Evolving Managers – not nearly as messy as one would think… it just takes some time.

I have been hammering through these books here lately it seems.  Cool!

I just finished listening to the following Audiobook.

“The Future of Management” by Gary Hamel 2007 – Harvard Business School Press – ISBN: 978-1422102503

I would rate this book as excellent.  12.3 / 14.0 Stars.

It is very informative, highly encouraging, and really strikes a cord with my innermost beliefs on how companies… created BY humans FOR humans… should be run.  The examples / anecdotes were especially helpful and greatly appreciated.  This book really got me jazzed up in what a company could be and that I could be the one to do it.  Bonus!

The only real complaint I could muster up was the underlying feeling that the plans / ideals presented were a bit too Utopian, but I am sure that is due to the corporate bureaucracy I have witnessed all my life.  There were also several instances of obvious dub over, but that didn’t but me too much.

The following are my personal notes from this book.  I took a lot of notes!  I was jazzed!  Enjoy!

Management Innovation: Anything that substantially modifies the way management does things such that it enhances organizational performance.

Innovation Conditions:

• novel solution / paradigm shift
• systemic
• part of on-going

Pyramid Bottom: ………….    operational innovation ………    product innovation (Dyson’s bagless vac) …..        strategy innovation (Apple’s itunes store) .        management innovation Pyramid Top

Reasons there isn’t a lot of Management Innovation:

• Most managers don’t see themselves as innovators / inventors
• Many execs doubt bold management innovation is possible (yet, R&D folks live on this hope)
• They believe: limits to the number of people that one person can effectively supervise, the degree to which accountability can be distributed, the degree employees can be trusted, the willingness of individuals to subordinate their self interests to the corp as a whole

Management Innovation Agenda:

• Be BOLD
• Ask questions: > Are we changing as fast as the world around us? > Devote efforts to problem that is consequential & inspiring, essential & laudable > what are the new challenges that the future has in store for us? >> what are the emerging discontinuities that will stretch policies and practices to breaking point? >> what is the tomorrow problem we need to start working on now? > what are the tough balancing acts company never seems to get right? >> Does one side seem to prevail at the expense of the other? > what are the biggest gaps between rhetoric and reality? >> what are the hardest things to live up to /  difficult to institutionalize? >> What is espoused ideal desired to turn into an embedded capability > What are you indignant about? >> what are frustrating incompetencies that plague company and other organizations like it? >> what is the can’t do that need to become the can do?
• Break main issue down into smaller, more manageable components

Calibrating efforts:

• dramatically accelerating pace of strategic renewal
• making innovation everyone’s job, every day
• creating a highly engaging work environment that inspires employees to give best
• How can you broaden the scope of employee freedom by managing less without sacrificing focus, discipline, & order?
• How can you create a company with a spirit of community instead of bureaucracy?
• How can you enlarge the sense of mission that people feel throughout your organization to justify extraordinary contribution?

Where are incentives that encourage people to spend time quietly dreaming up the future?

Challenges for Innovator:

• How to enroll everyone in company with work on innovation and equipped each one with creativity boosting tools?
• How can you ensure top management’s beliefs don’t hinder innovation & that ‘heretical’ ideas are given a chance to prove their worth
• How can you create time and space for grass-roots innovation to come about?

Make organization more human – creative, adaptable, artistic, non-conformist

Organizational Engagement Index – Q-12 survey – very few are “highly engaged”… most are somewhere in the middle. Human Capabilities Hierarchy (% contribution to making a successful, value creating organization):

• Obedience (~0%)
• Diligence (5%)
• Knowledge / Intellect (15%)
• Initiative (20%)
• Creativity (25%)
• Passion (35%)

Imagine your company was about to tank and your talent was going to leave.  What would you do to try and keep them?  Probably something that makes the environment seem more like a community and less like a bureaucracy.  Do this now!

Need moral imperative to keep people going / motivated.  Genuine sense of mission, possibility, or outrage.  How much time is spent/discussed on this overall goal?

Innovative Company Examples:

• Whole Foods
• W. L. Gore
• Google

GOOGLE: Growth of the company based on the contributions of the people.  Each person reviewed by peers and rewarded based on peer review only.  Tenure has no bases on compensation.

Google 70-20-10 Rule:

• 70% of engineering resources: enhancements on base business
• 20%: on services that significantly extend the core business
• 10%: allocated to fringe ideas (public wifi networks… etc)

Google Mission to improve the world. (knowledge, data, education)

Set aside 0.5 day a week of “dabble time” so long as it is focused on toward company-related renovation

The internet is an interesting guide for innovative management… what works and is popular on the internet?  Apply it!

• innovations that “humanize” work… work!

Four Conditions for Limiting Need for “Top-Down” Management:

• Front line employees are responsible for results
• Real time performance data available to all team members
• Team members have decision authority over key variables / ones that influence performance outcomes
• Tight coupling results, compensation, and recognition

Beliefs that are challenged and met with resistance – who does this belief benefit?

================================================================== Game Theory applied to management principles?  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

• popular trends / methods / goals in games, internet, existing media married to business models

  • Experimentation beats planning: continually experiment with what *could* be coming / happening – preadapt not readapt
  • Depoliticize decision making
  • Process for “regular folks” to submit ideas
  • Operational Efficiency does NOT equal Strategic Efficiency

  NOTE: Apply spiritual neurological level to business model… bounce off of Logical Levels (environment, behavior, capabilities, …, identity, spirit).

Jacob’s Rules for Design Serendipity:

• Diversity breeds creativity // organize for serendipity
• Most blocks must be short – opportunities to make turns / interaction chances with others is increased
• Mingle buildings that vary in age and condition

Review 21st Century Management Principles:

• variety
• flexibility
• activism
• meaning
• serendipity

Six subsidiary Problems:

1. Farther down in the chain, harder for voice to get heard – Creating a democracy of ideas: free to share, regardless – no single person can squash ideas
2. Most companies exploit only a fraction of each employee’s creativity
3. Allocation rigidity impair company’s capacity to fund the future
4. Positional bias / inattention to competing viewpoints leads to poor decision making at the top
5. Executive knowledge and capability often depreciate faster than management power and influence
6. Too much management and too little freedom saps initiative and leave little time or energy – army of conscripts into community of volunteers – Definition of ‘efficiency’ is too myopic as management might claim this method is too inefficient.

It’s not always in the company’s best interest to judge a project or start-up in terms of profit but rather in amount of learning.

Start using Management as a selling point in competitive advantage.

• What big challenges did management face? How was it handled? What innovation was involved?
• Prove / sell these skills as a company asset… or change it until you can.
• Consider having a 3rd party reviewer team to analyze certain cumbersome processes.  Pick 4 or 5 of the very toxic processes and consider reaching out the people (e.g. – anonymous inter-company masses) for solutions.

Ask tough questions when possible (e.g. – during question sessions at relevant meetings):

• If we wanted to create a company that was as good at experimentation as life itself, how would we operate differently?
• If we wanted to build a company that was as restlessly innovative as Silicon Valley, how would are management processes need to change?
• If we wanted to make our work environment as engaging for our employees as Time Square or Coven Garden is for out-of-towners, where would we start?

Look to the internet… no real level of management… anarchy in the true sense of the word.  The web has evolved faster than anything ever created by man and it has no center / is not managed.

The biggest issue at stake in this emerging age is the ongoing tension between creativity and organization.

Look at the rest of your world / life: How is it managed?  How does it work?

Put the HUMAN back into the Business.