Being a glass-half-full kind of person, I thought the current turmoil in the global marketplace would offer managers a good opportunity to do some blue-skies thinking and me the opportunity to discover new books with some spanking new ideas.
It appears that these are difficult times for the business of management literature, too.
If you happen to follow strategic management and have been reading some of the recent books on the subject you are bound to get that where-have-I-read-this-before feeling. That’s simply because a big chunk of them is not really original, like so many other things marketers brandish before you these days.
Take this. In 1959, Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” (The Landmarks of Tomorrow) and later argued that, in the “knowledge society”, the basic economic resource is no longer capital, natural resources or labour, but is, and will be, knowledge. In 2012, we are reading about the “The New Knowledge Workers” (Dariusz Jemielniak) or “How to Think Like a Knowledge Worker” (W P Sheridan).
In a nutshell, what these two books tell us is that in a collaborative organisation the combined knowledge of all workers is important, regardless of their roles or the jobs they perform. Every team member contributes by sharing knowledge; and, therefore, they all participate, in some way, in making larger organisational decisions. Above all, information flows in many directions rather than cascading from the organisation leadership down the ranks, through the various layers of management to the front-line people.
So what’s new, you might ask? If you are really good at reading between the lines, you will probably figure out that the knowledge debate is emerging from an individual-knowledge focus in the early literature to a group-knowledge focus more recently, from pinpointing the “hidden” or “tacit” knowledge in organisations to how best to leverage collective knowledge. That’s the kind of leap the business of knowledge management has taken in five decades.
Now consider this one. Dr W Edwards Deming introduced the concept of continuous quality improvement to the Japanese after the war and to US companies in the early 1980s. His broad thesis was that by adopting the correct principles of management, organisations can improve quality and simultaneously reduce costs. In short, the trick is to reduce waste, staff attrition, litigation and so on and try and increase consumer loyalty. The key to all this lies in thinking of manufacturing as a system, not as bits and pieces of jobs to be done. That is the essence of continuous improvement.
Now see what we got in 2012. This book is called “Repeatability”, and it is written by Chris Zook and James Allen, who have between them more than 50 years of strategy consulting experience. Drawing on a series of research findings and real-world examples, they conclude that “… simplicity, focus and mastering the art of continuous change nearly always trump strategies of radical change or constant reinvention”. Companies that have shown sustainable growth, they say, don’t stray from, or regularly discard, their business model in pursuit of radical renovation. Instead, they build a repeatable business model that allows step-by-step improvement and allows them to rapidly adapt to change without succumbing to complexity.
That sounds like the old continuous improvement concept in a 21st-century bottle.
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Many students of strategic management would agree that what you read in management books today may not be very different from what you have been reading for the last several decades. And more often than not what is bandied about as new management practices and strategies are just the latest fad from a new book that successfully marketed the idea. Sadly, the marketing savvy of an author or a consultant has very little to do with his ability to offer strategic insights and improve corporate management.
You may well argue that it’s not easy to come up with a radically new idea every so often because the fundamental processes of business — how we organise, coordinate and direct human activity towards profitable, collective goals — will always be a key ingredient of management literature. Also most people in an organisation — including the chief executive — just want to maintain equilibrium. They’d like to keep doing tomorrow what they did yesterday. Therefore, for every “Innovator’s Dilemma” (Clayton Christensen), there will be 10 others that will offer nothing new.
In fact, it’s interesting to see how little has changed over the last 100 years since the publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “Principles of Scientific Management”. We still pore over the “organisational chart” to understand the branches of a hierarchy, spent hours to set up “sales targets” and “ metrics” and swear by “annual performance evaluations”.
Taylor wrote in 1911 that the improvements in management could double the productivity of the average worker. “Think of the increase, both in the necessities and luxuries of life… of the possibility of shortening the hours of labour… and of the increased opportunities for education, culture, and recreation which this implies.”
Indeed, despite the massive technological and social change over the last 100 years, the agenda for management has remained pretty much the same. That’s why a lot of management literature is more of the same.
