The Future of Management [Anglais] [Relié]

When you write a book about the future of management, there are bound to be high expectations. When that book is written by one of the more celebrated management thinkers, those expectations go even higher. With that said and recognizing that it is hard to argue with success and stature. I have to say that this book left me flat. Hammel's Future of Management is a continuation on his 2000 work Leading the Revolution (LTR) which combined high impact statements with high design that reflected the height of the internet era. In many ways, the Future of Management is a more somber continuation of the ideas in LTR.

The first section of the book poses a powerful question in terms of what comes next for management innovation. That is followed by an explanation of the importance of management innovation over operational, product and strategic innovation. The section challenges the reader to first imagine, and then invent the future of management. A noble task and one that the author tries to address but unfortunately does not deliver on to the degree that you would expect.

The second section of the book highlights a few case studies such as Whole Foods, WL Gore, and Google. The cases are well written and unabashedly positive highlighting few of the challenges and setbacks people might face in this journey. A few, even anonomyous failures would have been much more illustrative of the concepts Hamel is advocating.

The third and final section is perhaps the best part of the book as it starts to set up some ideas on what future managers and management might look like. Here the results unfortunately are what you might expect, to paraphrase - the future of management will look much like the internet. OK, but I have heard that before from others. Some of the most insightful parts of this section include: the notion of separating what from how, the idea of management DNA and motivation, and the key challenges he poses in terms of the challenges for the future of management. These challenges hearken back to Leading the Revolution and include:

Challenge 1 - Creating a democracy of ideas
Challenge 2 - Amplifying human imagination
Challenge 3 - Dynamically reallocating resources
Challenge 4 - Aggregating collective wisdom
Challenge 5 - Minimizing the drag of old mental models
Challenge 6 - Giving everyone a chance to opt in

The fourth section concentrates on IBM's Emerging Business Opportunities or EBO process and how the company was able to reignite its growth engine by managing new growth initiatives and taking R&D to the market. It's an interesting case study and a good way to wrap up the book.

The future of management is an ok book, more like a toned down east coast consumable version of leading the revolution. This is a book for thinkers rather than practioners. This is one of the reasons why it is not a 5 star rating from me. Hamel attempts to be somewhat Druckeresque, if that is a word, but does not pull off the deep systematic thinking that Peter Drucker did so well. Pushing this analogy, the style of The Future of Management is 80% Drucker and 20% Tom Peters. For me, Hamel's groundbreaking work is still Competing for the Future. If you are a fan of Leading the Revolution or a fan of Hamel you will buy this book and like it. If you are a reader studying the issues and challenges of management you will find that Hamel raises more questions than he answers and that many of the answers are ones that are already out there in the marketplace.

There is an old Arab proverb: "He who speaks about the future lies even when he tells the truth".
The author makes some good points, particularly when discussing the corrosive affect of calcified corporate cultures on employee morale. But he extends his examples of Google, WL Gore and Whole Foods too far. What works for them might not work for other companies. He never makes this distinction (nor tells the reader how to identify it) and he falls into the trap of missing the difference between cause and effect (see the excellent book "The Halo Effect" to learn more about this all too common tendency amongst business management authors).
He gives some good examples of how technology can break down barriers inside of a company, such as internet enabled 'predictive markets' and their ability to help with m&a strategy. But then he goes on to suggest that company sponsored blogs where employees can vent their feelings about their employer (anonymously) might make for a healthier, more innovative workplace. Perhaps I am missing something, but I don't think this would go over too well in most workplaces.
But the real reason I can give only one star is that he never mentions the impact of different cultures on management styles. This is a gross oversight. What works in the US might not work in China, Brazil or India. I was surprised that someone writing a book with the bold title "The Future of Management" could completely overlook such an important topic, especially when our economy is becoming much more global. I would strongly suggest caution if one were to implement some of his strategies.

As he clearly indicates in his earlier books, notably in Competing for the Future (with C.K. Prahalad) and then in Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel's mission in life is to exorcise "the poltergeists who inhabit the musty machinery of management" so that decision-makers can free themselves from what James O'Toole aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." In his Preface to this volume, written with Bill Breen, Hamel asserts that "today's best practices aren't good enough" and later suggests that he wrote this book for "dreamers and doers" who want to invent "tomorrow's best practices today." In this brilliant book, he explains how to do that.

In the city where I live, we have a number of outdoor markets at which slices of fresh fruit are offered as samples of the produce available. In that same spirit, I frequently include brief excerpts from a book to help those who read my review to get a "taste." Here is a representative selection of Hamel's insights:

"To thrive in an increasingly disruptive world, companies must become as strategically adaptable as they are operationally efficient. To safeguard their margins, they must become gushers of rule-breaking innovation. And if they're going to out-invent and outthink as growing mob of upstarts, they must learn how to inspire their employees to give the very best of themselves every day. These are the challenges that must be addressed by 21st-century management innovators." (Page 11)

"Many factors contribute to strategic inertia, but three pose a particularly grave threat to timely renewal. The first is the tendency of management teams to deny or ignore the need for a strategy reboot. The second is a dearth of compelling alternatives to the status quo, which often leads to strategic paralysis. And the third: allocational rigidities that make it difficult to deploy talent and capital behind new initiatives. Each of these barriers stands in the way of zero-trauma change; hence each deserves to be a focal point for management innovation." (Page 44)

"Skepticism and humility are important attributes for a management innovator - yet they're not enough. To create space for management innovation you will need to systematically deconstruct the management orthodoxies that bind you and your colleagues to new possibilities. Here's how to get started. Pick a big management issue like change, innovation, or employee engagement, and then assemble 10 or 20 of your colleagues. Ask each of them to write down ten things they believe about the nominated problem. Have them inscribe each belief on a Post-it note. Then plaster the stickies on a wall and group similar beliefs together." Then sustain a rigorous discussion during which all premises and assumptions are challenged. "To escape the straitjacket of conventional thinking, you have to be able to distinguish between beliefs that describe the world as it is, and describe the world as it is and must forever remain." Focus on what can be changed...and should be changed. (Pages 130-131)

I especially appreciate Hamel's analysis of three exemplary companies: Whole Foods Market (a "community of purpose"), W.L. Gore (an "innovation democracy"), and Google ("brink-of-chaos management"). Hamel focuses his attention to how these companies invent tomorrow's best practices today. He cleverly juxtaposes a "management innovation challenge" with each company's "distinctive management practices." Having established and then sustained a one-on-one rapport with his reader throughout the narrative, Hamel makes it crystal clear that that he is not urging his reader to address the same challenges and develop the same best practices for any one of the three exemplary companies, much less emulate all three. That would be insane.

"There isn't any law that prevents large organizations from being engaging, innovative, and adaptive - and mostly bureaucracy free. Even better, it really is possible to set the human spirit free at work. So no more excuses. It's time for you to buckle down and start inventing the future of management...My goal in writing this book was not to predict the future of management but to help you invent it...From the first time since the dawning of the industrial age, the only way to build a company that's fit for the future is to build one that is fit for human beings as well."

So, there's Gary Hamel's challenge: Start your own "revolution" and lead it. If you don't, who will?