Management- It's Not What You Think!

by Henry Mintzberg

  A true adventurer is not foolhardy. He must realistically assess his capabilities and choose reasonable objectives. The sailor looks at himself and weighs his skills, and only then decides that he can cross the Atlantic in a smaller boat. The climber takes an inventory of his experience and judges himself capable of more remote peaks by more difficult routes. But as soon as the next step is taken, the margin of safety decreases. Bad weather, bad decisions, bad luck – all these factors crowd in more and more closely against competence and determination. That’s why the best adventures involve a strange combination of emotions: a strong expectation of success in concert with all sorts of doubts and worries about the consequences of failure …

  Source: R.R. Reno, ‘A descent in the dark’, CommentaryMagazine.com, November 2008.

  Leadership and Communityship

  by Henry Mintzberg

  We have this obsession with ‘leadership’. It’s maybe intended to empower people, but its effect is to disempower them. By focusing on the individual, even in the context of others, leadership can undermine a service of community. This is part of the syndrome of individuality that is sweeping the world and undermining organizations in particular and societies in general.

  Just enough leadership

  Of course leadership matters. And of course leadership can make a difference. But how often does this get magnified into a tautology: show the press a successful organization and it will show you a great leader. So much easier than trying to find out what has really been going on. ‘In four years Gerstner has added more than $40 billion to IBM’s share value’, proclaimed Fortune magazine in 1997 (April 14). All by himself!

  Where leadership does matter, as it probably did in Gerstner’s case, what kind of leadership is that? Is it the heroic leadership so commonly portrayed in the press – the great one who rides in on the great white horse to save the day, even if he or she only arrived yesterday, with barely any knowledge of the organization, its history, its culture? This has more often proved to be a formula for disaster. According to one report (“Waking Up IBM” by Gary Hamel, Harvard Business Review, 7–8, 2000), IBM got into E-business because a programmer with an idea convinced a staff manager, who had more insight than budget, stitched together a team that drove the change. And what role did Gerstner play? When he eventually heard about the initiative, he encouraged it. That’s all. Instead of setting direction, he supported the direction setting of others. He provided less leadership. But appropriate leadership. Just enough leadership! What could be simpler, more natural, than that?

  For starters, let’s recognize that separating leadership from management is part of the problem. Does anyone want to work for a manager who lacks the qualities of leadership? That can be pretty discouraging. Well, how about a leader who doesn’t practice management? That can be pretty alienating: he or she is unlikely to know what is going on. (These days, we distinguish leaders from managers. Half a century ago, Peter Drucker distinguished managers from administrators – and had exactly the same idea in mind! We keep upping the ante – soon we will be separating gods for heroes.)

  We hear a great deal about micro managing these days – managers who meddle in the work of their reports. Sure it can be a problem. But far more serious now is macro managing – managers who sit on “top,” pronouncing their grand visions, great strategies, and stifle performance standards, while everyone else is supposed to scurry around “implementing”. I call this management by deeming.

  We have too much disconnected leadership in this world – the hyped-up, individually focused, context-free leadership so popular in the press and the classroom. Courses and MBA programs that claim to create leaders promote hubris instead. No leader has ever been created in a classroom. Leadership grows in context, where it gains its most important characteristic: legitimacy. Enough of all these young, barely experienced people running around calling themselves “leaders”, worse still “young leaders” (who can really discern that?), just because some course or institution spilled the holy water of “leadership” on people they hardly knew.

  Imposed vs. Earned Leadership

  Mostly these days, we got illegitimate leadership, selected by outsiders and imposed on an organization or one of its units. A board of mostly outside directors, or a senior management gets charmed by a candidate whose internal practice of management they have never experienced. How remarkable that those people who know the candidates best, having been led, or at least managed, by them, are so rarely consulted on these choices. The current American ambassador to the United Nations was described in the congressional hearings on selection: as “a kiss-up and kick-down” sort of guy. The world is now loaded with such “leaders.”

