Taylorist Buildings

He made the fascinating observation that Taylorist offices influenced by Scientific Management, with its unremitting focus on efficiency, have resulted in unsustainable workspaces that are under‐occupied and unsuitable for emerging business conditions. Dr Duffy calls office buildings ‘misleading and obsolescent units of analysis’ and wonders why self‐reliant people should be constrained by them. Knowledge nomads use their clout to choose how, where, when and with whom they work. They are certainly not constrained by walls and place.

Taylorist Management

It is not only building design that is having to escape the strangling dominance of Taylorist influence. Despite unstoppable and converging forces in the external business environment, management practices and attitudes, also significantly influenced by a century of Taylorist approaches to management, remain stubbornly resistant to change. The parallels between under‐utilised workspace and under‐utilised human intelligence and creativity, arising from the separation of thinking and doing, is striking.

Taylorist IT Deployment

Taylorist attitudes are also influencing IT deployment in the UK. Although take-up of information technologies in the UK is high, one of the publications from the Future of Work, a six-year research project involving twenty two universities, drew attention to the fact that business have the choice of using ICT as an enabling technology deployed in combination with high‐performance HRM measures or as monitoring tools to control workforces. At the time the research was being reported on five years ago, the authors of Managing to Change? commented that the trend toward control without workforce participation was “deeply disquieting”. In their view, there is a substantial risk that low cost, automatically generated monitoring and control information, not shared with those being monitored, would be likely to become damaging and divisive.

Something’s Got To Change

IT, HR and FM need to mobilise urgently. The functions need to be having conversations internally and across professional boundaries. Stepping back to think about how things might be done better is not easy. The drag of the status quo is a major obstacle and of course businesses tend to become more controlling in recessionary conditions such as we are currently experiencing. Nevertheless, concerted effort at dialogue and understanding is now urgent. We have communication and collaboration tools at our disposal like we have never had before, and highly effective techniques for visualisation and decision support. There are no excuses – only the will to recognise the pervasiveness of the Taylorist stranglehold and to overcome it.

As Darwin was reputed to have said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

(1) Literature, art and history tell us that humans have always been connected.

(2) Social media give us new and evolving ways to connect, discover and inspire.

Evidence From The Middle Ages

I am currently reading Roads To Santiago: detours & riddles in the lands and history of Spain by Cees Noteboom. He describes a book he sees in the museum attached to the cathedral in El Burgo de Osma. He specifically describes a map of what they thought the world looked like in 1086. Noteboom says:

“This Codex Beato is Carolingian in its colouristic treatment and ornamentation, Arabic in the application of yellow and ivory and geometric patterns, Lombardian in the interlaced arabesques and animal motifs, Irish in the spiralled braiding, Islamic in the predominance of red and black, while eastern influences manifest themselves in the Mozarabic stylisation…

But we know how profound the pollinating influence in those days was, that the world was already a world, that people communicated and saw each other’s art, that artists and craftsmen travelled and inspired one another.”

Evolution Of Social Media

I was alerted to Om Malik’s post about the evolution of blogs through a Twitter micro-message, a Tweet, by Jon Husband. Om says:

“Today most of us walk around with newfangled smartphones that are nothing short of multitasking computers, essentially content creation points.

And they’re networked, which means creating and sharing content is becoming absurdly simple to do. With the increased number of content creation points –- phones, camera, Flip video cameras, Twitter -– we are publishing more and more content.”

Applications like AudioBoo and VideoBoo allow us to “capture information at the point of inspiration”, as Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish proposed three years ago in their book Mobile Web 2.0. The iPhone and applications being developed for it now given us a glimpse of what is possible to do, create and share using smart phones.

Discovery And Inspiration

I wrote a post a while back called Thinking About Discovery. I have been thinking about that a lot lately. Until recently, my dominant feelings have been frustration and incomprehension that we know about effective, smart working and managing and yet so much of this knowledge is overlooked in businesses. Talent, skills, knowledge and willingness to contribute are going to waste.

