Tag Archives: management

Your boss, the middleman – Part II

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by in business, human capital, management, Organizational Development, problem solving

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I ended my initial post on this topic with a pointer to the so-called “freelance economy”. In this post I want to take this thread further, as I think it can shed light into the future of employment.

What I was implying at the end of my initial post is that reducing or even doing away with “middleman” corporate hierarchies in a post-materialistic, fluid economy of ideas doesn’t lead to anarchy. Rather it logically leads to a “freelance economy”, a world where, in British management philosopher Charles Handy’s words, free-floating freelancer “fleas” service multiple corporate “elephants” following the need for their specific talents.

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Management consultants as educators

24 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in business, consulting, management

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I have heard my share of reservations about management consultants. Many see business consulting as a shallow field devoid of real substance. As the old saying about no smoke without fire goes, there is likely good reason for the distrust of this modern profession. The great Russell Ackoff himself distinguished between two types of consultants: self-promoting gurus and educators.

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Empowering true talent

03 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in business, human capital, management, Organizational Development, Uncategorized

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“Managing” true talent is a misnomer. Subjecting the truly inspired to rules is akin to plowing fields with Ferraries – yes it might just work, but it sure is stupid. Use the talented rather for creating the recipes around which the hoards of less inspired can be assembled and scaled. In the same vein, don’t compensate the truly talented by the hour or with a fixed income: you would in effect incentivize them to limit their imagination. Strategy and vision are holistic products, they cannot be bought or measured by the hour, and don’t bow to quantitative rewards.

So then how can you empower the talented? Here’s a few hints.

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Post-causality: a quiet global revolution in the making

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in business, capitalism, complexity, consulting, democracy, future, human capital, innovation, knowledge, management, philosophy, problem solving, society, taxonomy, technology

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If one were to cut a global cross-section through social classes, nationalities, ethnicities, ages, professions, genders, and so forth, very few commonalities would emerge. And yet, there is I propose just such a common thread: a shared causality mindset, a globally predominant belief in the supremacy of cause and effect.

Since it is people who run our institutions, this belief continues to shape our modern society and even influence to a large extent the technological outcrops of our knowledge economy. From business strategy to macroeconomic models, and from political debates to Big Data, causality is pervasive and its implications profound.

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The essence of management in 20 minutes

29 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in knowledge, management

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From Harvard Business Review articles on entrepreneurship, to New York Times bestsellers on leadership and innovation, to the top management consulting firms’ whitepapers on effective change and transformation, management knowledge is a labyrinth more daunting than the discipline itself. One could probably fill an entire career with sorting the knowledge available on management, with no guarantee that at the end one would master the discipline of management.

And so, is there a twenty minute read that would capture the essence of what Gary Hamel appropriately calls the “technology of human accomplishment”?

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The mechanistic world view continues to be reinforced by Information Technology

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in business, management, society, technology

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This will be a very short blog post. I am not going to make an elaborate argument. Rather, I would like the “evidence” to speak for itself. My thesis is that Information Technology (IT) continues to proliferate mechanistic thinking in business, more than a century after Frederick Taylor fathered the science of workflow analysis and labor productivity in a manufacturing intensive economy. While we’ve since moved on to the knowledge economy, we have yet to abandon manufacturing thinking.

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Why the “individuality disorder” is the great tacit crisis of our times and how complexity informed management can help resolve it

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by in business, Communication, complexity, Crisis, future, human capital, management, Organizational Development, paradox, philosophy, society

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With all the benefits derived from the advances in standard of living, our modern society suffers from an apparent paradox which can be best paraphrased as “if everyone is special, then no one is”.

We strive for individuality even as the economic affluence required to express ourselves is increasingly tied to economies of scale and the uniformity they foster. We do our best to proclaim our uniqueness to the world on social media pages, but have to make use of highly standardized templates in the process. We share in the belief (and rightfully so) that the very success of our modern society depends on scale, yet it is precisely scale that appears to generate confusion when it comes to the most intimate aspects of our human identity.

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A visualization of “discontinuous evolution”

08 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in complexity, design thinking, knowledge, management, Organizational Development, problem solving

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In my blog entry arguing for a unified theory of management, I proposed that most top management reference a fundamental distinction between exploration of new knowledge (i.e. innovation) and exploitation of existing knowledge (i.e. efficient operations).

Business and indeed the entire society is caught in an evolutionary dynamic that balances exploration and exploitation – see David Hurst’s ecological perspective. While the exploitation cycle is amenable to incremental thinking, exploration appears to be prone to discontinuities – hard to predict leaps of logic.

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Towards a unified theory of management

07 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in innovation, management, taxonomy

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Exploration vs. exploitation is a common thread amongst top strategy and management thinkers. Exploration is aimed at the future (strategy, innovation) while exploitation is more aligned with business operations, i.e. efficiency. Does this point to a unified management theory?

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And the nominees (for foundational thinking) are…

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in management, taxonomy

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In a recent post I proposed a distinction between foundational thinkers and “how” teachers. While defining the generic concept, I did not give any concrete example of what I consider to be foundational thinkers. In this post, I introduce a select few. The selection criteria for these thinkers is the development of a complete and internally consistent paradigm related to life, human organization and management.

Russell Ackoff – for providing a complete ontology of the management practice and its pphilosophy,

Elliott Jaques – for providing a complete ontology for human organization,

Frederic Vester – for providing a complete bio-cybernetic model of complexity,

Ilya Prigogine – for the pursuit of the unification of natural and social sciences using complexity.

It is worth mentioning another trait these four shared: they were all iconoclastic personalities within their respective fields.