why the future of management will mean mobilising all that we already know about how to enable autonomous, self-organising collaboration and social learning. By all means, invent and innovate management approaches if what curretly exists does not fit. The task ahead of us in changing management habits is challenging enough. Why make it any more difficult by ignoring the wealth of research knowledge available to us?

I have been immersed in Gary Hamel and Bill Breen’s The Future of Management, agreeing with much of what I am reading and also thinking, ‘Well yes, we know that”.

Competitive Advantage

Professor Hamel says that management innovation yields competitive advantage when:

the innovation is based on a novel management principle that challenges some long-standing orthodoxy;

the innovation is systemic;

and / or the innovation is part of an on-going program of rapid-fire invention where progress compounds over time.

The emphasis is Professor Hamel’s. He describes in some detail the fact that “it took the American car makers 20 years to decipher Toyota’s advantage”. Regarding shopfloor operators as innovators and change agents was not new to Toyota but it was new to the American carmakers, who “tended to discount the contibutions that could be made by first-line employees, and relied instead on staff experts for improvements in quality and efficiency”.

My doctoral thesis 14 years ago was about exactly that – what did management practices look like in factories where shopfloor operators enthusiastically contributed to problem-solving and continuous improvement? And what about when they resisted?

My subsequent work has in one way or another been about how businesses systematically design and put in place organisational systems and processes that enable customer-focused and high-performance ways of ways of working, which make the most of people’s tacit knowledge, creativity and experience. This includes what I have been calling new ways of working, for example flexible and mobile working, although there is not much new there. Professor Ursula Huws and colleagues were researching experiences of teleworking in 1987 and writing about it in 1990.

Much of what business leaders need to know to create adaptive organisations, the effectiveness of which depend on the active and willing contribution of people’s knowledge and skills, is already well-documented and evidenced. If ‘new’ means old knowledge that businesses are not currently acting on, then that’s a view of novelty I can cope with.

He is spot-on with his view that innovations must be systemic, that is embeded in processes and methods. This is crucial.

The Chosen Ones?

I was having trouble agreeing with the third condition for innovation yielding competitive advantage. It is the rapid-fire bit that niggled me. This sounded a bit too like the Wild West innovation from Enron days. Surely not? According to Madeleine Bunting, Enron boasted about having the brightest MBAs and the company fostered an intensely competitive corporate culture, which “encouraged daredevil entrepreneurial freedom among its youthful employees”.

Likewise, this article from Malcolm Gladwell probes companies, including Enron, who with McKinsey’s encouragement adopted a differentiation and affirmation approach to “singling out and segregating their stars, rewarding them disproportionately and pushing them into ever more senior positions”.

To me this is abhorrent and disruptive. It is, I think, also foolish. Many years ago the UK academic Mick Marchington wrote an article called Fairy Tales And Magic Wands, in which he criticised accounts of new management practices. It has been years since I last read the article but from memory two things stand out. I remember him commenting that published case studies were skewed towards ’success’ stories. The other point I remember him making was about impression management, where managers seeking promotion would instigate a pilot initiative and the move into a promotion before it was complete. This bred initiative fatigue and scepticism in those left behind with a stalled project.

Rapid-Fire Invention

Reading on through the book, you find that one of the issues in the proposed agenda for management innovation is making innovation everyone’s job. That’s more like it. Building responsibility for continuous innovation (doing what you do better or differently) into job design is well-understood. Plus, the suggested approach to becoming a management innovator sounds quite ’steady as she goes’, emphasising supplementing rather than supplanting existing management processes and commiting to revolutionary change by taking evolutionary steps.

So that’s OK, then.

OK, I am about to conduct an experiment with myself and I invite anyone who wishes to join in. What I want to do is critique the The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel (with Bill Breen) as I read it.

I am well aware that I may well be inviting egg on my face, severe criticism and ridicule. However, it is exactly these fears that have kept me quiet for too long (this may be news to some of my friends and colleagues ).
What’s Bugging Me?

I have a deep weariness of reading about supposedly new paradigms emerging in ways of working and management practices. On the face of it, this book sounds like another attempt to promote novelty. Professor Hamel’s goal is to help the reader become a management pioneer and equip him / her  to “reinvent the principles, processes, and practices of management for our postmodern age”.

My argument is that we already know many of the principles, processes, and management practices that are appropriate for effective strategic action in the face of current global environmental turbulence. They have largely been ignored or over-looked. To my way of thinking, a good place to start is with what we already know rather than needlessly reinventing ‘new’ principles. Reinterpreting – yes, definitely.

How Dare I?

I am sitting here asking myself that! Professor Hamel is highly respected, and I approach my critique from a respectful stance.  He says:

“I’m humble enough to know that one person’s imagination and foresight are no substitute for those of a multitude”.

That multitude includes, for me, the hundreds and thousands of academic researchers whose work is written up in obscure academic papers in obscure academic journals and which most likely never sees the light of day except when accessed by other foot-soldier academics like myself, when writing yet more obscure academic papers that end up in further obscure academic journals!

Here’s the thing, though. This collective intelligence (see it was there long before Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0) over the years reveals patterns, connections and insights that are now becoming invaluable. My intention in this critique is to make sure that some of these insights add to whatever Professor Hamel is proposing.

And Finally For This Post

“So this is a book for … everyone who … thinks that employees really are smart enough to manage themselves, who knows that “management”, as currently practiced, is a drag on success  – and wants to do something about it.”

Yep – you can count me in!