My
list of must-read business writers continues to expand.
Gary Hamel, however, author of What Matters Now,
with the very long subtitle of How to win in a World of Relentless
Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation, has been on the
list for quite some time. Continuing his thesis on the need for a new
approach to management introduced in his prior book The Future of
Management, Hamel calls for a complete rethinking of how enterprises are
run.
Fundamental to his
recommendation is that the practice of management is ossified in a command and
control system that is now generations old and needs to be replaced with
something that reflects an educated workforce, globalized demand and supply,
the Internet and networks in general, and the incorporation of technology into
everything.
Further,
he also calls for a new era of ethics in business, lamenting the failure of
banks and investment banks to monitor themselves, and being in the center of
the causes of the Great Recession. His indictment of business
behavior really leads to my only criticism of the book. The first 35 pages
are devoted to recounting the recent problems. Since I lived through
all that, and watched it, I didn’t need detailed reminders of the questions
about Complexity, Leverage, Illiquidity, Deceit, Hubris (all paragraph headers)
etc., that were part of the near-collapse of the U.S. economy from far too much
debt at every level.
He moves to a background
review. In summary he believes that enterprises are largely managed with
techniques from the turn of the last century, designed when most factory
workers were poorly educated, with multiple layers of supervisors, managers,
senior managers, etc., etc. with some kind of a standard ratio of one to ten or
so, that creates giant management overheads. Those overheads,
perhaps once necessary in a mass production era with a less educated workforce
and little information technology, in his view, now slow decisions,
impede innovation, and restrict senior executives from a real understanding of
what is happening at the customer/product level.
That’s
what he wants to dramatically change. The balance of the book is
devoted to approaches and examples of companies on the edge of radically
different structures (e.g. W.L. Gore, Morning Star) that are making
self-directed teams, smaller business units, and innovation from the bottom,
work to create faster, more nimble, more responsive – and profitable
businesses.
He
proposes that leaders think of five areas where an overhaul is needed: Values,
Innovation, Adaptability, Passion and Ideology. His argument is that
today’s global competition, and pace of change driven by technology combined
with a new generation of workers who want something more than just a paycheck,
means that to succeed, companies must (a) welcome ideas and innovation coming from
every part and level of the enterprise, (b) scrap traditional control systems
that really don’t work anyway (e.g. presumably there were plenty of traditional
control systems in place that failed to prevent the sub-prime mortgage crisis)
while stifling the business, (c) engage employees in such a way that they
commit to higher effectiveness, and infuse the organization with values that
lead to the right moral and ethical decisions without energy-sapping control
systems.
It is a good challenge for
managers to contemplate. I’ll admit to struggling to see how some of
my prior employers could evolve into a Morning Star, with self-directed workers
and virtually no managers. But it remains thought-provoking.
He concludes with a list of
twenty-five “moonshot” ideas, that is, bold big ideas for leaders to
consider. While most readers will have seen some of these, they
probably have not seen all of them, and certainly not all in one place. I
continue to rate Hamel as a must-read for business executives and exec
–wannabes. This is no exception. Strongly recommended.
Source of the Book : HomeShop18, Flipkart, Crossword, Landmark
Photo Credit: Google Images & Text Source: morphsview.blogspot.com
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