All Posts Tagged With: "agility"
Harvard Business Review’s Most Influential Management Ideas of the Decade
Everybody has a Top 10 list and HBR is no different. Well, they’re a little different: Their editors came up with the Top 12 most influential management ideas since 2000 (“The Decade in Management Ideas,” Julia Kirby, January 1, 2010):
1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy. And not a good one. Even the guy who popularized it concurs. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy,” said Jack Welch. “Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.”
2. IT as a Utility. Cloud computing is the latest step toward buying computing capabilities as services.
3. The Customer Chorus. Technical and social developments have given customers a stronger and more pervasive voice—and companies are finding ways to listen.
4. Enterprise Risk Management. Chief risk officers hold the new umbrella over pockets of risk that had been scattered, and addressed separately, throughout the organization.
5. The Creative Organization. The ability to produce creative output was seen as a competitive advantage to encourage through collaboration and diverse perspectives.
6. Open Source. Wikipedia, which represents the power of open source, was born in 2001.
7. Going Private. According to the article, “As the decade wore on, private equity’s playbook for turning around businesses was increasingly held up as best-practice management,” especially in the areas of strategic focus and governance.
8. Behavioral Economics. Rational thought alone does not explain human decision-making. Yup, that’s the 2000’s in a nutshell.
9. High Potentials. Some managers are more equal than others…
4Jan2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued25 “Moonshots for Management”
Last year the Management Lab, with support from McKinsey & Company, assembled 35 management experts to discuss what management practices imperiled the long-term success of large organizations and what fundamental changes are needed in management principles, processes, and practices.
Gary Hamel, author of two leading books on business strategy, described three broadly-shared beliefs among the participants in the Harvard Business Review:
- “Management” is one of our most important social technologies.
- The management model of the last 100 years is out of date.
- We must reinvent management to make large organizations more adaptable, innovative, and inspiring places to work.
The Baldrige model can help any organization of any size reinvent its management system by identifying, prioritizing, and acting on the major gaps in that system. I believe Baldrige provides a systems perspective and sound guidance on achieving the 25 “moonshots for management” that the experts proposed:
- Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. The first question in the Baldrige Criteria is: “How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values?” The Criteria then ask how senior leaders deploy them and how their personal actions support them.
- Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. Criteria Item 1.2 asks how the organization fulfills its societal responsibilities and supports its key communities.
- Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. The Baldrige model values efficiency and profitability, but it also values quality products and services, satisfied customers and employees, ethical behavior, and stakeholder trust.
- Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. The…
Moving Faster
As organizations grow, they lose their ability to move fast. Layers of management and pages of policies conspire against quick action. Hierarchical leadership structures delay decisions until word comes from the top. Functional silos put their priorities first and the organization’s needs second. Employees know what needs to be done but they lack the authority or, too often, the desire, to do it.
Agility is a core value of the Baldrige model and a distinguishing characteristic of recent Baldrige Award recipients. As the Criteria for Performance Excellence state, “Success in today’s ever-changing, globally competitive environment demands agility–a capacity for rapid change and flexibility.”
The Criteria ask how senior leaders create an environment for organizational agility. In an interview for the McKinsey Quarterly, John Chambers, CEO and chairman of Cisco Systems, admits that “I’m a command-and-control guy. It clearly has worked well for me. I say, turn right, 66,000 people turn right. But that’s not the future. The future’s going to be all around collaboration and teamwork, with a structured process behind it. And that’s the key. You can’t move fast without a replicable process. So it’s about speed, combined with technology enablement, combined with a replicable process.”
Integrating the Baldrige model is a proven way to design, manage, and improve replicable processes in all areas of an organization.
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company has received two Baldrige Awards. It has a replicable process for providing prompt, high-quality customer service: Every…
4Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
