Category: Management

 

 

Management provocations

at the Management Lab‘s conference on “Inventing the Future of Management“:

  • Tim Brown, IDEO: Creative people aren’t interested in management.
  • Hal Varian, Google: ‘Statistician’ is the sexy job of the 21st century.
  • Henry Mitzberg, McGill: We are not living in time of great change. Companies will not save the world.
  • Eric Abrahamson, Columbia: Organizations are over-organized.
  • Yves Doz, INSEAD: The danger is to think that what’s new is exciting and good, while what’s old is bad and tired.
  • Keith Sawyer, Washington University: People are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.
  • James Surowiecki, The New Yorker: The centralization of decision-making is a conceptual error. Individuals are not better than the collective.
  • Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford: The language of economics is toxic to the practice of management.
  • Kevin Kelly, Wired : Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.

(thanks)

Reacting to decline, dissatisfaction and dilemmas

I discuss in class the five ways in which people will react when faced with an ethical dilemma:

  • Exit
  • Voice
  • “Loyalty”
  • Neglect/Sabotage
  • Whistle-blowing.

The first three I paraphrase from a book by Albert Hirschman. The other two I picked up from research sources, as well as, sadly, my own experience.

The challenge for managers is to identify the behaviors and events that are symptomatic of these reactions, and to establish that said reactions are their cause.

Developmental levels of leadership

My friend Maureen recently published a short article that discusses:

What is a “Level 5” Leader? How many levels are there? How would I measure developmental levels including “Level 5”? How will understanding “Level 5” leadership impact my organization’s success? How can I use this information to become more successful?

A worthy source for developmental levels of leadership in general and Level 5 leadership in particular.

The missing piece of the innovation puzzle

Management innovation is in many ways the missing piece of the innovation puzzle. Management innovation is often needed to make technological innovation work. It is an important driver of competitive advantage, yet it remains poorly understood and scarcely researched.Of course many of us are familiar with hallmarks of management innovation, like the introduction of industrial research labs by healthcare company Bayer and General Electric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the divisional form of organising developed at General Motors in the 1920s, and more recently activity-based costing at General Motors and industrial equipment manufacturer John Deere.

But what do we know about the processes through which these management innovations came into being? What caused the individuals behind these successful innovations to try something new? And what were the consequences for the individual innovators and the firms for which they worked?

The beginnings of answers to these questions is in an EBF article.

Related post: Hamel on management innovation

Hamel on management innovation

Gary HamelWhat is “management innovation”?

Management innovation is innovation in management principles and processes that ultimately changes the practice of what managers do, and how they do it. It is different from operational innovation; which is about how the work of transforming inputs into outputs actually gets done.

How is it different?

Think of a company as a set of business processes that turn inputs into outputs. Business processes that turn labour and capital into services and products, for example. It is the business processes that govern the workflow. Things such as logistic systems, order processing, call centres, customer support, and manufacturing. Surrounding the work of transforming inputs to outputs, however, is everything the managers do: pulling resources together, setting priorities, building teams, nurturing relationships, and forming partnerships. And it is innovation within this sphere that I’m interested in.

The full interview is at Management Issues.

(photo credit: London Business School)

Sutton on Pfeffer

our three greatest living academic organizational theorists are, in my opinion, The University of Michigan’s Karl Weick, Stanford’s (now retired) James March, and Jeff Pfeffer. When I say “academic,” I mean scholars who have contributed important theories and published extensively in peer reviewed academic journals. If you look at the work of any organizational theorist who has ever lived, no one except for perhaps Nobel Prize Winner Herbert Simon exceeds the breadth and depth of Jeff’s contributions. (…)

What distinguishes Jeff from other star academic organizational theorists, however, is that he uses so much of this academic knowledge to influence what organizations and their managers actually do. Jeff isn’t as well known in managerial circles as Peter Drucker or Jim Collins. But I believe that his work should be as well-known because his ideas are so research-based and so practical. And unlike most star academics in his field, Jeff is deeply immersed in the stuff of organizational life. (source)

Mintzberg on MBA programs

I describe the MBA in the book as a degree from 1908 with a 1950s strategy. Because the degree was created in 1908 and business schools have had no new degree since 1908 and the strategy was set up based on a couple of reports in the 1950s which made business schools respectable, more research, more theory, more depth. All of which made them much stronger and much more respectable academically but it did not strengthen their managerial side, and to this day there is very little management in most MBA programs and what there is, is distorted.

Let me give you an example. The Harvard case study model (…)

The book he refers to is Managers Not MBAs which he discussed at MIT in this video.

See also Henry Mintzberg on heroic managers.

 

Netflix to employees: Take as much vacation as you want

Employees at the online movie retailer often leave for three, four, even five weeks at a time and never clock in or out. Vacation limits and face-time requirements, says Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings, are “a relic of the industrial age.”

“The worst thing is for a manager to come in and tell me: `Let’s give Susie a huge raise because she’s always in the office.’ What do I care? I want managers to come to me and say: `Let’s give a really big raise to Sally because she’s getting a lot done’ – not because she’s chained to her desk.” (San Jose Mercury News)