Via Hylton Jolliffe of Beeline Labs, a link to this May 2008 gabfest. Actually, I remember writing something about it at the time … perhaps The Wisdom of the Organization Crowd ?
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”. For example, all of the following are elements of management that are addressed in the article “Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?“.
- embed the ideas of community and citizenship
- reconstruct management’s philosophical foundation
- eliminate the pathologies of hierarchy
- reinvent the means of control
- reinvent strategy making as an emergent process
- de-structure and disaggregate the organization
- share the work of setting direction
- create a democracy of information
- expand employee autonomy
- create internal markets for ideas, talent and resources
- enable communities of passion
- retool management for an open world
- retrain managerial minds
It also seems clear that we will, collectively, not go back to the existing models of management, although the process of transition to these new goals is really only still in the early days. As I re-read the list of stretch goals I am reminded of Peter Vaill’s book “Learning as a Way of Being – Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent Whitewater” and I end up thinking that any competent OD (organizational development) practitioner will have been talking to organization / management clients about these issues for at least the last decade. That is the core message of “Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?” … that the transformation of management is available and accessible from organizational development principles but probably needs some re-framing.
By the way, I don’t like the implications of the term “moonshots” used in Hamel’s post. I do not see these issues as “moonshots” but rather as an intensification and amplification of changes that have been underway for some time now. Many or most organizations are struggling with these new forms and dynamics of management because of legacy structures and the accompanying legacy assumptions about how activities are and should be managed.
What do you think ? Are networks here to stay and will their impact on traditional management continue to accumulate ? Will social computing be the medium that helps these necessary changes take place, or will the changes be forced onto traditional management whilst they go kicking and screaming, full of resistance, into the future ?
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25 Stretch Goals For Management
In May 2008, a group of renowned scholars and business leaders gathered in Half Moon Bay, California, with a simple goal: to lay out an agenda for reinventing management in the 21st century.
The two-day event, organized by the Management Lab with support from McKinsey & Company, brought together veteran management experts such as CK Prahalad, Henry Mintzberg, and Peter Senge; distinguished social commentators including Kevin Kelly, James Surowiecki and Shoshana Zuboff; and a number of progressive CEOs, including Terri Kelly from WL Gore, Vineet Nayar from HCL Technologies, and John Mackey from Whole Foods.
Before arriving, each of the 35 attendees participated in an hour-long interview. The double-barreled question:
What is it about the way large organizations are currently managed that will most imperil their ability to thrive in the decades ahead; and given this, what fundamental changes will be needed in management principles, processes and practices?
[ Snip … ]
First, that “management” — the tools and methods we use to mobilize resources to productive ends — is one of humankind’s most important social technologies.
Second, that the “management model” that predominates in most large organizations is now seriously out-of-date. This model has its roots in the late 19th century, and was invented to solve one overriding problem: how to get semi-skilled human beings to do the same things over and over again, with perfect replicability and ever-increasing efficiency. This was, and is, an important problem, but it is not the most important challenge for today’s organizations.
Third, that we must, therefore, reinvent management in ways that will make large organizations fundamentally more adaptable, more innovative and more inspiring places to work — that will, in short, make them as human as the individuals who work within them.
After two days of sometimes contentious deliberations, a set of “moonshots for management” began to emerge. These challenges are described in full in the February 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review, and are summarized below:
1. Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.
2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.
3. Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology and theology, and from such concepts as democracies and markets.
4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.
5. Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems.
6. Reinvent the means of control. To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within rather than constraints from without.
7. Redefine the work of leadership. The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.
8. Expand and exploit diversity. We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.
9. Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.
10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.
11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.
12. Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process where share of voice is a function of insight, not power.
13. D
evelop holistic performance measures. Existing performance metrics must be recast, since they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.14. Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. Discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.
15. Create a democracy of information. Companies need holographic information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.
16. Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than in the past.
17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.
18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.
19. Depoliticize decision-making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization.
20. Better optimize trade-offs. Management systems tend to force either-or choices. What’s needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.
21. Further unleash human imagination. Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.
22. Enable communities of passion. To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of self-defining communities of passion.
23. Retool management for an open world. Value-creating networks often transcend the company’s boundaries and render traditional power-based management tools ineffective. New management tools are needed for building complex ecosystems.
24. Humanize the language and practice of business. Tomorrow’s management systems must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.
25. Retrain managerial minds. Managers’ traditional deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.
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Tags: wirearchy, learning, management 2.0, organizational change
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