  True leadership is earned, internally, if you like – in the unit, or the organization, or even the nation that not only accepts the guidance of some person, but sought it out in the first place, and has subsequently sustained it enthusiastically. How many of today’s companies and countries can claim to be headed by people with that kind of legitimacy? How many current heads of state have been “drafted” by overwhelmingly popular will, as, say, Nelson Mandela in South Africa?

  “Community-ship”

  But even this overstates the case for leadership. People, of course, seek leaders, But often they fool themselves, by mixing up leaders with leadership. There is, in other words, need for more of what is called “distributed leadership,” meaning that the role is fluid, shared by various people in a group according to their capabilities as conditions change. Is that not how the Linux Operating System and Wikipedia work?

  But calling this leadership really slights it, because its effectiveness lies not in any individuals so much as in the collective social process – essentially in community. Every time we use the word leadership, therefore, we have to bear in mind that it isolates the individual while considering everyone else a follower. Is this the kind of world we want: overwhelmingly of followers? Will that make our institutions and/or societies better places?

  Our obsession with leadership, of any kind, causes us to build organizations that are utterly dependent on individual initiative. We don’t allow them to function as communities. So when they fail, we blame the leader, and seek a better one. Like drug addicts, each time we just need a bigger bit.

  Just consider that ubiquitous organization char, with its silly boxes of “top”, “middle”, and “bottom” managers. This is no more than a distorted metaphor. What does it tell us, beside who has authority over what. The painting may not be the pipe, but far too many people, this chart is the organization.) Isn’t it time we began to think of our organizations as communities of cooperation. And in so doing, put leadership in its place: not gone, but alongside other important social processes.

  What should be gone is this magic bullet of the individual as the solution to the world’s problems. We are the solution to the world’s problems, you and me, all of us, working in concert. In fact, this obsession with leadership is the cause of many of the world’s problems.

  And with this, get rid of the cult of leadership, striking at least one blow at our increasing obsession with individuality. Not to create a new cult around distributed leadership, but to recognize that the very use of the word leadership tilts thinking toward the individual and away from the community. We don’t only need better leadership, we also need less leadership.

  How about if we challenge every single speech, program, article, and book that uses the word “leadership” and does not give equal attention to “community-ship” in one form or another? This could have profound implications, not only for the effectiveness of our organizations, but also for the democracy of our societies.

  Source: Parts of this were published as ‘Enough leadership’ in the Harvard Business Review (November 2004) and the Financial Times (November 2004). Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review, © by the Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation; all rights reserved.

  The hero doth like the ape, that, the higher h
e climbs, the more he shows his arse.

  Sir Francis Bacon

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  MYTHS OF MANAGING

  Year after year the worriers and fretters would come to me with awful predictions of the outbreak of war. I denied it each time. I was only wrong twice

  [Researcher in British Foreign Office from 1903 to 1950.]

  Now it’s straight into the myths of managing. Management has had a long-standing love affair with formal rationality. ‘Crunch the numbers’, introduce the right systems, do your action plan (an oxymoron), and the Holy Grail of managing will be yours. How to explain this? Perhaps it reflects our obsession with control – having to bring under control at first things physical, then things social, and finally each other. Or maybe it’s all about our desperate search for comfort and security in the face of uncertainty.

  We had great fun choosing these pieces. Our first myth takes a light-hearted look at the fad of the decade – outsourcing. Coming to your organisation soon could be the out-sourcing of your CEO. Why not? This person may be the only one left. Then Danny Miller and Jon Hartwick consider why management fads are so popular, concluding that ‘If it looks too simple to work, it probably is.’ Next Henry Mintzberg muses on a number of management myths, including ‘the soft underbelly of hard data’, concluding with a shot at the very places that perpetrate these myths.

  Scholars have long been fascinated by the biases and distortions we exhibit, especially in processing information. Spyros Makridakis, a leading authority on forecasting, demonstrates rather depressingly how these plague so many of our decisions.