The view I am choosing to take now is, “Great that means a journey of discovery for businesses and enterprises stuck in old attitudes, ways of managing and working”.

Like the medieval artists who travelled, discovered and were inspired by each other, we now have amazing tools and technologies that let us discover and inspire each other. What an opportunity businesses now have to create learning architectures and social collaborative environments where people can experiment with insights gleaned from beyond their organistional boundaries, learning and being inspired from different practices and cultural influences.

Trying to explain and describe new ways of working doesn’t work. Like trying to explain the business value of social media, you just have to explore, discover, experiment – and experience.

The Smart Work Learning Place

One of the things I want to do with The Smart Work Company is to build on this experience and create a learning network for senior executives online. And so The Learning Place is just about ready. Well, the software has been ready for a while. It has taken me some time to sort out practicalities, like Terms and Conditions and membership criteria.

Who Is It For?

The profiles of the people I have in mind are modelled on the sort of senior people I have been working with since 2000. They are all executives, in public and private sectors nationally and internationally, who have a specific strategic thing they need to do. This is probably something they have not done before, and there are significant consequences for their enterprise and for them personally. Examples in the past three years are from sectors as diverse as construction, engineering design, energy, retail banking, public sector, executive search and telecommunications. The executives who become members of The Learning Place will have their own unique and widely diverging strategic challenges they are dealing with in their workplaces.

What Is It For?

The Learning Place is an online resource for busy executives to challenge their strategic thinking and action during a time of change. This is what the recent press release said:

“In fast changing times – senior managers and directors need time to think. Sadly, a relentless schedule of travel, meetings, emails, phone calls and deadlines leaves little time for reflection and independent feedback. A lull may happen within an airport lounge, between meetings or at some random time of the day.

The Learning Place is waiting for the member to log in and think in a way which suits them. The Learning Place gives the member time to breath, learn, think and reflect in their own time and in their own way – on their own and with peers. They are helped along the path with tools, techniques and resources which are right for them. There is no set course or ‘one-size-fits-all’ format. This is learning and development as it should be – social, natural, flexible and human.

What Topics Will Be Addressed?

That will depend on the executives who are members of The Learning Place. I have structured The Learning Place into four ‘lounges’, as a way of loosely sign-posting conversation and resources on:

Smart Working

Smart Strategising

Smart Collaborating

Smart Managing

I have also condensed my knowledge of research and theoretical insights on organisational dynamics, enterprise responses to them and current workplace trends into 5 ‘first principle’ modules: Smart Basics. This content and structure is suggestive to get things going. Members will add content and direct conversations.

Won’t People Be Too Busy?

That of course is a danger. The conversations and content on The Learning Place will need to provide real value to attract and keep the attention of busy, high-profile people. This is just some of the value I hope will be created:

• Emotional support. Listening to my friends, many of them are worn-out. We have all experienced temporary insanely busy periods. It appears that this has become widespread and unrelenting. Recession, threat of redundancy, overwork – how can people be expected to innovate and be effective under these conditions?

• Getting different perspectives and ideas is energising; I know this from my experience of co-facilitating the Global Mobility Network.

• Access to research. Of course the professional institutes are a source of current research. What The Learning Place offers is an inter-disciplinary research perspective. IT, HR and Facilities Management need to be working together much more than they currently do.

• Most valuable of all, perhaps, will be the opportunity to explore the practical implications of workplace trends, smart processes, and tools and methods.

I am obviously interested in hearing from you if you think you might fit the profile I have described, and you think you could gain value from The Learning Place. Membership is by application and will be free until the end of December, 2009. After that, an annual subscription fee applies.

I am also interested to hear from you if you think you have experience of implementing strategic change in finance or pharmaceuticals. Please contact info@thesmartworkcompany.com if you are interested in knowing more.

In my last post, I said that I would explore in this one why I think looking back at the first wave of smart working helps us to see how we can respond to current workplace trends.

I also quoted Gary Hamel’s pressing challenges for the future of management, two of which are:

• the need to make innovation everyone’s job

• creating highly engaging work environments.

