Who's Managing Your Company?
One of the best books I’m reading lately is The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel.
It’s all about how management innovation is the best competitive advantage, whether you look through the history of great businesses or the history of great militaries. Hamel makes a great case that strategic innovation, product or service innovation, and operational innovation are fleeting advantages, but management innovation leads to competitive advantage for the long haul.
In The Future of Management, Hamel poses a powerful question …
“Who is managing your company?”
“Who's managing your company? You might be tempted to answer, 'the CEO,' or 'the executive team,' or 'all of us in middle management.' And you'd be right, but that wouldn't be the whole truth. To a large extent, your company is being managed right now by a small coterie of long-departed theorists and practitioners who invented the rules and conventions of 'modern' management back in the early years of the 20th century. They are the poltergeists who inhabit the musty machinery of management. It is their edicts, echoing across the decades, that invisibly shape the way your company allocates resources, sets budgets, distributes power, rewards people, and makes decisions.”
That’s why it’s easy for CEOs to hop around companies …
“So pervasive is the influence of these patriarchs that the technology of management varies only slightly from firm to firm. Most companies have a roughly similar management hierarchy (a cascade of EVPs, SVPs, and VPs). They have analogous control systems, HR practices, and planning rituals, and rely on comparable reporting structures and review systems. That's why it's so easy for a CEO to jump from one company to another -- the levers and dials of management are more or less the same in every corporate cockpit.”
What really struck me here is how much management approach has been handed down through the ages, and accepted as status quo.
It’s some great good for thought, especially given that management innovation is THE most powerful form of competitive advantage from an innovation standpoint (which Hamel really builds a strong case here throughout the entirety of the book.)
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