Business schools tout themselves as thought-leaders, but they only appeared on the scene after the mass production industrial model had been proven. We shouldn’t expect leadership from our academic institutions, with their profitable business schools, until we have a proven new organizational model for the post-industrial era. Actually, business schools may be to blame for our current economic problems. According to renowned management professor Henry Mintzberg:
From where I sit, management education appears to be a significant part of this problem. For years, the business schools have been promoting an excessively analytical, detached style of management that has been dragging down organizations.
Every decade, American business schools have been graduating more than a million MBAs, most of whom believe that, because they sat still for a couple of years, they are ready to manage anything. In fact, they have been prepared to manage nothing.
The current economic situation is the result of an utterly failed management model. It’s obvious when you compare Japanese automakers with the “Big Three” in North America – the same materials, the same technology and the same base of workers, but DIFFERENT management. Yes, it’s management’s fault.
Mintzberg also says that, “Management is a practice, learned in context.” That means that book-learning is not enough. Thomas Malone’s The Future of Work and Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management are two good books that look at the need for new management models. They’re a start. What’s missing from both are practical models to implement and that is one of my key interests in consulting. I think that adding the framework of wirearchy and the practical examples of natural entrepreneurship would be useful. Since both of these are completely ignored by business schools, I take that as a positive indicator. However, we still need to try these models, frameworks and ideas in the context of managing real businesses. That’s the challenge.
I believe that future management models can find inspiration and clues in web-based service companies as well as small, community-based businesses. A networked society means that businesses have to be nimble and small-thinking because every individual transaction is unique. One bad experience can go viral. Lack of transparency is mistrusted. Command and control matters less and less. Look to business models that understand the importance of community.
Any new management models will have to break down long-standing silos between departments and let people connect on a more human level. We are not “human resources”. We need models that keep everything at a human scale, so biological metaphors, instead of mechanistic or military ones, may be more appropriate. This is the kind of thinking that the Internet Time Alliance is extending: tearing down the training department and instilling human performance into the organizational DNA. Learning is not something that is ‘done to you’ and management should not be an external force but instead an internal motivational driver of the organization. Once again, look at the definition of wirearchy:
a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology
This would be a good foundation for the next generation of business schools.