It just so happens that these are core attributes of lean manufacturing. Effective lean manufacturing systems make innovation everyone’s job through continuous improvement (CI) and problem-solving. They also incorporate physical layouts of machines, uncluttered working environments, and management systems that support CI and collaboration across sub-process and organisational boundaries.

There is an abundance of research telling us what works and doesn’t work in building engaging physical and organisational work environments that enable learning cultures where making innovation is everyone’s business.

DISCOVERY

At this point, I had intended to take two specific examples of the implications of current workplace trends – distributed work implying workforce autonomy, self-determination and self-organisation plus enterprise fragmentation implying cross boundary collaboration and integration – and show how principles from lean process management show us how to do this.

Then I realised something. I was boring myself writing this post. I felt like I was going on and on. Yak, yak, yak. So what? And if I was bored writing it, the chances would be very high of your being bored reading it.

I have a friend who said to me recently, when I was regurgitating some piece of research, that he didn’t care what anyone else has said and done. He values discovery and finding things out for himself. My response was ‘But that means re-inventing wheels and not learning from experience’. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that he is right. Which of us learns from other people’s experience, without trying things out for ourselves? I mean really learn and understand?

ABUNDANCE AND SCARCITY

I enjoyed reading Confused of Calcutta’s reflections on abundance and scarcity. In this context, it seems to me that the scarcity is experience of taking other people’s insights, trying them out and either rejecting them or adapting them to make them work personally and uniquely. Other people’s insights are abundant.

This blog post really has been emergent. I did not mean for it to lead so neatly to the next post but it does. Although I have spent a long time, at least the past three years, monitoring workplace trends and creating a sort of curriculum (a series of short modules I am calling Smart Basics), I am not in the content development industry. I am in the service industry, helping top teams and senior executives to discover what works for them in making the transition to new ways of working and strategising.

So more about that next time.

So here is an edited version of the proposal in instalments.

INNOVATION EVERYONE’S JOB

The global business environment is evolving simultaneously on many fronts : economic, technological, demographic and organisational. How equipped are businesses to deal with these potentially overwhelming changes, which require radical adaptation of management attitudes and methods to cope with increasingly uncertain and unpredictable business environments? In his agenda for management innovation, Gary Hamel proposes that three of the most pressing challenges facing businesses today 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”.

International research shows that a large number of business leaders are failing to create learning environments and quality jobs consistent with meaningful work, which people find engaging. It seems that skills, eagerness to contribute, knowledge and creativity are being wasted.

This squandering of talent is wasteful at any time but is suicidal in the face of challenging global business conditions and competition from the emerging economies. Business leaders who do manage to set the initial conditions and create engaging working environments and ways of working will be the ones that succeed in staying ahead of the game.

SMART WORKING

The term ‘smart working’ has in recent years been associated with flexible and mobile working, that is ‘anytime, anywhere’ ways of working enabled by communication technologies. Another view, broader than the narrow focus on location and time independence, is that smart working is about flexibility and autonomy in where, when and how people work.

In my view, smart working is the outcome of designing and putting in place systems, working environments and governance principles that are known to be associated with effective business performance, including workforce autonomy and self-determination, and which seek to maximise opportunities to use and develop people’s knowledge, skills and ability to connect.

There are no best practices to replicate and slavishly roll out. Rather there are theoretical insights, management principles, and working and managing practices which, taken together, provide guidance for action. Understanding and skillfully applying these insights as inputs is a fundamental prerequisite to the dynamic outcome of smart working. Although nothing is for certain, these smart inputs increase the probability of effective work outcomes.

FIRST WAVE SMART WORKING

The tendency in the management literature to talk of 21st century management and new paradigms, a “delusion with novelty”, risks overlooking fundamental insights of trail-blazing theoretical thinkers from decades ago, from years of academic research, and lessons learned from manufacturing business process innovation that took root in manufacturing from the 1980s onwards.

I am calling the systems of management and business process innovation practices from that time the first wave of smart working. The next post summarises why I think that looking back at this first wave helps us to see how we can move forward into the future.

