The Future of Management / 미래의 경영

The Future of Management Gary Hamel

It seems that our world changes too fast. The pace of change might be the biggest change coming to our world. It's no surprise that adaptability is getting focused and regarded as the most important virtue of this era. The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel, tells us how could we and our company get enough adaptability to live on and to be prosperous.

It's the Hamel's conjecture that bureaucracy and hierarchy, the essential elements of current management, could not keep pace with this fast-changing world. The hierarchical overhead keeps the people who make decision away from data in time, the opinions from front-line employee, creative ideas. Management democracy, if it is possible, is the one to be gotten, the author emphasized. If democracy wins over autocracy for somewhat reasons, those could be applied to management. Passion and creativity favor democracy. Innovation and competition are not exceptions by no means.

What about the fear from manager's side? Do people do their best when there are less managerial rules? It might be that efficiency and productivity get banished, isn't it? The author answers to this fear with the example of democracy. Democracy might be inefficient and might be slow-runner in short term. However, history tells us that democracy eventually wins over autocracy. It's 21-st century manager's role to devise the way which minimizes short-term inefficiency of democracy.

I'm deeply impressed. This is one the two great books I read this year. (Another is By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

• Passion can make people do stupid things, but it's the secret sauce that turns intent into accomplishment.
• Hierarchies are very good at aggregating effort, at coordinating the activities of many people with widely varying roles. But they're not very good at mobilizing effort, at inspiring people to go above and beyond.
• Too often, companies try to sidestep difficult trade-offs. To them, paradoxes are a pain. So they adopt metrics, processes, and decision rules that give one operational objective or performance goal an almost permanent advantage over its opposite number. However successful management innovators find ways of reconciling irreconcilable trade-offs and capturing the benefits of two-sided advantages.
• Yet the idea of spending your entire life working for someone else would have seemed strange, even repugnant to most Americans living before the Civil War. Fact is, the concept of the employee is a recent invention, not some timeless social convention. It would be dangerous, therefore, to assume that the concept of "the employee" - or any other tenet in the creed of modern management - is anchored on the bedrock of eternal truth.
• People change for what they care about. Admittedly, there are folks who spend their days mindlessly polishing the deep grooves of habit. Yet even these souls are capable of change; they just haven't found anything worth changing for.
• 21st-centry management principles: Variety of life, flexibility of markets, activism of democracy, meaning of faith, and serendipity of cities.
• To be adaptable, a company must be capable of spawning new businesses. For a host of reasons, this is a daunting challenge for most incumbents. As a consequence, it's usually newcomers who grab tomorrow's opportunities. Often, the real problem for an established company is not a dearth of ideas, but management processes and practices that reflexively favor "more of the same" over "new and different."
• Top management's unyielding demands for fact-based analysis and detailed financial forecasts dissuaded all but the most incautious managers from embracing the uncertainty and risk of investing in a new business.
• The ethos of the EBO process is to fail early and fail small. With this in mind, the monthly review meetings are an opportunity to reassess critical assumptions in light of customer feedback and shifts in the external environment.
• What share of your budget and headcount is focused on initiatives that could help our company build a decisive management advantage? If you can't figure out a way to turn all this expensive and time-consuming work into a source of competitive advantage, you're going to be outsourced.
• Most of us grew up in a "post-industrial" society. We are now on the verge of a "post-managerial" society, perhaps even a "post-organizational" society.
• The biggest issue at stake in this emerging age is the ongoing tension between creativity and organization - Richard Florida, in The Rise of the Creative Class.

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경영서적 세번째. 게리 하멜 교수의 "미래의 경영"이다. 책 전체가 현학적인 영어의 퍼레이드. 정말 읽는데 난관이 많았다. 그러나 책 자체에서 받은 감동은 가장 컸다. 나의 올해의 책으로 꼽아본다.

변화의 시대. 적응해야 살아남을 수 있는 시대에서 기존의 계층조직은 한계가 있다는 것이다. 계층조직이 한계가 있는 이유로서 마이클 해머가 말한 많은 오버헤드로 인한 단점도 꼽고 있다. 하지만 열정과 창조성이 기존의 계층조직에서는 발현되기가 어렵다는 것을 주요한 이유로 이야기하고 있다. 열정과 창조성 - 많은 자기계발서에서 이야기하는 것 아닌가. 경영전문가가 미래의 경영에 (계량화하기 어려운) 열정과 창조성이 중요한 요소이다라고 말하는 점. 신선한 충격이었다.

또한 저자는 계층 조직이 아니면서 계속 발전해 나아가는 다음 다섯가지를 관찰하고, 그것을 우리에게도 권하고 있다: 생명 메카니즘, 시장(market)의 원리, 민주주의, 신앙의 힘, 그리고 도시의 매력.

기존의 굴레를 벗어 던져야 살아남을 수 있는 변화의 시대이다. 따라가기도 힘들지만, 그래도 무작정 변화를 따라가다보면 심신만 지치는 것이다. 이 책이 우리에게 말하고 있는 것은 결국 발상의 전환, 패러다임의 변화가 필요하다는 것이다.