Discontented with Organizations

Andrew Hill interviews management thinker Gary Hamel in today's Financial Times. Hamel is a no-nonsense kind of guy, when it comes to talking about organizations, strategy, and general management practices.

"We're not discontented enough with how much organizations really truly suck," Hamel contends. "The whole notion of leadership [is] discredited...We have organizations that demand far too much of the few, and far too little of the many, so we disenfranchise most employees." Hamel proposes that management coaches and [management] educators "haven't been very ambitious in trying to make [organizations] different."

What is quite interesting about Hamel is that he thinks that those tasked with educating others could be doing so much more to move the process along; indeed, to create revolution. He proffers that, in business schools, for example, folks "don't see themselves as inventors; [they] don't have that sense of almost sacred mission" that he sees only rarely, highlighting Stanford University as one such place (its engineers, in particular).

A sacred mission to re-think organizations? Fascinating, at least, to me.

It may surprise readers, given the aforementioned comments, to learn that Hamel is an "in-betweener" (my term). He straddles traditional managment practices and more recent, innovative ones. For example, he acknowledges the strengths of crowd-sourcing, but also its weaknesses. Crowd-sourcing, he says, cannot better handle/solve any issues associated with line production of 29-nanometer chips. Only traditional management is poised to handle such issues. In other words, he can diagnose a situation quite readily.

School leaders have something to admire in Hamel: a pragmatist, yet a visionary who is willing to admit a bias toward action. He has been talking about a revolution in management for some time, and he feels that now is that time. He submits that the next decade will see an overt and intentional evolution of management to...well, something a bit different. Something that is more bottom-up than top-down.

One wonders what school leaders are already doing in our schools, in this same spirit?

Comments

[Carla Silver]

Great quotation from Hamel. Would like to read the whole article. Nice work, Kevin, (as always).