Most of the leaders are not able to accept the reality of how management processes have changed with technological innovation. Throughout history, technological innovation has always preceded organizational and management innovation. Think back to the end of the 17th century, when muskets started to be introduced into European warfare. At the time, battle formations were very deep, very square, with the archers in the middle of the formation shooting over the heads of the archers in front of them. Eventually, those formations changed in size and scope to better reflect the capabilities of muskets. But it took almost 100 years for this to happen. Why? Because a couple of generations of generals had to die off before military planners were able to use this new weapon in a productive way. It won’t take 100 years this time. Still, if we’re going to fully mobilize human minds, we’re going to have to turn a lot of our legacy management beliefs on their head. The old model was, “How do you get people to serve the organization’s goals?” Today we have to ask, “How do you build organizations that merit the gifts of creativity and passion and initiative?” You cannot command those human capabilities. Imagination and commitment are things that people choose to bring to work every day—or not. U cant afford to loose that business opportunity, dealing with commitment, quality, thought process and innovation bejeweled in an employee a new business opportunity is persistently awaited for a business leader.
But as the "S" curve of technologies exist so does it apply to technology of management too. Innovation in organization occurring all over the place, but a lot of those innovations go nowhere. There’s lots of experimentation going on, but organizational barriers prevent the adoption of good innovations throughout the company. New organizational models are needed in all industries because all companies engage in thinking-intensive work. The traditional, hierarchically based 20th-century model is not effective at organizing the thinking-intensive work of self-directed people who need to make subjective judgments based upon their own special knowledge. Such people work in all companies, in all industries, and in the digital age it is these people who create wealth. We need a model for such work—a model that uses hierarchical decision making only for activities that need that authority, such as allocating resources, appointing people to jobs, or holding people accountable—but at the same time enables self-directed professionals to collaborate with their peers continuously. And that’s where you need to adapt the model: by creating mechanisms to enable such collaboration to be efficient, effective and most importantly value adding. Such mechanisms can help the organization to work horizontally as well as vertically. Many organization have thinking intensive professionals or teams, and most of them are so dispersed in the org that its difficult for them to map the capabilities and utilize the one from one team and another from another. Identification of innovative talent is a largest problem faced in initiation innovation management programs and the second is the picturisation, evaluation and perspection of the talent by experienced team members. Its important for the leader to be aware of the fact that the team is there for benefitting the organization more than evaluation, and else mentioned, primarily the team has to be aware of its objective and reason for existence.
Part of the issue is the definition of talent. Everybody says they want more talent, so it’s almost uninteresting to ask people what their biggest challenge is; it’s always going to be talent. But to be very clear, it isn’t just intrinsically talented people you need. You can hire all the intrinsically talented people you want. There’s a market for talent, and as long as you’re willing to pay what that marketplace demands, you can attract talented people. The real challenge is making profits off those talented people. That’s where the big opportunity is. The leading companies today are combining talent and technology and organizational design to generate much higher profits per employee than was possible in the past. So the trick becomes, “How do I hire talent that I can profit from?”
In a market where talent is largely a commodity and can be bought anywhere, the secret sauce is creating an environment in which you push that frontier out, in which you can steadily raise the returns on human capital. The combination of technology and talent is a powerful catalyst for value creation, but to take advantage of the Web’s capacity to help us aggregate and amplify human potential in new ways, we must first of all abandon some of our traditional management beliefs—the notion, for example, that strategy should be set at the top. So I think in terms of managing creative-thinking people, you have to separate the work of managing from the notion of managers as a distinct and privileged class of employees. Highly talented people don’t need, and are unlikely to put up with, an overtly hierarchical management model. Increasingly, the work of management won’t be done by managers. It will be pushed out to the periphery. It will be embedded in systems. I think we’re on the verge of what I would call a postmanagerial society. The idea that you mobilize human labor through a hierarchy of overseers and bureaucrats and administrators is going to look extraordinarily antiquated a decade or two from now.