Anyone interested in the full text of my arguement about how the past informs what we do now, including all references and sources, can read it in Getting Ready For The Next Wave Of Smart Working.

Skimming articles in a futile attempt to keep up with workplace trends, I discovered a gem of a paper by Professor Sir Michael Marmot. Published in the Lancet in 2006, the article is entitled ‘Health In An Unequal World’ and is the text of a lecture given to the Royal College of Physicians. In the article, Professor Marmot is clear that social environment is a crucial influencer and determinant of health. He says:

“The unnecessary disease and suffering of disadvantaged people, whether in poor countries or rich, is a result of the way we organise our affairs in society. I shall argue, in this oration, that failing to meet the fundamental human needs of autonomy, empowerment, and human freedom is a potent cause of ill health … the challenge is to understand how position in the social hierarchy is related to health”.

Then only today @markgould13 posted this on Twitter. It is from Jeffrey Pfeffer, who I have long admired. Pfeffer says:

“Although much of the research and public pressure concerning sustainability is focused on organizational and economic effects on the physical environment, companies and their work practices affect the human and social environment as well … there is evidence that high performance work arrangements are better for both financial performance and human sustainability.

We need to embark on a project to reduce the illness and death being caused by companies and their management practices.”

Reduce the illness and death being caused by companies and their management practices? Wow. That is a very strong statement, which resonates with me for personal reasons.

Social Environment And Performance

So what are these high-performance work arrangements that Pfeffer mentions? Professor David Guest is good on summarising the key elements of high-performance working, which systematically incorporates structures and processes that enhance competence, opportunity to contribute, motivation and commitment.

Competence includes ability and motivation for continous learning, and learning is social in today’s networked and connected world. This means commiting to a holistic view of organisational learning, which is built into all supporting IT, HR and facilities management systems.

Opportunity to contribute is closely aligned to continuous learning. Guest says:

“The core mechanism for ensuring that competent workers have an opportunity to contribute is job design … jobs should be designed, either singly or in team-based groups, to provide sufficient autonomy, control and responsibility to make full use of knowledge and skills, and to permit on-going learning and adjustment.”

Despite the performance benefits of high-performance work arrangements (the evidence is that these work practices need to be implemented as mutually supporting systems) their take-up in the UK has until recently been poor.

The CIPD in partnership with Cap Gemini carried out a research study on smart working last year. How Smart Is UK plc? reported that only 9.6 % of respondents ’strongly agreed’ that their companies deliberately designed roles that embrace smart working concepts, with 35.2% ’somewhat agreeing’. The author(s) comment that ‘building autonomy and innovation formally into job roles is still an aspiration.’ Guest attributes the lack of take-up of high-performance working to ignorance, inability and doubt about financial benefits.

This is set to change. The developments in the external environment, which I have been writing about in the past few blog posts, are driving new ways of working and increasing workforce autonomy and self-determination. As with general health, the organisational and social environment is an influencer of workplace health and performance. Creating working environments that are good for business and good for people is fast becoming a not-so-secret unfair advantage for enterprises willing to design jobs, processes and structures around employee autonomy and self-determination.

We know what works. We know how to do it. It is all to play for.

I have written elsewhere in this blog about leadership and my diffident attitude towards it. I recoil from people who would set themselves up as leaders while recognising that visionary leadership encourages others to achieve great things, which they may have felt unable to do on their own. Cognitive dissonance? Guilty as charged.

Euan Semple has written a great post about The Price of Pomposity, in which he says:

“I would argue that pomposity represents a real, and nontrivial cost to the business world.”

Euan’s post ties in with something I have been thinking about. This is the coming to an end of a successful and innovative academic programme I have been involved with, and that has been running for the past three years. Innovations from the programme have been incorporated into an Executive MBA, which the market understands more easily.

Reflective Leaders

One of the most notable features of the programme has been the sort of executives drawn to it. These senior people could easily have been persuaded by the allure of the institution’s existing MBA, which is seen as a market leader. They chose to do something different. As a result, I have been privileged to work with people who are thoughtful, reflective, respectful and the farthest from pomposity you can imagine.

