.. and, according to several friends, "wirearchy".
Within 15 minutes of each other, today I received three emails from friends who are either consultants in organizational change or in management positions pointing me to Gary Hamel’s new book The Future of Management, saying "he’s writing about wirearchy!"
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MT exclusive: Gary Hamel’s ‘The Future of Management’
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The basic argument of the book is that the core practices of management – from capital budgeting, to talent management, to reporting structures – were all invented some 100 years ago to allow the companies of that time to deliver standardised, mass-produced outputs for a rapidly-growing market. The underlying principles of hierarchy, bureaucratic control, and pay-for-performance worked well when the objective was efficiency. But today companies need to deliver on a broader set of objectives, and they need to be far more creative than their forebears.
So rather than force-fit our old management practices to the needs of today’s companies, we should actually develop a new set of practices – based on new principles such as community, variety, and creativity.
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Please forgive my momentary feeling of pleasure … I’ve been reading and thinking about organizations as social systems for a couple of decades now, with inspiration and help from the greats such as Peter Drucker, Charles Handy, Mary Parker Follett, Don Tapscott, Stan Davis, Peter Senge, Peter Block, Marvin Weisbord, Simone Weil, Eric Trist, Fred Emery, Dave Snowden, Patricia Pitcher, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Watts Wacker, Harrison Owen and on and on …
By the way, I also get a lot of insight and stuff from wandering around on the streets of cities and in nature and from listening to people wherever I go … just didn’t want to let those essential influences slide by
I like to believe that the stuff I have written about wirearchy and its eventual impacts on traditional hierarchy, leadership and management has solid grounding in the research and reflection of many of these well-known thinkers. And if my knowledgeable friends suggest that Gary Hamel is writing about the implications of wirearchy, who am I to argue with them ?
For the record, I think that much of the necessary components for future management are addressed in many of the adult and organizational development approaches and methods in practice today. I also believe that these will benefit greatly from an acceptance and understanding that interlinked online networks of communications and information and knowledge sharing and construction, combined with an acceptance and understanding that this environment will change the basic nature of traditional position-and-status based hierarchy.
The key point for leaders and managers, I think, is that it is now possible to choose and implement the appropriate or "best-fit" structure for addressing and accomplishing objectives .. but the rub is that you have to know that, and have the freedom to do so. It’s yesterday’s management processes and practices, seeking to effect control from outmoded assumptions about talent and interaction / collaboration, that leave many well-intentioned managers and leaders frustrated, twisting in the electronic wind. As for unintelligent and / or lazy or fearful managers and leaders, I haven’t much to say. It’s a more demanding environment and world today and for the foreseeable future
I am not going to get into here the adequacy or sufficiency, or not, of what I call "late-stage capitalism", and whether it will be useful for the world to rein in rampant corporatism (see John Ralston Saul’s under-appreciated The Unconscious Civilization for a comprehensive treatment of that subject). The world as we know it or even as we want it will still need organizations and those organization will still need leadership and management.
Even a cursory glance at the appropriate organization / management section in most bookstores will help most people understand that the traditional structures and dynamics of management have been or are woefully inadequate to the rapidly changing structures and behaviours of the new environment in which we are all floundering and flourishing.
Maybe that awareness is growing .. lately I’ve been interviewed a couple of times on radio stations, and in a fortnight or so there should be an interview on wirearchy published in the Australian Financial Review’s leadership magazine, Boss (an unfortunate name for a magazine if ever there was one, as the most common use of "boss" is still the epithet used by prisoners for prison guards ;-) I’ll put a copy of the interview up when it goes online.
This is the logical extension and evolution, in my opinion, of the notion of knowledge work and the dynamics of knowledge workers (who necessarily operate in interlinked collaborative conditions) as championed by Peter Drucker. That’s the sociological angle .. which is increasingly being intertwingled with the technological, as demonstrated in the ongoing discussions of Enterprise 2.0 at places like the FastForward blog and in offerings by a variety of people like Headshift (UK), Dion Hinchcliffe, New Paradigm, David Weinberger, Euan Semple, Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge, Rob Patterson, Dave Pollard, and a whole host of others I should name (you probably know who you are, but my fingers are tired).
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Tags: Gary Hamel, the Future of Management, wirearchy
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