These thinking-intensive people will inherently be increasingly self-directed. In fact, they’re directed as much by their peers as they are by supervisors. The management challenge while dealing with them is akin to urban planning. The art of it is that you must enable people to make thousands and thousands of individual decisions about how to live and work, but you have to create the infrastructure to make it easy for them to do so. You’ve got to have the sewer lines, you’ve got to have the four-lane highways, you’ve got to have the pedestrian malls thought through in a way that individuals find it natural and easy to work either by themselves or with others.
There’s a danger too, of creative apartheid. Too many executives seem to believe that while a few people in the company may be really clever and creative, most folks aren’t. When you look at companies like Toyota, you see their ability to mobilize the intelligence of so-called ordinary workers. Going forward, no company will be able to afford to waste a single iota of human imagination and intellectual power. So it might be bringing talent or knowledge marketplaces inside a company or building formal networks or introducing dynamic management principles to a company. These are all ideas that have been tried somewhere; they just haven’t been integrated together, at scale, in very many companies. Decision-making will be more peer based; the tools of creativity will be widely distributed in organizations. Ideas will compete on an equal footing. Strategies will be built from the bottom up. Power will be a function of competence rather than of position. In terms of the future of management, we’re at the beginning of what will be a fairly long journey. To become inspired management innovators, today’s executives must learn how to think explicitly about the management orthodoxies that bound their thinking—the habits, dogmas, and conceits they’ve never taken the trouble to challenge. For example, many people believe that it takes a crisis to change a large organization, and when we look at the evidence this seems to be the case. And yet it’s important to dig underneath that belief and ask, “Is this a law of physics? Is crisis-driven change the only way to change a large company, or is this reality the consequence of something we designed into our management system 100 years ago?” I would argue it’s the latter. It often takes a crisis to change an organization because in most companies the authority to set strategy and direction is highly concentrated at the top. As a consequence, a relatively small group of people at the top can hold the organization’s capacity to change hostage to their own personal willingness to adapt and to change. So the orthodoxy is that it takes a crisis to change. OK, but in order to change that reality you have to change the distribution of power in large organizations. Some of these things are not going to happen overnight. To counter the forces of creativity the largest block is the pit of forces of organization to move on the the creativity path, its important to jump the S curve than to shuffle with it.
When it comes to reinventing management, you must have the courage to set seemingly aggressive objectives—like GE’s goal of growing at twice the rate of GDP, net of acquisitions. But the actual work of reengineering our musty old management practices will be more evolutionary than revolutionary. You don’t take a large, complicated company and tear up all the track at once. To do so would expose a company to an intolerable level of operational risk. Yet companies must become as purposefully and creatively experimental in thinking about their management systems and processes as they already are in thinking about R&D or new-product development.
As in any scientific experiment, you have to set some very clear boundaries around what kind of risks you’re willing to take and then challenge people to test new ideas within the boundaries. That’s a new skill for most organizations. A lot of the inspiration will come from looking entirely outside the world of large organizations and management—and understanding how experimentation is used in the sciences to engender new insights will minimize risks.
What organizations need to work is on how they enable their people to collaborate with one another at much lower cost by dramatically reducing unproductive search and coordination costs. And that means deploying such devices as talent marketplaces, knowledge marketplaces, and formal networks to make intangible assets flow throughout the company, as opposed to going up and down vertical chains of command. Hamel: In any field of human endeavor you ultimately reach a point where you can’t solve the new problems using the old principles. I think we’ve reached that point in the evolution of management. When you go back to the principles upon which our modern companies are built—standardization, specialization, hierarchy, and so on—you realize that those are not bad principles but are inadequate for the challenges that lie ahead. Ideas are being monetized in ways never before possible, and the world is a richer place. I’m not just talking about creating financial wealth; I’m talking about a much more stimulating work environment, with more interesting jobs for employees to create more valuable products and services for the world’s consumers. It is just an incredibly exciting time to be alive.
Alive - by which I mean to add the best value to every interacting entity in this time of existence called life.
