Management 3.0

There were so far three stages of management:
— Man­age­ment 1.0, which was all about hier­ar­chies and the chain of com­mand that comes along with them. The few peo­ple on the top are in con­trol and as we grad­u­al­ly descend on the com­pa­ny lad­der there is less pow­er and less con­trol. To moti­vate the top com­man­ders there were bonus­es, which served as an incen­tive to seek for com­pa­ny’s well being. The side effect was that bonus­es became more impor­tant than strate­gies and deci­sions and this led also to finan­cial implosion.
— Man­age­ment 2.0, which was not real­ly a dif­fer­ent approach, but a series of add-ons plugged in to Man­age­ment 1.0, such as Bal­anced Score­card, Six Sig­ma, The­o­ry of Con­straints and Total Qual­i­ty Man­age­ment. Some of them worked, some of them did­n’t. To increase the con­fu­sion, many of these add-ons are con­tra­dict­ing each oth­er, each one pre­tend­ing to be the real solution.
— Man­age­ment 3.0, which is a real step for­ward, intro­duc­ing the the­o­ry of com­plex­i­ty as a response to the Age of Com­plex­i­ty, as Stephen Hawkins called the 21^st cen­tu­ry. Lead­er­ship is intro­duced along with man­age­ment. And orga­ni­za­tions are per­ceived as net­works, despite their out­er look as hierarchies.

Tak­ing about lead­er­ship, the author dif­fer­en­ti­ates among three type of approaches:
— Lead­er­ship princess, the ones that claim that “lead­er­ship is dif­fer­ent from man­age­ment”, that is tak­ing place at a “high­er” lev­el. They see lead­er­ship being about inspi­ra­tion, while man­age­ment is about exe­cu­tion. But by def­i­n­i­tion lead­ers have no pow­er of author­i­ty over oth­ers. Why would a share­hold­er give mon­ey to some­one that has no author­i­ty? And how about oth­er peo­ple in the orga­ni­za­tion that are not man­agers, but could be true leaders?
— Lead­er­ship priests, the ones that claim that “man­age­ment is not need­ed”. They refer to social media, to orga­ni­za­tions such as Wikipedia, Lin­ux and oth­ers that are func­tion­ing based on a shared pur­pose, sug­gest­ing that self-orga­nized teams do not need man­age­ment, only lead­ers with visions. But busi­ness have assets. And share­hold­ers expect that those assets are not man­aged prop­er­ly. So it is not the teams that need man­age­ment, but the shareholders.
— Lead­er­ship prag­ma­tists, are the ones intro­duced by this book. Man­agers are need­ed to take care of the busi­ness on behalf of the own­ers. And man­agers need to have lead­er­ship skills. But lead­er­ship can arise also from oth­er lay­ers of the orga­ni­za­tion, from non-man­agers. These infor­mal leader must under­stand that the self-orga­niz­ing teams must accept some direc­tions from the own­ers, which pass­es through the managers.

Insert Con­tent Here