Last year a new book was published by Gary Hamel. I know Gary and have seen him present. He is an outstanding speaker which probably explains his popularity. Proclaimed by many as 'the world's leading expert on business strategy', there is actually nothing especially startling (or new) in Hamel's vision of The Future of Management. There is, however, a lot of highly pertinent and valuable thinking that has been ignored or omitted, presumably because it does not fit into Hamel's (rather conventional) beliefs about management. Allow me to illustrate with just one example.
Technology, particularly the technology of knowledge, biases our reasoning in preference of perceiving the world a certain way. A blackboard, for instance, encourages deletion, continual modification, exploratory thinking. Pen and paper require neatness, attention to syntax, orderly thinking. Online hypertext inspires discontinuity, non-linearity, collective, flexible thinking. Thus, the way we construct our thinking space is also the way we orchestrate ideas. The problem is that over time we come to believe our particular model represents the way the world itself is organized. Extreme myopia results.
Essentially, each paradigm shift in technology changes what we mean by ‘knowing’. In effect our culture is just a vast thinking space, a complex semiology of idiosyncratic structures and symbols. And, just as our culture is moving from the printed word to the electronic text, so are we shifting from an hierarchical social order (of empire) to a dynamic network culture (or earth community). Such a shift challenges even the most well-worn of ‘truths’ and alters, usually quite significantly, those embedded conventions and traits of thought that produce for us a sense of reality.
A paradigm shift of this ‘reality-altering’ kind occurred at Cambridge University in 1792. A tutor by the name of William Farish suggested that students’ papers be graded. This novel proposal - that a numerical value be assigned to the expression of human thought - was a breakthrough in our acceptance of numerical measurement as an authenticator of knowledge and of our formulating a mathematical impression of reality.
A simple idea changed the entire experience of meaning and learning. By instituting fierce competition among students through the provision of sharply differentiated symbols of attainment, grading provided an ‘objective’ measure of human performance. It thereby created the illusion that accurate estimations could be made of worthiness. In Foucault’s phrase, the human being became ‘a calculable person’.
The concept quickly spread for if a number could be given to the quality of a thought, then it could equally be given to other qualities such as mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, personality, intelligence - even sanity.
This concept still permeates our thinking today. Just try to imagine a world in which there are no clocks, no timetables, no accountants - most of us would find it quite impossible to do our work without resorting to mathematical calculation of some kind. We have been thoroughly indoctrinated into a mode of numerical patterning (of counting, measuring and calculating) in order to perceive the world this way.
There is nothing inherently incongruous with that, of course, so long as we understand that our awareness of what is ‘real’ is being shaped, and our choice of what is important significantly preordained, by such ingrained partiality. We should not assume the absence of (or deficiencies in) other, strange, unfashionable, even contrasting - and equally valid - ways of comprehending the world.
Secreted within every technology is an ideological bias - a predilection to construct meaning as one thing, rather than another. We are easily seduced by such ideological biases, but that is not all. Those who become adept in the use of a new technology quickly become part of an elite information monopoly, accumulating power and influence in such a way that they are then granted authority, status and prestige by those lacking in such competence.
For well over 500 years, for example, teachers and academics have been part of such a monopoly created by the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Now, however, with the advent of new communication technologies, we are witnessing the inevitable disintegration of that dominance. The same fate awaits all ‘status’ professions, from lawyers to medical practitioners. Sooner or later, when the technology shifts, the knowledge monopoly crumbles.
As it developed, industrial society spawned its own self-referential ideology. Modernism became a ‘totalitarian technocracy’, purging alternatives to itself. This was accomplished, not by rendering alternatives illegal, immoral or unpopular, but simply by making them ‘invisible’ and therefore irrelevant. In the process of fashioning modernism, new meaning was ascribed to old concepts as diverse as religion, culture and progress, so that our definitions still made sense within the new context. And we devised new instruments - among them management, bureaucracy and production.
Innovations like these spread rapidly through industrial society, formalizing and cementing the new ideology in place. Based implicitly on the appropriation of notions of calculability and the authority of the written word - which led inevitably to ideas such as detailed accounting mechanisms, inventory control, and productivity norms - these new techniques became the bedrock for ‘scientific’ management systems. Indeed, by adopting these principles, American business created the modern corporation. W. H. Galbraith maintained that, “More perhaps than machinery, massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestations of advanced technology”.
Like any other technology, however, management has progressively tended to operate independently of the system it serves. The technology of management is comprised of rational protocols, reductionist controls and precise regulations designed to achieve clarity and efficiency while standardizing behaviour and dampening down unwanted perturbations in the system of industrial production. It has become sanctified, fixed - ruling out any possibility of other, more appropriate, alternatives taking its place.
Only now, poised in a liminal moment in history when the depleted frameworks of modernism are breaking down and the new have yet to be created, are we discovering that our identity is not fixed, but fluid and transitional. We have become multiple - a community of mind. Chaos and complexity theories assert that the world is both unknowable and unpredictable. All we can do is engage in moments of transient meaning-making. In this bewildering and unfamiliar context, the prevailing ‘science’ of conventional management has become irrelevant.
And so our cultural memory adjusts (at times painfully) to postmodernism - shimmering with new possibilities, confusing yet exhilarating. Everything in this new world is infused with new meanings. There is no central authority, no keeper of wisdom or knowledge here - only fiduciaries of particular ephemeral points of view.
The art now is to find appropriate models for a new society and then trust sufficiently in these models to let go of the old ones. This is far easier said than done. Management has become deeply implanted in our consciousness as the prime mechanism for effectively coordinating and directing the institution of work. We have come to regard management as an unquestionable imperative. Indeed, it has become so analogous with getting things done that it is difficult enough to make changes to the institution of management, let alone devising alternative methods for achieving our purposes.
In fact management has become an ‘invisible technology’ working subversively but convincingly to insinuate itself into our cultural state of mind. And yet, painful though it might be to imagine, it is entirely possible for business, and almost any other institution, to operate once again without a highly technocratic management structure or managerial elite. In fact, it is inevitable that such sociocratic governance will ultimately prevail.
Professor Hamel's 'future' of management is nothing of the kind: it is a neat set of observations focusing on current trends. But it is no more about the future than the latest stock prices. His central hypothesis revolves around the fact that any business is now global and therefore needs to function in real time. I cannot argue with that. But he fails to explore the real consequences of what this really means.
My central hypothesis is that modernist management - as a ‘technospheric solution’ to running a modern corporation - is obsolete. Almost any attempt by a professional management elite to manage as it has done in the past now risks serious damage to their organization as a whole. Besides it is not necessary. This hypothesis is based on two revolutionary principles resulting from close observation of the ‘pathology’ of many different types of organization:
Principle 1:
Observing the laws of ‘complex adaptive systems’, such as ecosystems, teaches us that organizations may consciously need to adopt comparable processes to those found in natural systems in order to survive in the long term. Within this context, strategic development becomes nothing less than the creation of new social ecologies.
Principle 2:
Noting the results of recent research, it is apparent that the greater proportion of an organization’s financial and operational performance (especially in long-surviving companies) appears to result not from any formal plans, vision, or management control system, but from informal actions, habits, instinct, conversation, and personal/cultural agendas enacted routinely by every member of the enterprise.