Rehearsal of some of the problems.We live in a society dedicated to dividends, organization, decision, orders from top to bottom, confrontation (every idea put forth must win or lose) and all-out war to destroy a competitor be he at home or abroad. Take no prisonner, there ust be winners and there must be losers. This may not be the way to better material living.
We live in an era in which everyone expects to see an everyrising standard of living. A little arthmetics sometimes helps to clarify thinking. When cometh the ever-increasing supply of worldly goods that build up an ever-increasing supply of food, clothing, housing, transportation and other serices ? It is gard to understand of a significant economic development could happen in the United States as long as our products are not competitive in our country and in the rest of the world.
How can anyone buy products from others if he can’t manage to sell them his own ones ? The only possible answer is a better conception, higher quality, higher productivity.
Only a better management can bring the necessery improvement. The question is to know how long it will take for managament to assume at last its responsabilities and for a new attitude to bear fruits. The american industry doesn’t have to prepare for restauration but for transformation. Solving problems from day to day and installing gadgets won’t put an end to our difficulties.
[...]
An article in Business Week [...] cited the paradoxal case of an executive who was laid off from his company, even though he had been hired to manage long term planification. The only reason was that the last quarter’s dividends [...] felt off.
CxOs managed to make shareholders believe that dividends were a measurement of management performance. Some business schools teach their students how to maximize short term profits. [...] When will industry leaders learn that they have a moral obligation to protect the capital.
Out of the crisis ! How ? Why ?
Considering the gap between management 2.0 and enterprise 2.0
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 :
How Enterprise 2.0 can help managing and improving organizational capital to support strategy
This is the third (and last) post of the series about enterprise 2.0 and intangible assets. Why do “organization capital” ? It’s the ability to mobilize and support the change process that is needed to support strategy.
It’s made of four elements :
- culture : appropriation of the vision and key values needed to support strategy
- leadershp : presence of skilled leaders at every level of the organization
- alignment : link between objective and individual and collective reawards to reach strategic goals
- teamwork : shared knowledge across the organization;
In concrete terms those components are about behavioral change. Some are dedicated to value creation (focus on client, be reative and innovant, deliver results), some to strategy execution (undertanding the mission, the rules, link the financial aspects to strategy, communicate with transparency, team work).
Do we really need to add anything since the link with E2.0 seems obvious ?
Quotations between provocation and good sense
Sometimes I find sentences which are really worth by themselves, that have a lot of meaning, whether in or out of their original context. I often bookmark them but this time I think they’re worth a post. As a matter of fact I find two series of nice quotations in two posts I recently read : the first from Andrew McAfee are more about provocation (but provocation is sometimes useful to make people wonder), the second is from Jon Husband and is more about good sense.
So…let’s start with provocation :
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.
…and finish with good sense :
“Networks make organizational politics and culture explicit“ (Michael Schrage, MIT)
“The most difficult thing about IBM’s transformation was that so many people delegated responsibility upwards” (Lou Gerstner, IBM CEO)
“Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust“ (Warren Bennis, USC)
You can find the "original" french version of this blog here