Going back to my ambivalence about leadership, the executives that joined the programme have one thing in common. They do not aspire to to be leaders as a prime objective. Rather, they have a specific thing they need to do (set up new business units, get into new markets, diversify products, deal with post-merger cultural integration etc). The excutives want to do it in a way that is good for them as individuals, for the business and for their employees.

The Executive MBA will continue to attract thoughtful and reflective people, of that I have no doubt. But there is something a bit special about pioneers who take a risk on an academic programme that many in the UK regard as an innovation too far.

I am looking forward to graduation in July. Party!

“The history of modern business is the history of GM, and vice versa … if the success of GM defined the management agenda for 20th century, then its failure defines the management agenda for the 21st.

The rash of commentary on GMs’ troubles is obviously linked to its iconic status; it represents a metaphor for the mighty fallen. There is shock that this could happen to an apparently invincible corporation.

One of the most productive plants in the US has been NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.), a joint venture between GM and Toyota set up in 1984. According to Yochai Benkler, “as of the numbers last year, it continued to be one of the three most productive plants in the U.S.”

NUMMI emerged from the embers of a failed GM plant, which closed and the re-opened with the same people, same unions but different values and busines processes. I first came across NUMMI in an HBR article, Time and Motion Regained, by Paul Adler, when I was doing my doctoral research. I was intrigued by the account of what had happened at NUMMI, which was that a form of Taylorism had apparently been introduced and accepted.

A faculty member at Babson College in the US puts it well:

“In effect, they gave Taylorism to the workers. It taps into three sources of adult motivation -the desire for excellence, a mature sense of realism, and a positive response to respect and trust”

It’s Been A Long, A Long Time Coming

The joint venture was set up in 1984. That is 25 whole years ago. What exactly did GM learn from the joint venture? Not much it would seem. Yochai Benkler characterises GM as driven by management practices that monitor people below and incentivise people above, attempting to extract everything from relationships. Here is Gary Hamel’s assessment:

“GM’s failure isn’t the result of one spectacularly ill-conceived decision—the company didn’t jump off a cliff. Instead, it meandered into mediocrity, one small short-sighted step at a time. Like a two-pack a day smoker, GM committed suicide in degrees.”

In an excellent article, The New GM – a first look, in Automotive World, CEO Fritz Henderson is reported as as saying:

“the “New GM [will be] dedicated to building the very best cars and trucks – highly fuel efficient, world-class quality, green technology development and with truly outstanding design. Above all, the New GM will be re-dedicated in its entirety to our customers.”

The article pithily observes that “quite why this wasn’t the case with the old GM will no doubt become the subject of many books and academic theses to come”.

A Change Is Gonna Come

The business environment BC, that is before credit crunch, was already turbulent, with significant economic, structural, technological and demographic developments causing uncertainty. The global financial crisis has taken this existing uncertainty into another dimension. Businesses need urgently to review and adapt their working and management practices, to ensure their continued viability.

Organisational cultures and management practices can be extremely resistant to adaptation. GM gives us a powerful symbol of rigidity and a clear example of what can happens to the mightiest of companies. As I said in my last post:

“Decline is associated with inability to sense and respond to changes in the external environment. Path dependency strongly commits businesses to past decisions. “Sticking to the knitting”, one of Peters and Waterman’s eight indicators of excellence, as an exhortation to concentrate on core products and services might need clarifying and expanding on?”

Yes, change is gonna come -  one way or another. That doesn’t mean that it is going to come in ways that are advantageous to business.

P.S.

What about NUMMI? The Automotive World article says:

“A large question mark hangs over the future of GM’s 25-year old Californian joint venture with Toyota, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc (NUMMI). The operation builds the Pontiac Vibe, and the Toyota Tacoma and Corolla. The confirmation that the Pontiac brand will be wound down by the end of 2010 leaves GM’s role in the joint venture at best unclear; it is difficult to see the plant, and the joint venture, being of any relevance to a lean New GM.”

