Provocations and Design Flaws for Management
Andrew McAfee shares a provocation and a design flaw about the future of management. His provocation is how on the one hand management can impose new structures through IT, and on the other management can let them emerge. He also shares some provocations by others:
- Tim Brown, IDEO: Creative people aren’t interested in management.
- Hal Varian, Google: ‘Statistician’ is the sexy job of the 21st century.
- Henry Mitzberg, McGill: We are not living in time of great change. Companies will not save the world.
- Eric Abrahamson, Columbia: Organizations are over-organized.
- Yves Doz, INSEAD: The danger is to think that what’s new is exciting and good, while what’s old is bad and tired.
- Keith Sawyer, Washington University: People are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.
- James Surowiecki, The New Yorker: The centralization of decision-making is a conceptual error. Individuals are not better than the collective.
- Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford: The language of economics is toxic to the practice of management.
- Kevin Kelly, Wired: Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.
That last one, by KK, had me laughing and thinking for five minutes.
If I had to add my own, it wouldn't simply declare the end of process, as Gary Hamel is one who brought together this group (although we have talked about it before). Lately I've been thinking about whether Agile software development is really a process and what it could imply for business process in the future. I owe you a post about this, but to put it in the form of a provocation: business processes at the edge of the organization will emphasize social discovery, group forming and transparent communication over process itself.
In the meantime, go see Andy's impediment or design flaw, People and Information are Deeply Mismatched in Most Organizations and the remedy: Create an Emergent, Social Enterprise Information Environment.
