If you are in senior management or administration, then this article in HBR by Gary Hamel, one of the most influential business thinkers, will cause you to become very uncomfortable and probably stop reading before the end. As I read it I was confronted by ideas and statements that rocked the very core of my management experience.
Rather than give a summary of the article, below are some of the many confronting ideas. My challenge is for you to actually read through the entire article without getting defensive, and instead to consider how your organisation might adapt to succeed in the new business world .
- It is the unchallenged tenets of bureaucracy that disable our organisations – that make them inertial, incremental and uninspiring.
- As one of humanity’s most enduring social structures, [bureaucracy] is well-suited to a world in which change meanders rather than leaps. But in a hyperkinetic environment, it is a profound liability.
- A formal hierarchy overweights experience and underweights new thinking, and in doing so perpetuates the past. It misallocates power, since promotions often go to the most politically astute rather then the most prescient or productive.
- Managers worship at the alter of conformance. That’s their calling – to ensure conformance to product specifications, work rules, deadlines, budgets, quality standards, and corporate policies.
- Bureaucracy is the technology of control. It is ideologically opposed to disorder and irregularity. Problem is, in an age of discontinuity, it’s the irregular people with irregular ideas who create the irregular business models that generate the irregular returns.
- Shrink an individual’s scope of authority, and you shrink their incentive to dream, imagine and contribute.
- Unfortunately, managers often see control and freedom as mutually exclusive – as ideological rivals like communism and capitalism, rather than as ideological complements like mercy and justice.
- As long as control is exalted at the expense of freedom, our organisations will remain incompetent at their core.
If you would further information on how Avondale Business School can help your organisation, contact Warrick Long
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