Change The Management

Given the mandate to write a blog on Change Management – I thought it would be appropriate to write about Change the Management. The principles of management as we know today are fast getting obsolete, as these principles were created for the Industrial era. For the Knowledge era, the rules have to be reinvented.

Many authors like Gary Hamel, Late CK Prahalad have already raised many valid concerns on the inertia, which organizations have on changing the principles which govern them. Being associated with the strategic management, I have witnessed change from efficiency of industrial era to the effectiveness of the knowledge era.

And the question which keeps cropping up time and again in change management discussions is – what do we do that the organisation is highly adaptable, innovates continually and is truly engaging.

Well, I have no recipe for this but can make the following observation. We are trying to invent an organization for the future with our ideologies hooked on the successes of the past. It’s like driving a car with your sight firmly fixed on the “rear-view mirror”!

In my work as a consultant, I have encountered resistance to change from one and all across different levels of organization hierarchy. Perhaps the single justification, I could now think of for all these people is “Change” was not a matter of choice but organizational diktat. Creating a buy-in or enrolling the people for the change process always worked best.

Some of the paradigms that worked for me:

As soon as the people were given the desired values and a free hand to effect a change, motivation and performances improved. Organisational best practices were trashed and trust with robust communications saw through most of the successful projects. The feeling of togetherness always worked. Hierarchy for the project at hand was diluted with strong aspirations to succeed as a team. This is when the teams shunned the fear of failure and grew in confidence to even celebrate their failures as learning experiences.

Present scenarios, present excellent opportunities to change the management as we know. Iconclastic principles of management like “Getting work done”, “top-down structures”, supervision,  line of command, etc. are all shot by the success stories of the internet. Blogs, crowd sourcing, wikis, self-organising networks, peer ratings have all put the management principles to shame.

There are some underlying currents that could be seen for Management 2.0 which are marked different than the management principles as we know them.

Every week I will deliberate on these NEW management thoughts and cite examples of the corporate who have tried or tested these principles (both failures and successes). Hope you will join me in this debate.