Alberto Da Silva offered two comments about this piece on the Harvard Business Publishing website that we would like to build on. First the preliminary results from Gary's May conference published in the latest Labnotes seem to reflect the difficulty Da Silva identified of experts escaping their own paradigms to find a completely new approach to management. The attendees did not build upon Gary’s innovative thinking and instead identified 25 challenges for Management 2.0, most of which have been studied for years without success. Viewed from the perspective of Thomas Kuhn’s work, they produced a list of "anomalies" with the dominant hierarchical control paradigm that can be resolved only by a management paradigm shift.

More relevant to this blog and Management for the 21st Century is Da Silva suggesting “self-reinvented leaders” as a source for “reinventing Management.” In retrospect that has been the focus of our 10+ years of research which produced remarkable findings. For example we discovered that we and the “self-reinvented” leaders who built Hewlett Packard, Wal-Mart, Nucor Steel, Southwest Airlines, and Herman Miller intuitively utilized a paradigm shift from traditional hierarchical control to "vision-based freedom." Trial and error attempts to emphasize freedom-based leadership in our companies produced remarkable business successes for all. Further the learnings extracted from these experiences suggest the potential to transform management. We have seen nothing that empowers and motivates more effectively than management valuing employee knowledge, skills, and creativity, and creating an organizational culture within which they can be trusted to do their best without management controlling them. Key elements of these cultures include:
* Everybody understanding the enterprise vision for success—mission, aspirations, shared values and beliefs, and how their unit contributes to that success.
* Personal responsibility for focusing on the mission and aspirations;
- behaving consistently with shared values;
- maximizing one’s contributions;
- deciding and acting with competence and appropriate knowledge;
- respecting rights and property of others; and
- managing one’s own development.
* All business information openly available to everybody.
* Encouragement to take risks and learn from mistakes.
* Sufficient financial and other authorities to freely fulfill responsibilities, and accountability to colleagues and the organization for doing so.
* Encouragement and help to develop and fully utilize one’s potential.
* Sharing the intrinsic and financial rewards of business success.
* Freedom to question, to investigate, to decide, to act, and at times to fail.
* Freedom from boundaries and arbitrary limitations like work hours, location, dress, etc.

Freedom-based organizations require managers, but their responsibilities shift to leading, coaching, and serving employees—instead of directing and controlling them. Management retains responsibility for controlling areas such as the vision for success, business strategies, company policies, and large financial commitments, but shifts primary responsibility for control of day-to-day activities to employees. Experience shows that this shift in control responsibilities improves organizational control—in part because employees think and act like an army of internal auditors.

If peer review confirms our findings, FREEDOM-BASED MANAGEMENT© seems to offer the paradigm shift Gary seeks for 21st Century Management.

Regards, Bill Nobles and Paul Staley
billnobles@optonline.net

Dear Gary,

I know this will sound heretical, but I think there is a single, optimal solution to reinventing management in the 21st century. The best way to organize human beings, I will argue, is the one that aligns harmoniously with nature's elegant motivational design--an ancient survival mechanism built deeply into our brains. In other words, our biology and evolved motivational psychology put constraints on what will work in the 21st, or any other century thereafter.

If we accept the premise that companies should align with human nature, the next question becomes--what, exactly, does human nature look like and how can companies align with it. I argue in my book, "Primal Management: Unraveling the Secrets of Human Nature to Drive High Performance," that human nature can be viewed as a set of biologic and social drives, or appetites, that create pleasant, rewarding feelings when we act in ways that promote survival. Feelings, according to this scheme, are proxies for the vital survival needs of our species and they tell us in which direction we should go (which direction is optimal).

Nature, I propose, seduces us into productive, cooperative and innovative behavior with pleasant, rewarding feelings created by neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin; neuropeptides like vasopressin and oxytocin; and natural, endogenous opiates. The optimal management scheme is therefore the one that feeds the social appetites and thereby maximizes the natural productive pleasures that nature built into the system to promote survival--or, as Aristotle proclaimed, pleasure in the job put perfection in the work.

The idea that employees should enjoy their work is similar to what you propose in "The Future of Management." "Primal Management" simply provides some biologic underpinning regarding how these productive pleasures work and how to unleash them in the workplace.

If you'd like to learn more about the five productive pleasures that drive human achievement, I'd be happy to give you a sneak peak at Primal Management (publication date April, 2009 by AMACOM Books).

By the way, I love your work and your books! You're awesome!

Best Regards,

Paul Herr
peherr@paulherrconsulting.com
608-833-9446

Hello

I presume that the most important item to look at in reinventing management or in accelerating the evolution of management processes in the 21st century is the psychology of management. This area in my point of view is of crucial importance and surprisingly we are not witnessing any considerable work pertaining to the psychology of management. Would it sound absurd if one comes and argues that all the failures and all the problems that an organization faces, has its roots in the phenomenological psychology of management in that organization? The question then will be how to delve into the subjective experiences of management? How to combine human factors psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, cognitive psychology and so on to explain the happenings in the organizational context. I remember once when I was talking to a psychologist; he made a point that every illness or disease can be traced back to the mind and nervous system. I guess this analogy may work if we consider an organization as a human body. Then the task will be to determine the psyche and nervous system of the body and study them in a way that helps us explain the situations or plan for future experimentations. In this point, I guess the psychology of management arises as an important factor that can strongly explain success or failures of the real world. Maybe we need to delve into the psychological aspects of organizational management to identify the reality of the relationship between developmental, educational and cognitive aspects of management as a phenomenon and the organizational performance.

Jamal Ghamari
Jamal_ghamari@yahoo.com