Future of Management, The

The Future of Management By Gary Hamel Harvard Business School Press, $44.95

Mob rule

DEREK PARKER ENCOUNTERS NEW IDEAS ABOUT MANAGEMENT INCLUDING EMPLOYEE PARTICIPATION

Hamel likes to portray himself as a crusader. His past books, Leading the Revolution and Competing for the Future, have both heavily criticised business-as-usual approaches and lauded companies that have shaken up the status quo. The Future of Management takes a similar line, noting that the current crop of management tools, from Six Sigma to balanced scorecards, are used so broadly that they constitute an unspoken orthodoxy. Hence, says Hamel, CEOs and senior executives can jump from one company to another without needing to reconsider their thinking. New ideas are simply excluded from discussion.

To tell the truth, Hamel labours this point to a rather tiresome degree. Only in passing does he begin to discuss some interesting experiments to encourage innovation, such as market-based approaches to funding ideas and a recasting of broader social purposes in order to motivate workers.

It is an attempt by the Best Buy corporation to involve hundreds of employees in forecasting, rather than depending on a small group of specialists, that Hamel finds most interesting. He notes that the crowd consistently outperformed the specialists, and raises the idea of using a large and diverse workforce as a device for corporate strategy and management

Characteristically, he only gets to this in the final dozen pages of the book, where he sketches out the idea of a web-based, Facebook-style intranet It would allow opinions and information to flow freely, encouraging the formation of teams based on shared interest and expertise. The technology is available and, Hamel believes, the new generation of workers, born into the era of Web 2.0, will accept nothing less.

Well, maybe. It is an interesting concept but whether a large company can actually be run by this sort of all-in method is another question. True, the many might generally be wiser than the few, but the crowd is hardly infallible. What are the consequences if a strategy chosen in this way fails? Can the whole system be upset by a few manipulators and recalcitrants? What if the company is based on highly technical, confidential information?

Hamel explains the lack of detail by saying that his intent is to suggest new ways of thinking rather than provide a detailed roadmap. This seems to throw the whole purpose of the exercise into question, even though there are some thought-provoking ideas in the book. It is a pity that it does not spend more time on the solutions rather than complaining about the problems.

Copyright CPA Australia Feb 2008
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