In Search Of Excellence

This is how Tom Peters summarises In Search of Excellence, the book he co-authored with Robert Waterman:

“You could boil all of Search down to one idea: Soft is hard. Up until then, everybody assumed that hard was hard. “Hard” numbers told you everything that you needed to know about dealing with hard assets, such as factories, machinery, and buildings. But Search said that everything soft is hard. People, customers, and relationships — they make up all of the soft stuff that determines what really gets accomplished and how well it gets done. It turned out to be a revolutionary message.”

The claim that they ‘faked the data‘ (which Peters denies) has not diminished the book’s popularity and despite the well-documented poor performance of some of their ‘excellent’ companies after it was published, there is ample research to support what Peters and Waterman said.

Another more recently popular book in a similar vein is Jim Collins Built To Last: Successful Habits Of Visionary Companies. Steven Wheeler from the University of Southern California’s Centre for Effective Organisation, participating in a roundtable discussion on the life cycle of great business ideas, says that:

“if you had taken the 18 companies that were profiled in the book and invested in each of them over the next 10 year, you would have got about a 150 percent return. That is not too bad – until you compare it with an S&P 500 index fund, which would have given you a 250 percent return. And if you had the foresight to pick up a copy of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For each year, you would have gotten a 600 percent return.”

Wheeler goes on to comment that one way to build a successful business is to create an environment where people enjoy their jobs and are eager to work. All so far so good, and consistent with Peters and Waterman.

When Good Companies Go Bad

In the FastCompany article linked to above, Peters dodges the question of why some of the excellent companies subsequently performed so poorly. He says such criticism is ‘missing the point’. I have read the Fastcompany article back to front and I cannot see how it is missing the point. What accounted for the poor performance, especially if the companies cited conformed with Peters and Waterman’s eight indicators? Whether or not this is a good question, it is one I want to ask.

Jim Collins is back with another book, How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. I have not yet read it but from the product description on Amazon, the first stage of decline is hubris born of success, taking businesses outside of their core.

This article from the FT concludes that:

“Organisations fail not because they stray from their core, but because they stick to it too closely as circumstances shift … the idea that focusing on the core is the best defence against failure is too simplistic for these complex and turbulent times.”

Now we are getting somewhere. Decline is associated with inability to sense and respond to changes in the external environment. Path dependency strongly commits businesses to past decisions. “Sticking to the knitting”, one of Peters and Waterman’s eight indicators of excellence, as an exhortation to concentrate on core products and services might need clarifying and expanding on?

Again from the FT:

“GM executives were so focused on cross-town rivals that they underestimated the threat posed by Japanese carmakers … once a trajectory is set, subsequent commitments reinforce the status quo. These can be bet-the-company decisions or incremental steps refining current technology”

Peters is obviously well aware of this. He says, again in the FastCompany article:

“The CEO of General Motors announced that GM wasn’t in the business of making cars, it was in the business of making money. (This came as a shock to most of GM’s customers, who were in the market to buy a car – or even a better way of life – not to spend money.) That may account for the rise of Japanese automakers, who most certainly were in the business of making cars … that customers would definitely want to buy.”

The trajectory set by GM, of which Peters was so disapproving, has culminated in General Motors filing this afternoon for bankruptcy protection.

I want to finish with another question. What is it about Peter Drucker that makes him such a baddie in Tom Peters eyes? That’s me got more reading and probing to do

Jon Husband kindly alerted me to Umair Haque’s blog post The Beginning Of The End Of Business As We Know It. Haque proposes that the economy is in a state of institutional collapse and says that we can possibly escape “this death-with-a-whimper” through behavioural innovation, creating new sources of advantage by reconceiving value-creation and the costs and benefits we respond to. His suggested five pathways to behavioural innovation are: stewardship, trusteeship, guardianship, leadership and partnership. He aligns leadership with challenging the status quo, which brings me to an academic article that impressed me when I first read it’s prescient observervations.

