The Future of Management Has Already Arrived – Part I: Hidden In Plain Sight

by Rod Collins

 

The practice of management needs a major overhaul. The top-down hierarchical model that has served as the fundamental platform for how we organize the work of large numbers of people is rapidly becoming obsolete in a business world that is being radically transformed by the forces of accelerating change. Put simply, a nineteenth century management model is unsustainable in a twenty-first century world. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, it is unrealistic to believe that a century-old management model will somehow endure while the rest of the world is reshaped by the technologies of the digital age.

The reasons for the inevitable obsolescence of traditional management have been cogently described by the business thinker Gary Hamel in his most recent books, The Future of Management and What Matters Now. The essential tools and practices of what was once known as modern management, Hamel points out, were invented to guide business leaders in building and preserving sustainable business models and maintaining highly efficient operations. However, in today’s rapidly changing world, keeping pace is more a matter of adapting and innovating than preserving and maintaining. Thus, Hamel correctly concludes what ultimately constrains the performance of so many businesses in this time of great change is a deeply entrenched management model designed to propagate the status quo.

However, while Hamel outlines in great depth why traditional management’s days are clearly numbered and presents compelling examples of companies, such as Google, Gore, Morning Star, and Whole Foods, whose leaders manage very differently from their traditional counterparts, he somewhat surprisingly concludes that what he terms “Management 2.0” has yet to be invented. He urges his readers to become part of the movement to reinvent management for the twenty-first century by sharing new practices in online forums such as the Management Innovation Exchange in the hope that a new management model, which is better designed to successfully guide leaders in meeting the challenges of a rapidly changing world, will eventually emerge from the dialogue.

Hamel’s conclusion is surprising because the future of management has already happened and many of his examples are evidence of the new management model’s arrival. His conclusion is even more puzzling because in What Matters Now, Hamel notes that the future usually starts on the fringe rather than the mainstream, citing the science-fiction writer William Gibson, who once wisely observed, “The future has already happened, it’s just unequally distributed.” And so it is with management: While its future is present today, it’s not equally distributed, and thus, remains hidden in plain sight.

Part of the reason we may have difficulty in recognizing the new management model is because it works so very differently from the old model. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, the prevailing theory known as Scientific Management assumed that organizations were essentially machines, and that they worked best when the functional parts were correctly aligned and properly controlled. The new model, which some have called Creative Management, sees organizations as evolving complex adaptive systems rather than static machines. This new model is a well-developed management system that is guiding its practitioners to consistent extraordinary performance, despite the challenges posed by the forces of accelerating change.

The workings of this new model are reflected in the well-established—but little known—practices of management innovators, which are detailed in two books; The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management by Stephen Denning and my own recently published Wiki Management. These sources describe the innovative processes and practices of the revolutionary new management model that is hidden in plain sight. They spotlight a very different business world where leaders are catalysts and facilitators rather than bosses, workers are highly engaged in shaping strategic thinking and operational practices, and business processes are designed around what’s most important to customers. In the next five installments of this blog, we will summarize the key content of each of these sources and highlight the fundamentals of the future of management.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).