I’ve been neglecting the management 2.0 topic for a long time although it was what this blog was about since 2005. Last years I slowely slipped from management 2.0 to enterprise 2.0, even if I find it sad that there were so many people to discuss about of make companies use 2.0 tools than people wanting to focus on building a new management framework in which these tools would make sense. But this question is coming back like a boomerang while companies are slowly realizing that small side adjustments won’t be enough to make tools useful and that a systemic overhaul is needed to make tools serve as catalyssts in a new organization model.
In february’s issue of the Harvard Business Review, Gary Hamel put this issue back to the headlines with an article called “Moon shots for management” which clearly defines management issues for the upcoming years.
Namely :
Ensure that the work of management serves a higher purpose.
Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems.
Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations.
Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy.
Reduce fear and increase trust.
Reinvent the means of control.
Redefine the work of leadership.
Expand and exploit diversity.
Reinvent strategy making as an emergent process.
De-structure and disaggregate the organization.
Dramatically reduce the pull of the past.
Share the work of setting direction.
Develop holistic performance measures.
Stretch executive time frames and perspectives.
Create a democracy of information.
Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries.
Expand the scope of employee autonomy.
Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources.
Depoliticize decision making.
Better optimize trade-offs.
Further unleash human imagination.
Enable communities of passion.
Retool management for an open world.
Humanize the language and practice of business.
Retrain managerial minds.
Of course I advise you to read the full article. I’ll write more about this later since these are my favorite concerns, but we can start looking into it closely.
I think we can distinguish thress broad lines :
• Make people and company’s activity a part of something greater, which goes far beyond the purely economic side of things.
• Equip businesses for permanent self re-engineering (or reconfiguration) : businesses have to be able to reconfigure themselves permanently. It means that information, ideas, people, knowledge, expertise are resources thant have to be mobilized according to the needs, in adhoc or unique processes. Intangible assets are an internal market. Well, well…reminds me of something…
• Rethink the organization cogs : all this supposes an overhaul of all the rules that jam the organization. Among them : decision making, negative impacts of hierarchy, local measurement models that prevent from having any kind of systemic approach.
Where’s the enterprise 2.0 here ? Interesting question.
This article is clearly not about technology, contraty to McKinsey surveys where it underlies many management issues. The question of the link between mananagement 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 will be more and more sensitive. And that’s not a natter discussion.
Can we say that a 2.0 managed company is necessarily an enterprise 2.0 in its traditional definition ? Do enterprises 2.0 have necesseraly adopted management 2.0 ?
To the first question, the answer is obviously not. Tools are defined according to a mode of management, not the opposite. But it’s obvious than in a “management 2.0″ company, the question of 2.0 will quickly arise. It’s one of the reasons why many management professionnels showed interest for enterprise 2.0, not because they were interested in technology but because they saw it as the consequence of unavoidable new ways of managing people. So we can imagine that a “management 2.0″ works well without enterprise 2.0 tools. Even if it can work uch better with.
To the second question, the answer seems to be yes. If rely on the available studies, the answer is affirmative. If we rely on actual cases like CISCO’s it’s the same. Globally speaking, businesses that successfully achieve their enterprise 2.0 projects are those that began to work, earlier or concomitantly on the points that Hamel mentions. Moreover, at a time when the most asked quetion about enterprise 2.0 is “how to do it”, when we have a look at successful implementations, at Cisco or GE for instance, we are forced to wonder if those who don’t still catch the “how” are those who refuse to see the management issues beyond software implementation. Success in not in sotware deployment and what comes with, but in what’s all around.
I highly suggest you to answer this HBR survey in order to assess how manager feel about Hamel’s points and how organization began to take them into acocunt in their agendas.
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autonomie, évaluation, but, Communautés, control, décision, Entreprise 2.0, gary-hamel, hiérarchie, Innovation, leadership, Management, management-2.0, marketplaces, mesure, organisation, reconfigurabilité, reconfiguration,a ctifs intangibles, immateriels
You can find the "original" french version of this blog here
