by Gary Hamel

First off, thanks so much for being part of the MLab’s inaugural conference.  I hope you thought it was a worthwhile use of your time.  Several of the participants have sent me emails suggesting ways of carrying our work forward.  I’ll send you an e-mail in a few days which outlines some potential next steps.  My hope is that some of these activities will of interest to you.

Since our time together, I and my MLab colleagues have had two priorities:  (1) To pull together a compendium of conference-related materials that can be sent to you—as a record of our discussions in Half Moon Bay; and, (2) to produce an initial summary of the conversation we had around “management moonshots.”   On the first item, it will take a couple of weeks to edit all the video material that got generated, and a bit longer for Grove (David and Kristen) to compile all the slides, presentations and graphical outputs into a summary volume.  These materials will be sent to you, or made available online, as soon as they’re available.

As to our second priority . . .

You’ll recall that one of the goals at our conference was to identify some of the 21st century’s most important management innovation challenges—and I think we made a good start at this during our two days together.   Since then, I have compiled a document (which you can download below) that contains a synthesis of the various moonshot challenges that were discussed in the preconference interviews and during the event itself.  (You also received this document by email).

(If you’re not interested in how this document was compiled, skip the next four paragraphs).

In pulling the summary together, I starting by reading through Jeremy Clark’s precis of the interviews that were conducted with all of the conference attendees.  Each interviewee was asked what one thing they would change about the way large organizations are managed, led or structured—and this question generated a long list of management challenges.  I did my best to cluster these points into broad categories, and then tried to capture each category with a label, e.g. “lead from behind” or “legitimize dissent.”  By the way, I did this summary before the conference.  In the attached document you will see a bunch of text that is in blue type.  These are the broad challenges that were extracted from the interviews.  The black text which follows are the corresponding points that were made by the interviewees.

Next, I went back through the worksheets that we generated during the “management moonshot” exercise at the conference, and captured the big challenges that were identified by each team.  In the attached document, these challenges are in red text, and the sub-points that I was able to extract off the worksheets are listed below each of these red headlines.  (Some of the worksheets were more cryptic than others—so some points aren’t as thoroughly elaborated as others.)  In addition, I reviewed some of the notes that David took during our deliberations, looking for other “big challenges.”

Finally, Jeremy Clark and I spent some time merging the two lists of management challenges together (the first list extracted from the interviews and the second from the team exercises) and then, where necessary, we created new headlines.  In the attached document, the numbered challenges (in black, bold type) represent our best efforts to synthesize all these various inputs.  Sorry for this detailed explanation, but I wanted you to know that we did our best to represent accurately the various views of all the renegades.

After all this capturing, clustering and synthesizing, the following 25 challenges “emerged:”

1.  Reconstruct the philosophical foundations of management
2.  Fully operationalize the ideas of community and citizenship
3.  Seek orientation in a higher and broader purpose
4.  Distribute (share) the work of creating direction and strategy
5.  Develop holistic performance measures
6.  Stretch executive timeframes and perspectives
7.  Increase trust, reduce fear
8.  Create a democracy of information
9.  Expand and exploit intellectual variety
10.  Substantially reduce the gravitational pull of the past
11.  Enlarge and empower the pro-change constituency
12.  Expand the freedom for autonomous action
13.  Create more space for emergent strategies
14.  Create an internal market for ideas, talent and resources
15.  De-structure and dis-aggregate the formal organization
16.  Dramatically diminish the influence of (formal) hierarchy
17.  Reinvent the work of executive leadership
18.  De-politicize decision-making
19.  Reinvent the means of “control”
20.  Transcend the efficiency vs. innovation trade-off
21.  (Further) Unleash human imagination
22.  Enable communities of passion
23.  Create (more) open organizations
24.  Rethink management thinking
25.  Humanize (the language of) business

Now we need you tell us where we got it wrong—or what you think should be changed.  Specifically, we need your thoughts on the following questions:

(1)  Are there some key challenges that are not on the list and should be added?  If so, please nominate these.
(2)  Should some of the challenges be collapsed together, or conversely, should some be partitioned into multiple challenges?  If so, please suggest how to do this.
(3) If you had to prioritize the “top ten” management challenges, which ones would you pick?

As you scan these challenges, you may want to ask yourself:  Would real progress on these challenges dramatically improve the capacity of organizations to:  (a) fulfill their obligations of society, (b) adapt in the absence of crisis, (c) unleash the forces of innovation, and (d) become truly inspiring places to work?   If the answer is “yes,” then we’re probably on the right track.

Parenthetically:

Not all of our nominated challenges are “new.”  But what is new, is the attempt to get a substantial number of the world’s most influential business thinkers to identify and prioritize the “make or break” challenges for 21st century organizations.  With any luck, our collective voice, and the combined weight of our reputational capital, will help to generate focus and urgency around these weighty and worthy problems.  Sure, this is only a modest first step in figuring how we can work together to help accelerate the evolution of management—but if we can create some air cover for battle-scarred management innovators, inspire some young Ph.D. students or b-school faculty to work on big problems, or motivate some well-intentioned but cautious CEOs to try something new, then perhaps our efforts will have been worth it.  

So . . . it would be great if you could let us have your comments by JUNE 20.  During the last week of June, we’ll work through the proposed changes and come back with a final draft.  Once this is done, everyone will have the chance to decide whether or not they’d like to be listed as one of the “authors” of the resulting document.

Ultimately, the objective is to further annotate these challenges and publish them as some sort of manifesto.  If you have any suggestions on how this might be done, please share your ideas with your fellow renegades via the MLab website, or get back to me by email.

For now, please take a few moments to review our management moonshot challenges.