Socially Responsible Strategising

Called Taking Strategy Seriously: Responsibility and Reform for an Important Social Practice, it was published in December 2003 in the wake of Enron. The authors argue that it is time to take strategy seriously in a number of ways including “building more heedful interrelationships between actors within the field, particularly between business schools and practitioners”. The article makes the case for strategising as a multi-actor, socially responsible activity. Its analysis is detailed and pulls no punches.

It identifies as actors management teams, consulting firms, gurus, financial institutions, business schools, business media, state institutions and pressure groups. Gurus and the business schools they are associated with are criticised in the article for being “implicitly enrolled” in endorsing Enron, as are prestigeous business journals for publishing unquestioning and uncritical accounts of Enron’s apparent success. Stock market analysts and investment banks also get their collars felt for “pumping up the stock with recommendations that flew in the face of conflicts of interest”.

Challenging The Status Quo

In the UK, we are hearing increasing admission from Members of Parliament of the need for parliamentary reform. MPs’ behaviour is being loudly challenged by the force of public anger, leading to a number of them saying that they will not stand for re-election at the next election. Two things strike me as notable. One, for all the talk of the end of newspapers, it is a prominent newspaper, The Telegraph, that has led the charge. Second, ‘behavioural innovation’ from MPs has certainly not come about because they know it makes sense. They are not easily prized from the fruits of vested interests and entrenched attitudes of entitlement.

And so it is within the eco-system of institutions that oil the wheels of business. Institutional reform rarely comes from within, even in crisis conditions. Can we as individuals do anything to contribute to institutional reform? Can we influence and curtail the sort of mutually reinforcing behaviour displayed by the actors who fuelled the Enron myth? I think we can but not as lone voices. We need to use social media for more than self-promotion and entertainment. We need to come together as communities of critical consumers of what we are being told, with voices as loud and as powerful as those that criticise products and services.

Maybe then we will begin to see the beginning of the end of business as we know it.

I am dipping in and out of Alain de Botton’s new book, The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work.

This is ‘an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace’.

De Botton does this by examining a range of occupations, including that of a landscape painter. He says:

“There are few jobs in which years’ worth of labour can be viewed in a quick scan of four walls and even fewer opportunities granted to us to gather all our intelligence and sensitivity in a single place.”

Mine is one such profession. Or at least the research part of it is. The pdfs linked to the components of The Smart Work Framework are the result of my scanning research on new working practices since 1995. In my more pessimistic moments, it gets me down that we know so much about high-performance work systems and so few businesses are built around these principles and practices.

Click on the image if you would like to read the Betjemen poem that inspired it

The Smart Way

In my more optimistic moments, I think “Great! We know all this and there has never been a better time to help businesses evaluate the way they do things.”

As Jon Husband said on a comment, kindly left on one of my posts, “The tools and the environment are now clearly at hand.”

So for the moment, I have said all I want to say about smart working and high-performance work processes. Hurrah! I hear you say.

It is time to show how it can be put into practice, which is really what The Smart Work Company is all about. Working with senior executives, alone or in groups, we start with a strategic challenge the executive or top team wants to address. Together we determine what needs to be done, who needs to do it and how. Everything we do is guided by the executives’ practical challenge. Knowledge, tools, techniques and new perspectives are introduced as needed in a just-in-time way.

Learning is through action, experience and reflection, alone and with others. Conversation, collaboration and sharing experience with peers is a crucial part of the learning process. It is about collaborative transformation, changing together through doing, talking, experimenting, supporting, evaluating, reflecting, succeeding, failing – and getting up and trying something else.

I will tell you the story of one of these transformations in the next post.

I have just read this article in HR Review and thought ‘ho-hum’. It is headed ‘Businesses Urged To Give Employees ‘More Autonomy and Less Intensive Management’’ and comments on a new report from the Work Foundation, Knowledge Workers and Knowledge Work.

From the HR Review article:

“Ian Brinkley, co-author of the Knowledge Workers and Knowledge Work report, and associate director at The Work Foundation, said: “So far in this recession employers have been reluctant to lose the skills, talents and experience of their workforces. Yet at the same time they seem to be failing to make the most of them. Many people could be doing more but are denied the chance to do so.

