Benkler wrote of GM:

“They monitor people below and incentivise people above”

To my mind, this needs to be exactly the other way around but, like turkeys voting for Christmas, why would senior teams willingly subject themselves to scrutiny? I think many would, at least many of the ones I know would.

What Set Me Off?

An item on the BBC Radio Four news this morning about the ineffectiveness of Boards of Enquiry following the failure of ageing aircraft, with associated loss of service personnel lives. The point being made was that these boards repeatedly missed systemic failure. What was also said was that the boards are subject to interference from top military personnel.

I have been thinking for a while about senior management influence on organisational culture. The testimony of Paul Moore, ex-head of Group Regulatory Risk at HBOS plc to a government select committe makes a great case study. Mr Moore says:

“I strongly believe that the real underlying cause of all the problems was simply this – a total failure of all key aspects of governance. In my view and from my personal experience at HBOS, all the other specific failures stem from this one primary cause.”

The testimony is really very detailed. Mr Moore claims in his statement that he and his team “experienced threatening behaviours by executives .. in overseeing their compliance with FSA regulations.” He reports being prevented from having some things properly minuted by the CFO. He also said:

“But sadly, no-one wanted or felt able to speak up for fear of stepping out of line with the rest of the lemmings who were busy organising themselves to run over the edge of the cliff behind the pied piper CEOs and executive teams that were being paid so much to play that tune and take them in that direction.”

It is not often we get to hear what apparently goes on in some companies. I have however seen and been on the receiving end of vile management behaviour implicitly sanctioned at the top.

I have also been thinking about agency theory and stewardship theory in influencing executive behaviour but I will leave that for another post.

(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.

“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.”

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.

Press release of the The Smart Work Company launch.

Wishing everyone a restful and happy Easter holiday

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?

Sadly, no-one has told the patient.

We live in a connected world, where competition from clever and cost-effective talent is not going away. Businesses really need to value people’s knowledge if they want to stay in the game, creating work environments that let people collaborate and learn together.

We have been here before. Continuous Improvement (CI), problem-solving and cross-functional collaboration are the hallmarks of successful lean manufacturing. They represent the first wave of smart working. Collaboration and social computing technologies present businesses with enormous opportunities for a second wave. Building on what we already know from the first time around, it is now possible to tap into deep reserves of collective intelligence, both inside and outside of the enterprise.

The Smart Work Company

The Smart Work Company helps enterprises transform performance by changing management cultures and processes. We do this by blending action learning and new management thinking, where ‘new’ is in fact putting into practice management methods that have been known about for a long time and have yet to become mainstream.

How We Do It

We start with a strategic challenge a senior executive wants to address. Together we determine what needs to be done, who needs to do it and how. 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.

The Last Word

We know what to do. We know how to do it. The knowledge is there for the taking and now is the time to act.

Many thanks to Nigel Temple for helping me shape the words.

• what it is;

• why it is important;

• lean manufacturing, quality and continuous improvement, if implemented in ways that recognised the primacy of people skills and knowledge, represented the first wave of smart working;

• a second wave is imperative and emerging, and there is a valuable legacy of learning from the first wave.

The diagram summarises work of many theorists and academic researchers over decades, supplemented by recent sources on global workplace trends. Even if it is not useful to anyone else, it helps me to organise my thoughts and I will be using it as a jumping off-point for my bloggy rambles

What is it about the phrase “renowned scholars” that irritates me? Well one reason is that now when the business world is in such a state, it is not the time to be impressed by renownedness. Now is a time for a bit of humility. As it happens, I have a lot of respect some of the scholars mentioned. Henry Mintzberg in particular. I have been shouting and cheering in support of his critique of MBA education. From his website,

“Mintzberg asserts that conventional MBA classrooms overemphasize the science of management while ignoring its art and denigrating its craft … this calls for another approach to management education, whereby practicing managers learn from their own experience.”

The Practice Of Management

Exactly so. But wait a minute. Wasn’t Peter Drucker saying something very similar back in 1954 when he was writing about The Practice Of Management? He says,

“The quality and performance of its managers is the only effective advantage an enterprise in a competitive economy can have”.

Well, that and the brainpower, largely untapped creativity, potential and willingness to contribute of every person working in the enterprise. But you get the idea. He also says,

“Management expresses the basic beliefs of modern Western society … It expresses the belief that economic change can be made into the most powerful engine of human betterment and social justice”.

So Drucker proposes a deeply human and humane view of managers and the potential of management practice.

Nothing New Under The Sun

Which brings me to the 25 Stretch Goals For Management. Of the twenty five statements, there is not one that has not already been thought of and written about. Jon says in his blog post,

“It seems clear to me that most of these “25 Stretch Goals For Management” can arguably be informed by the emergent organizing principle I call “wirearchy” …  any competent OD (organizational development) practitioner will have been talking to organization / management clients about these issues for at least the last decade.  The transformation of management is available and accessible from organizational development principles but probably needs some re-framing.”

Beware Bad Management Theories

I am grateful to my colleague, Professor Robin Matthews for bringing Sumantra Ghoshal’s paper to my attention. Professor Ghoshal said,

“Business schools do not need to do a great deal more to help prevent future Enrons; they need only to stop doing a lot they currently do … we need to own up to our role in creating Enrons. Our theories and ideas have done much to strengthen the management practices that we are all now so loudly condeming”.

I argue here that there is more research on how to achieve new ways of working and managing than you can shake a stick at. Thankfully there is so much of it that patterns of principles-in-practice can be discerned from a kaleidoscope of past and present research.

While the majority of the twenty five ’stretch goals’ cover familiar ground and seem uncontentious, I have already written about my unease over ‘rapid-fire’ invention. Innovation needs tempering with checks and balances; I have too often seen the consequences of maverick bosses whose innovative activities have been to the greater glory of themselves and to the detriment of their staff, whom they regard as their own private fiefdom.

P.S. What I meant to say is that businesses do themselves no favours slavishly following the utterances of “renowned scholars”. By all means listen to what they have to say but business leaders need to exercise judgement and understand their own operating contexts before deciding how they go about adapting their management practices.

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!