Paradigms of Management 2.0

Gary Hamel, rightly esteemed for many reasons, created a summary outline of what the future discipline of "management" will need to both rely upon and exploit. Within his essay, a particular characterization of management goes as follows:

"for the first time in a century, we have a viable alternative to the status quo. Thanks to the Web, we can imagine organizations that are large but not bureaucratic, that are focused but not myopic, that are specialized but not balkanized, that are efficient but not inflexible and, best of all, that are disciplined but not disempowering."

In this vision, Hamel basically equates "organization" and "community", in a way that may in fact prove to be prescient but to date is probably more just emotionally appealing in its potential to get past conventional and vexing old problems. In devil's advocate mode, let's compare, but not devalue, the terms of that imagined organization against a harder set of terms.

1. Large: a matter of scale. But reach and scale are not the same thing.

2. Focused: a matter of goals. But interests and goals are not the same thing.

3. Specialized: a matter of competencies. But intents and competencies are not the same thing.

4. Efficient: a matter of resources. But commitments and resources are not the same thing.

5. Disciplined: a matter of compliance. But affinity and compliance are not the same thing.

Web-based communities are far more like "markets" than they are like organizations, and they have fundamentals of structural coherency that are not the same as "organizations". It may be, yes, that we can view and study both organizations and markets for their innate "chemistry" and "physics" -- but in so doing, it is the viewing perspective that is the same (consistent) across both markets and organizations, not the subjects that are necessarily actually similar to each other.

Lying behind this comparison of terms is a notion perhaps strongly dissimilar to Hamel's: management does not create organizations; rather, organizations create management. Although Hamel provides a great list of characteristic actions and responsibilities of traditional management right up front in his article, these are by and large things that organizations ask and/or need managers to do for one dominant reason: to provide a certain kind (not amount) of accountability for Form.

In large part, the conventional view of management has the pronounced characteristic of fusing, if not confusing, "accountability" with "form" itself, with a kind of "progressive" slant to evolving from accounting as "control" to accounting as "influence" -- evolving from restriction to persuasion. The analog of web life, where groups form around attractions instead of within boundaries, is therefore provocative, but if it is instructive then the type of instruction it provides needs to be dispassionate. Dispassionately: we already know how to run things differently, but who is it that cares?

On the terms of reach, interests, intents, commitments and affinities, it is not surprising that communities have the ability to form and reform themselves so spontaneously and dynamically. But the main purpose of a community is not to "act out" -- rather, it is to "bring together". Conventional management is highly intolerant of acting out unless it is in a prescribed direction; and except in the name of innovation or escape it is too anxious to just settle for "bringing together" (which after all actually has the sole function of creating pre-conditions, not causing other effects). Communities want to benefit from togetherness, of course; but communities know that they and/or their members can come and go mainly at their own expense -- that in fact, they are naturally ephemeral.

The real dynamics of communities is done a disservice by applying the popular notion "self-organizing" to them; and it's that "organizing" part that allows managers to be seduced by the idea that the "self"-ness can somehow be appropriated into an externally-directed technique called Management 2.0 or whatever...

Seeing past the seduciton, it is marketing that is the most obvious paradigm for managing on the basis of the terms of communities. With that notion, the analogous future "managed organization" would be a market of work moreso than an organization of labor. As an irresistible segue from that observation: in this future it would not be an organization that is capturing value from labor, but instead it would be work that is driving the market to value.

Having said that, the real challenge surfaces. Namely, how do investors latch on to value in such circumstances? Why would they invest? Who can be that kind of investor? The most probable outcome of a search for Management 2.0 is not that some newly discovered management will supplant an earlier one; instead, an other additional kind of management will increase as a natural consequence of cultural change stimulated by the new pervasiveness of experience on the web.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 2:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack