The Management Myth

Matthew Stewart, writing in The Atlantic, is my kind of guy. He says most of management theory is inane and if you want to succeed in business you should study philosophy not get an MBA. Of course, he is a philosophy graduate. He makes the case in this well written article that the need for the MBA is a myth. New fads are promoted with maddening papal infallibility and lack of empirical data.

He points back to Mary Parker Follett in the 1920's for attacking "departmentalized" thinking and advocating the "integrative" organization. Rosabeth Moss Kanter picked up the torch in 1983.

"Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master the dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey these are people we're talking about! And the debate goes on."

He calls MBAs a way for businesses to outsource hiring.

In the end he has three recommendations for academic philosophy departments that he says will bring them back to be the educators of management - their "rightful" place:

• Expand the domain of your analysis! Why so many studies of Wittgenstein and none of Taylor, the man who invented the social class that now rules the world?
• Hire people with greater diversity of experience! Not just someone from another university, someone with another world view.
• Remember the three Cs: communication, communication and communication! Remember Plato: Its all about dialogue!

My comment: I have to agree that organizational leadership demands a broad range of skills and backgrounds and there really is no common set of tools for getting there. It would be interesting to put the requirements for an MBA up against the list of skills of innovators from the previous post. I think you would find that there are many, many places where they do not relate.

The People Focus in Innovation

Paul Williams wrote a post for innovation tools on May 8, 2009 about the people focus of innovation. This was a response to Stefan Lindegaard's challenge on why leaders don't talk more about the people who drive innovation. Williams does a great job of synthesizing the people focus:

Ideas have many sources:

• Employees
• Research and development teams
• Customers
• Vendors
• Marketing/sales team
• Competitors
• Leadership
• Patent Searches
• Academic Institutions
• Business partnerships
• Best/next practice reviews
• Association memberships
• Conferences

What all of those sources have in common is that each and every idea starts with one person. Those who excel at developing ideas and solving problems have many common skill sets and traits. They are:

• Skilled at alternative thinking styles
• Excel at individual problem solving
• Able to participate in or facilitate group ideation settings
• Able to see weak signals of future trends
• Able to identify root causation of problems
• Comfortable with taking calculated risks
• Not bothered by fear of failure (or success)
• Able to maintain an imaginative and creative approach to problems and/or opportunities
• Able to analyze and learn from failures
• Able to assume leadership responsibility
• Able to translate ideas into objects (physical, visual, etc.)

Then there are the roles that are important for moving ideas from concept to reality:

• Idea generator - The origination point of an idea
• Idea champion - The person responsible for shaping the idea, building a business case and keeping it moving forward
• Idea sponsor - The person who secures the resources (money, human, time) to explore the idea and who provides "cover" for the idea to keep it safe
• Process manager - The person who manages the innovation/idea process to ensure ideas have an easy to access and repeatable path to follow
• Engineer or prototype builder - The person who brings the idea to life (on a drawing board, in a lab, virtually, physically, etc.)
• Project manager and implementation team - The people who manage the process and create/implement an actual object, business process and/or service based on the idea
• Sales and marketing teams - The people who convince others to purchase the output of the new idea, thus making it an official innovation

But how do you protect these people and help them stay connected?

• Look for the mavericks who feel constrained by your current processes and procedures and who develop alternative methods
• Reward those who challenge the status quo
• Encourage self-organizing teams
• Mandate cross-functional teams
• Implement collaboration tools like conference rooms/idea centers, blogs, message boards, wikis, groupware, etc.
• Provide training on expanding their natural innovative/creative skills
• Provide cover and support and appreciation for fast failures
• Demonstrate that risk taking is okay

And what about keeping people motivated to keep the idea pipeline full?

• Public recognition
• Money
• Idea lottery
• Frequent idea point program
• Calls, notes or personal visits from senior leadership
• Ice cream socials
• Promotions within the innovation management group
• Temporary assignment to work on the idea
• Award ceremony for the best failure
• Great idea awards banquet

My comment: I find most of what Williams says right on target. The one place I'd differ is this last section on keeping these people motivated. I, for one, would be turned off by anything public - so eliminate the public recognition, ice cream socials, award ceremony and banquet. The things that I want are freedom with support - for myself and my people, enough resources to develop and test the new ideas we come up with, and the ability to get the project out of our hands once it becomes mundane and ordinary. Give me those things and you'll get more production than you could ever imagine!

Words and phrases that I like

During all my reading I come across new phrases or word connections that really make a connection for me. Sometimes it is the name of a process that I was unaware of - like "Open Space". Sometimes it is just a way of stating something - like "Collective Creativity" (Ed Catmull, Pixar Animation). I've decided to start saving them here. When I run across a new one I will come back and edit this post and add it.

These are the triggers that often start me down a path of exploration. Future blogs cover what I learn along the way.

