Management 2.0

 

 

 

Speaking at the World Business Forum, Professor Gary Hamel of the London Business School shared several statistics from Harvard Business Review and other reputable surveys that paint a frightening picture:

  • 84% of employees in the UK are not engaged at work
  • Less than 20% of employees are consulted before goals are set for their work
  • 70% of jobs require little or no originality
  • 68% believe new ideas are greeted with scepticism or hostility
  • 76% said that politics highly influence who gets ahead

Hamel summed up his research up by stating that “many companies and organisations feel like emotional dead zones.”

I’m sure that most of the audience felt, (as I did and I imagine you do too), that this list of woe at work can’t possibly apply to their/your company – but might it, or to some degree at least? Hamel shared his analysis of what he labelled ‘Management 1.0’ as the causes for these issues:

  • Power is vested in positions
  • Authority trickles down
  • Senior executives set strategy
  • Big leaders appoint little leaders
  • People are slotted into roles
  • Managers assess performance
  • Staff functions enforce compliance
  • Compensation correlates with rank

Now, how many of these can you identify within your business?

Hamel offered examples of how some of the world’s most successful businesses have embraced better ways of management which include:

  • Thousands of “micro-enterprises” (within the overall “Group”) – Haier
  • Teams self-organise around key problems – Valve
  • Front line employees drive innovation – Intuit
  • Strategy is crowd-sourced – Red Hat
  • There are no internal monopolies (no centralised HR, marketing, R&D, etc.) – Zappos
  • Teams choose their own leaders – WL Gore
  • Every employee thinks like an owner – Nucor
  • Employees contract with each other – Morning Star
  • Pricing decisions are entirely decentralised – Handelsbanken

Hamel suggests that companies need to become:

  • Bold
  • Simple
  • Lean
  • Open
  • Flat
  • Free

I think this list is worth checking against – how does your company measure up?

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