'The Future of Management' (Gary Hamel)
13 August - 22 August 2008
As much as we might deplore “bureaucracy,” it still constitutes the organising principle for virtually every commercial organisation in the world, yours included. And while managers here and there may work to ameliorate some of its stultifying effects, there are few who can imagine a root-and-branch alternative.
Over the coming decades, an accelerating pace of change will test the resilience of every society, organisation and individual. Luckily, these changes will create opportunities as well as challenges. But the balance of promise and peril confronting any particular organisation will depend on its capacity for adaptation. Hence the most important question for any company is this: Are we changing as fast as the world around us?”
New problems demand new principles. Put bluntly, there’s simply no way to build tomorrow’s essential organisational capabilities—resilience, innovation and employee engagement—atop the scaffolding of 20th century management principles.
Have you ever asked yourself, what are the deepest principles upon which my management beliefs are based? Probably not. Few executives, in my experience, have given much thought to the foundational principles that underlie their views on how to organise and manage. In that sense, they are as unaware of their managerial DNA as they are of their biological DNA.
One can fairly describe the development of modern management as an unending quest to regularise the irregular, starting with errant and disorderly employees. Increasingly, though, we live in an irregular world, where irregular people take advantage of irregular events and use irregular means to produce irregular products that yield irregular profits.
Look around you; what things have demonstrated their adaptability across decades, centuries and eons? What sets the benchmark for adaptability? From my vantage point, life, markets, democracies, faith and cities all seem surprisingly adaptable. Each of these biological and human systems has proven itself to be far more resilient than any large corporation. They must become the role models for 21st century companies.
The more one learns about what it is that makes things adaptable, the more one is tempted to question the very foundations of modern management theory. After all, when compared to large companies, the most resilient things on the planet are significantly under-managed or, mon dieu, even un-managed. A distressing thought for managers, perhaps, but an essential insight for those who are eager to build companies that are fit for the future.
In this seminar Gary Hamel asks: How do you discover radically better ways of leading, organising and managing? The short answer: You look far beyond the boundaries of today’s “best practice.” You look someplace weird, someplace unexpected. To glimpse the future of management, you must search out the “positive deviants,” organisations and social systems that defy the norms of conventional practice. We must now face the obvious question: What is the chance that tomorrow’s most successful organisations will be as different from today’s corporate behemoths as the internet is different from plain old telephone service? The answer: A lot higher than you think. Unlike your company, the internet already is adaptable, innovative and engaging.”
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