A reader in France wrote to me yesterday:
“It is refreshing
to see some organisations do actually 'get it' - that employees are people
rather than things, or in my own organisation 'posts' to be filled or swopped around
at imperial will. The 'saying / doing' gap is just so great that sometimes I
despair and wonder if it is really me that has got it wrong - your blogs are a
reassuring boost.”
What do you do,
when you are talking sense and everyone around you is thinking, speaking and acting
in ways that are utterly counter-productive?
A century hence, when historians come to write the history of the current age
(assuming our species survives so long), they will, I believe, be puzzled as to
why so many people managed—and so many more people allowed themselves to be
managed—in ways that were known to be unproductive, crimped the spirits of
those doing the work, and frustrated those for whom the work was being done.
Why, they will wonder, did this continue for so long on such a wide scale?
One school of
historians may focus on the pervasive feeling of complacency.
Another may
marvel at the superficiality of popular proposals to deal with it, such as by contriving
“a sense of urgency,” with measures like: conspiring to create “crises”,
canceling luxurious perks, using consultants to force more open discussion,
banning senior management “happy talk” or bombarding workers with information
about opportunities.[i]
These really are bandages on a cancer. It’s really “more of the same,” only
doing it faster.
Still others may
dwell on the sense of resignation felt by most of those involved—the feeling
that no matter what is done, it won’t make any difference. After all, how could
traditional managers avoid turning radical management into a mirror image of
the very practices they were supposedly trying to change?
In other spheres
of human activity, when we look back over history, we can see times when whole
societies acted in ways that in retrospect look utterly misguided. What did
someone with sense think and say during the Hundred Years War? Most wars are
spasms of craziness. But when it goes on for several generations, what could reasonable
people have been thinking during all that bloodshed?
Or during the time of slavery in the Ante-Bellum South in the US? If anyone said
at the time that this was not only wrong but not a very unproductive way to run
a society, the statement wasn’t exactly greeted with enthusiasm. That’s because
the statement threatened a whole way of life. That way of life was about to
change fundamentally, but the thought of the change was unthinkable to most of those
living in that society.
The reality is that big disruptive changes are never embraced at once, no
matter how sensible and rational they are. For instance, the principles of
science were figured out by people like Francis Bacon in the early 1600s. But it
wasn’t until a number of decades later—1660—that the Royal Society was founded
in London and modern science really began to get under way. For a couple of
generations, scientists couldn’t make their voice heard. The universities were
the worst. They fought it bitterly, because they had such a stake in the status
quo. Much of what they were teaching would have to be thrown out. Unthinkable!
Similarly if you
go into business schools today and tell them much of what they are teaching is upside
down, and leading to counterproductive results, and that almost all the management
textbooks will have to be substantially rewritten, you should not expect to be
greeted as a hero. Instead, you will be told, if you are listened to at all, that
your heterodox thoughts will lead to chaos, or worse.
Lang Davison, a co-author of The Power of Pull 
So the change won’t
be easy and it may not be quick. But the
economics makes it inexorable. Firms successfully implementing radical
management will be two- to four-times more productive than traditional firms,
even on traditional metrics. And so the traditional firms will be steadily put
out of business, even faster than they are today (i.e. life expectancy of a
Fortune 500 firm is now down to 15 years, and heading towards 5 years.)
Where do the
gains in productivity from radical management come from? One aspect is that
much of what big bureaucratic firms do isn’t wanted or needed by customers: by
listening more closely to customers, firms stop wasting time on things that
aren’t valued. Another is that by fully mobilizing the energies and talents of
people in the workforce, the firm has a lot more ideas to work with. A third is
by introducing radical transparency, long-standing problems get identified and
solved—something doesn’t happen in most established bureaucracies: problems can
fester there for decades without getting resolved. A fourth is that by working short cycles, the
firm becomes more agile: as the marketplace changes, it can change direction at
a moment’s notice. Finally, by insisting on value at the end of each cycle, the
“queues” which are endemic in bureaucracy tend to be eliminated.
So for all these
reasons, a new world is being born, willy-nilly. Radical management is coming
to your organization. The only question is when, not whether. You can help it
along by spreading the word!
To learn more about radical management, go here:
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