Management design flaws and radical remedies
Earlier this year the MLab brought together a "Renegade Brigade" that included many of the world's most progressive thinkers on management and organization. Each participant was asked to identify a key barrier that prevents organizations from being adaptable, innovative, or an inspiring place to work; and then to propose a potential solution. In the video clips below, academics, venture capitalists, and CEOs identified the critical flaws of "management-as-usual" and posit innovative solutions.
These video clips may not be used for commercial purposes without express permission from MLab. All rights reserved by Management Lab.
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Eric Abrahamson (Columbia Business School) proposes "more of less" organization: less structured management, fewer change programs - which requires greater tolerance for "messiness" - in pursuit of greater capacity for organizational adaptation. |
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Joanna Barsh (McKinsey & Company) speaks about the inability of corporations to harness emotion productively for innovation, and proposes the close integration of positive emotion with the purpose and mission of the company. |
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Julian Birkinshaw (London Business School) speaks about the risks of the manager-centric language and literature of management, and proposes a rewrite of the "book of management" from the perspective of an idealized well-managed employee. |
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Tim Brown (IDEO) proposes the systematic deployment of a set of principles, tools and processes to support innovation and collaboration in organizations. |
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Lowell Bryan (McKinsey & Company) speaks about the prevailing notion of the CEO as patriarch, and proposes a refocus on the CEO role as designer of an organization where work is done in smaller teams and as much unproductive work as possible is eliminated. |
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Bhaskar Chakravorti (McKinsey & Company) speaks on the need to renew a business by selectively "burning down" elements of the model to enable islands of entrepreneurial activity that will regenerate the proposition. |
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Yves Doz (INSEAD) speaks about the pitfalls of the fundamentally competitive bilateral relationships between business unit leaders and the CEO. He proposes a redistribution of roles to permit shared accountability for broad areas of the business, to promote integration and cooperation. |
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Alex Ehrlich (UBS) speaks on the overuse of hierarchy in organizations, and proposes a remedy based on broadly shared ownership by employees. |
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Gary Hamel (Management Lab) speaks about the difficulties faced by corporate innovators when trying new ideas, and proposes creating a free internal market in which any budget holder could invest in any new idea. |
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Linda Hill (Harvard Business School) speaks about the limitations of "leadership from the front", and proposes a model of leaders as "social architects", focused on enabling the talents and passions of others. |
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Jeffrey Hollender (Seventh Generation) speaks about the absence of true purpose in modern corporations, and proposes that large corporations revisit the fundamental question "why are we here?" to ensure their continued relevance. |
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Steve Jurvetson (Draper Fisher Jurvetson) speaks of the inherent advantages of ecologies of startups over larger organizations with respect to innovation. He proposes limits on group size, a greater role for passionate minority views, and greater focus on decision making processes over coherence across individual project outcomes. |
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Kevin Kelly speaks about the lack of a mechanism for "devolving" from the comfortable position of a local success optimum, which carries risks in a changing world. He proposes a need to practice "inefficiency" in a corporation, manifested by tolerance for more failure, which is evidence of healthy experimentation with less-proven concepts. |
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Terri Kelly (WL Gore & Associates) speaks about the role of leadership and in particular the exaggerated expectations of the CEO. She proposes rethinking leadership to emphasize enabling the syndication of leadership roles across the entire employee group. |
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Ed Lawler (USC) speaks on the need to design organizations to achieve change less painfully when adaptation is needed. |
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Andrew McAfee (Harvard Business School) speaks on the emphasis on "assumed expertise" in organizations, as mapped by formal job roles and static hierarchies, and proposes the use of Web 2.0 tools to attract, link, tag, and access "emergent expertise". |
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John Mackey (Whole Foods Market) proposes that corporations should clarify a deeper, more engaging purpose and should balance the needs of multiple stakeholders rather than focusing almost exclusively on the needs of investors. |
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Thomas Malone (MIT) speaks about the inability of organizations to take advantage of the full potential of the people working with them. He proposes the use of communications technology to decentralize the coordination of work among large groups. |
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Marissa Mayer (Google) speaks about the limitations of traditional values and incentives within corporations, and proposes a model that permits much higher potential payouts for the innovators of radical, high-value ideas. |
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Lenny Mendonca (McKinsey & Company) speaks about the broader contract between organizations and society, and the transformational power of technology to bring the transparency and efficiency of market mechanisms to management. |
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Henry Mintzberg (McGill University) proposes changes to the funding and governance model for corporations, including tying voting rights to the length of time stock has been held, and eliminating shareholder value as a management principle. |
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Vineet Nayar (HCL Technologies) proposes development of comprehensive, inclusive measures of the value created by and for four classes of stakeholder: employees, customers, shareholders and society. |
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Jeffrey Pfeffer (Stanford University) speaks about the excess, misuse, and poor calibration of corporate measures, and proposes eliminating measures entirely. |
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CK Prahalad (University of Michigan) proposes the need to re-examine the principles used for organizing work in ways that support emergent organization rather than rigid structures. |
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Leighton Read (Seriosity) speaks about the poor level of employee engagement within corporations, and proposes the use of capabilities of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games to amplify group collaboration and to enrich the experience of work. |
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Keith Sawyer (Washington University) speaks about the bounded nature of the corporation, and proposes designing mechanisms to exploit "collaborative webs" of skills beyond the boundaries of the corporation, including customers and business partners. |
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James Surowiecki (The New Yorker) speaks about the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of executives, especially the CEO. He proposes the systematic aggregation and sharing of collective knowledge to improve decision making. |
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Peter Senge (Society for Organizational Learning) speaks of the disharmony between organizations and their broader environment of natural and social systems. He proposes greater focus on developing the emergent examples of organizations that invest effort in defining a deep purpose, and in measuring and harmonizing these broader impacts. |
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Raj Sisodia (Bentley University) speaks about how corporations can create engagement in meaningful work (a higher purpose), unconditional love (care for others, in this case society as a whole), and meaning extracted from the experience of suffering (transparent and constructive handling of crises) for employees. |
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Tom Stewart (Harvard Business Review) proposes the top-down mandating of reporting of returns to human capital, full disclosure of compensation, and a prohibition on compensation via stock options. |
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Hal Varian (UC Berkeley and Google) proposes more true experimentation by companies in place of the current preference for making decisions by HIPPO (a Highly-Paid Person's Opinion). |
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Steven Weber (US Berkeley) proposes an experiment employing technology to make everyone's actions and decisions visible to each other, with the intent of encouraging positive behavior changes based on improved mutual understanding and empathy. |
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David Wolfe (Wolfe Resources) proposes replacing the machine metaphor for organizing business with a biological system metaphor. |
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Shoshana Zuboff (Harvard Business School, retired) proposes a new chapter of capitalism based on serving the new needs of customers that are grounded in personal empowerment and expression. |
