What’s the blueprint for radical management?

Someone asked me yesterday for “the blueprint for radical management”. My answer was that the question makes no sense. It reflects a failure to understand the nature of radical management.

The word, "blueprint" implies the mechanistic depiction of inanimate things that characterizes traditional management. It implies that we can think about, and treat, people like things and still expect them to respond wholeheartedly and give their best every day.

To think that you can "engineer" the continuously innovating organization from a "blueprint" is to make a category mistake. Thus you can have a blueprint for a complicated thing like an airplane or a motor car or a command-and-control organization in which people are treated like things, but not for something complex like a flower or a continuously innovating organization that is practicing radical management.

Radical management involves a fundamental recognition that we are dealing with a complex, interactive living entity. It cannot be engineered. It has to be grown. So the word "blueprint" is inappropriate. There is no blueprint, any more than you can have a blueprint for a flower. This doesn’t mean we don’t know how to grow a flower or how to make a continuously innovating organization happen. To grow flowers, we follow the principles and practices of gardening.

To grow a continuously innovating organization, we follow the seven principles and seventy-plus practices of radical management. If we follow those principles and practices, our organization will grow into one that continuously innovates, provides deep job satisfaction and client delight.

But I'm sorry: there is no blueprint. We have to learn to cleanse our minds of such mechanistic thinking.

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Comments

[davidburkus]

Great post. I was just talking about the difference between linear and nonlinear thinking, radical management is right along those lines.

[Tom Asacker]

Wonderful post Steve. Let's kill those worn out metaphors. The marketplace - we - have evolved!

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[writing jobs]

So that's what it is. I haven't heard of this radical thing until now.