1. Open Space. Harrison Owen. A way of encouraging and supporting self-organizing.
2. Appreciative Inquiry. Asset based assessment.
3. Collective Creativity. Ed Catmull. A continuous process of small and constant change involving a large number of diverse people working together to respond to multiple opportunities.
4. Systemic inventive thinking. Genrich Altschuller. Brainstorming doesn't work because people withhold their best ideas. Instead, break down successful products and processes into components, study the parts and find other potential uses.
5. Open Innovation. Authentically involving all aspects of an organization in the innovation process and ensuring that the process is shared in an open and accessible way.
6. Disruptive uncertainty. Jeanne Liedtke. Organizations deal with disruptive uncertainty to a large extent through collaboration - collaboration among organizations.
7. Black Swans. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Unanticipated events.
8. Disruptive innovation. Dr. Clayton Christensen. A business model that brings to market a much more affordable product or service that is much simpler to use.
9. Predictably irrational (Dan Ariely)
   
10. More to come.

Notes from March MLab Management 2.0 LabNotes

Tim Brown, CEI, IDEO

• At IDEO – management is tolerated insofar as it is a means to the end of facilitating what people want to do, rather than the other way around.
• Key to our culture is an absolutely incessant interest in doing things that are new.
• Choose employees with deep craft who are also keenly curious about the context surrounding it.
• The pattern of innovation in emergent, not planned
• Creative culture has a deep reservoir of trust in its DNA
• The real question about scale is not about sharing information – it is about sharing inspiration.

Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies

• The higher the quality of employee you have, in terms of capability, enablement, engagement, the better value gets created in the interface between the employee and the customer.
• Reverse accountability – managers are accountable to their employees
• For any complaint or query an employee opens a service ticket on a portal to which the department is obliged to respond. Crucially, it is only the employee who can close the ticket.

Jeffrey Hollender, CEO, Seventh Generation

• In every deliberation, it behoves to consider the impact of the decision on the next seven generations.
• Extreme transparency. That inspired us to look at everything we were doing and put on our website anything critical that might be missing that anyone would want to know.

The World Beyond Budgeting, Robin Fraser and Franz Roosli

• Radical decentralization is the underlying concept. The organization revolves around the customer. Principles of the beyond budgeting model:
• Devolved Leadership principles

1. Focus everyone on their customers, not on hierarchical relationships
2. Organize as a lean network of accountable teams, not as centralized functions
3. Give teams the freedom and capability to act, don’t micro-manage them
4. Create a high responsibility culture at every level, not just at the top
5. Promote open information for self management; don’t restrict it hierarchically
6. Adopt a few clear values, goals, and boundaries, not detailed regulations
   

Adaptive Process Principles

1. Set relative goals for continuous improvement, don’t negotiate contracts
2. Reward shared success based on relative performance, not fixed targets
3. Make planning a continuous and inclusive process, not a top down annual event
4. Base controls on relative indicators and trends, not variances against plan
5. Make resources available as needed, not through annual budget allocations
6. Coordinate interactions dynamically, not through annual planning cycles

Engaged Innovation Roundtable, London Business School

• Tim Thorne, Royal Bank of Scotland: Five days of innovation training for employees. Develop ideas some of which then receive funding. 50% of those that received funding have entered the marketplace.
• Amanda West of ThomsonReuters: A supporting online toolkit and series of webinars about innovation enable staff globally across the business to build their own skills on a self serve basis
• Tod Bedilion, Roche: Put internal problems on an internal system and waited for solutions. Our hope that our internal technology-oriented people would gravitate to using this type of tool was completely unfounded… We really had to push people (via an electronic marketing campaign) to involve them in suggesting solutions. Had to offer incentives in the end.
• Thought triggered for MSU: Could alumni be involved in “innovative engagement” through technology? Would this create an institutional value for alumni. By innovative engagement I’m thinking of a system that would enable alums to post challenges that other alums could suggest solutions for? What would the incentives be? Access to knowledge?

Seven Rules for Radical Innovators, Lessons from Barack Obama’s campaign, Umar Haque, Director, Havas Media Lab

1. Have a self organizing design. Obama’s organization blew past orthodoxies for structure to use the power of self-organizing
2. Minimize strategy. Obama’s campaign realized that strategy, too often, kills a deeply-lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning.
3. Maximize purpose. Yesterday we built huge corporations to do tiny incremental things – tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.
4. Broaden unity. Marketers typically segment and target, Obama succeeded through unification, not through division.
5. Thicken power. True power is the power to inspire, lead, and engender belief.
6. There is nothing more asymmetrical – more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative - than the world changing power of an ideal.
7. Rule six is the starting point for tomorrow’s radical innovators. Where are the ideals in your organization? What ideals are missing? What ideals will you fight and struggle for

Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 Book List

• Creative Experience, Mary Parker Follett, 1924
• Out of Control, Kevin Kelly, 1994
• The Age of Heretics, Art Kleiner, 1996
• Manufacturing the Employee, Roy Jacques, 1996
• Competing on the Edge, Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt, 1998
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond, 1999
• Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, David Weinberger, 2002
• The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida, 2002
• The Future of Work, Thomas Malone, 2004
• The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, 2004
• Firms of Endearment, Raj Sisodia, Jag Sheth, and David Wolfe, 2007
• Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky, 2008

If you are inspired to read all of any of the articles go to www.managementlab.org