He said that companies should be aiming to “give people more responsibility” and he suggested that they aim for “more autonomy for people and less intensive management”.”

Increasing autonomy was a key theme in the CIPD’s Smart Working: How Smart Is UK plc? report last year. This found that smart working was currently more of an aspiration than a reality. The call was for a move from command and control to greater degrees of freedom, flexibility and collaboration.

I did a doctorate on all this stuff fourteen years ago. One of the things I explored was how manufacturers balanced localised autonomy in decision-making on the shopfloor and simultaneous, centralised co-ordination. At that time, in among all the froth about employee empowerment there were people calling out hype for what it was. Chris Argyris, for example in an article in the Harvard Business Review in 1998 – Empowerment: The Emperors’s New Clothes. He said:

“The battle between autonomy and control rages on while the real potential for empowerment is squandered.”

The McKinsey Quartely 2009 Number 1 has on the front cover “The crisis: A new era in management”. Ah, some new thinking? Not a bit of it. Here we find an article entitled “From Lean To Lasting: Making operational improvements stick” by focusing on the ’soft’ side of lean. Listen, if there was no ’soft’ side there would be no lean. Process control is only possible because of operator tacit knowledge and their willingness to engage in continuous improvement and problem-solving.

We already know all this. A new era in management? Don’t hold your breath. Yep. I am fed-up 

I am re-visiting the meeting of 35 of ‘the world’s most progressive thinkers on management and organisation’ in May 2008. The output from the meeting was a list of twenty five stretch goals for management, Management Moonshots, ten of which were ‘regarded as uniquely critical.’

I have been worrying away at this like a dog with a bone. I happen to agree with a number of these stretch goals. It is possible to map many of them against classic texts from management thinkers I respect, some of whom were there at the meeting.

All this thinking has been available for a long time. And there’s the rub. If these fundamental insights have been around for so long, what makes anyone think they are going to be taken up and actioned now? Because we have crisis conditions? I don’t think so.

And another thing. Just because this august gathering came up with their twenty five stretch goals, are these the most pressing issues for management practice?

Applause to the group for raising and publicising the issue of management practices and their fitness for purpose in 2009. I do think, though, that the way in which the management reformation movement is being promoted is distinctly Management 1.0. At the end of his WSJ article, Gary Hamel asks, “which of these moonshots do you think is the most important to address now? And why?”

Not “Have we got it right? What have we missed? What would you propose?” I am probably being ungenerous and unfair. But there you go. That’s how it feels to me.

Reinventing Strategy

The ninth of the ten uniquely critical stretch goals is summarised as:

“Reinventing strategy making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making can no longer be a top down activity. What is required instead is a strategy process that reflects the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.”

Variety in a system is requisite when it is at as least as great as the complexity it is attempting to regulate. Anyone who knows me professionally knows that the social psychologist, Karl Weick is one of my thought-heroes. He says in The Social Psychology of Organising:

“It’s because of requisite variety that organisations have to be preoccupied with keeping sufficient diversity inside the organisation to sense accurately the variety present in ecological changes outside it.”

Management Reformation

So far it feels to me like the strategy for management re-invention is being approached in a manner akin to top-down, privileging and promoting the views of prominent thinkers to the exclusion of the experiences and collective intelligence of managers at the sharp end, practitioners, consultants and thousands of academic foot soldiers researching new management practices.

Transforming management practices, if it really happens, will emerge from vast mosaics of local action, experimentation and failures. The enormous complexity of the undertaking, following the principle of requisite variety, will require complexity of perspectives much greater than those possible from the group that convened in 2008.

So while I agree with many of the stretch goals, are they correct and sufficient? At the very least, management transformation demands wider debate and needs to include multiple perspectives. Even if consensus does begin to emerge around the stretch goals, what then? How do businesses go about making the transformation to new ways of working and managing? Again it has got to be collective transformation, learning, sharing, experimenting and failing together.

And Finally

Anybody else want to join me in proposing alternative priorities for the transformation of management?