  Be that as it may, the architects of these decisions – those swash-buckling CEOs – continue to pile in the money. Why? Because they are bold, risk-taking gamblers, many of them tell us. Once again: think again. ‘Some gamblers’ concludes by calling the bluff of these high-rolling CEOs. But fear not. While these CEOs seem always to win, surrounded as they are by all that money, maybe they are the real losers.

  Outsourcing the Outsourcers

  Montreal, March 28, 2005. Air Maple Leaf today announced that the Office of the President, CEO and the Chairman will be outsourced as of April 30, for the remainder of this fiscal year and beyond.

  ‘At the end of the day, the cost savings will be quite significant,’ says an Air Maple Leaf spokesperson. ‘We simply can no longer afford this inefficiency and remain competitive on the world stage,’ he said.

  Rahdpoor Nahassbaalapan, 23, of Indus Teleservices, Mumbai, India, will be assuming the Office of President, Chairman, and CEO as of May 1. He will receive a salary of $360 Canadian a month with proportionate benefits. Mr. Nahassbaalapan will maintain his office in India and will be working primarily at night, due to the time difference between Canada and India.

  ‘I am excited to serve in this position,’ Mr. Nahassbaalapan stated in an exclusive interview. ‘I always knew that my career at the Air Maple Leaf call center would lead to great things.’

  An Air Maple Leaf spokesperson noted that Mr. Nahassbaalapan has extensive experience in public speaking and has been given the CEO’s Script Tree to enable him to answer any question without having to understand the issue.

  The Air Maple Leaf board continues to explore other outsourcing possibilities, including Air Maple Leaf’s more than 100 vice presidents.

  Source: Adapted from an email that circulated in Montreal in the spring of 2005, apparently inspired by similar stories about the US presidency. Its authenticity, let alone source, could not be confirmed.

  Spotting Management Fads

  by Danny Miller and Jon Hartwick

  What makes them so popular is what undermines them in the end.

  TQM. MBO. Japanese management. Like fashion trends, management fads erupt on the scene, enjoy a period of prominence, and then are supplanted. What makes business fads so attractive? And how can managers tell a fad from a tool that might endure?

  To find out, we studied many of the more popular business fads of the last 40 years, looking for ideas that followed the characteristic trajectory from sudden prominence to obscurity. In reviewing 1,700 academic, professional, business, and trade publications over a 17-year period, we observed the rise and fall of many business fads.

  Though the term ‘fad’ may seem dismissive, it’s not: Fads like TQM can profoundly change companies, for better or for worse. And they can introduce useful ideas that companies incorporate into practice, even as the fad itself fades from the scene. But fads often fail to deliver on their promises, a factor that contributes to their short life cycles and rapid decline. In the course of our work, we uncovered eight qualities that most business fads share. Let’s look at these qualities as they apply to three fads: total quality management, Japanese management, and management by objective.

  Fads are …

  Simple. Fad concepts are easy to understand and communicate and tend to be framed with labels, buzzwords, lists, and acronyms. Usually, a few key points convey a fundamental message. TQM, for example, rests on five essential pillars. But because fads are by their very nature suited for a simple world, they have limited utility in the real one.

  Prescriptive. Fads tell managers what to do. MBO, Theory Z, TQM – all indicate specific actions managers must take to solve problems or improve their companies. Though a fad’s fundamental ideas might be sound, the need to be simple but prescriptive makes their action points easy to misinterpret or inappropriately apply. What a mistake it would be to blithely adapt Japanese management’s lifelong employment and seniority-based promotions to highly specialized technology positions.

  Falsely Encouraging. Fads promise outcomes such as greater effectiveness, more motivated and productive workers, and deeply satisfied customers. But, in fact, all kinds of fads are better at raising hopes than delivering results, and they generally fail to specify clear-cut criteria for evaluating whether or not an implementation succeeded.

  One-Size-Fits-All. Fads claim universal relevance, proposing practices that adherents say will apply to almost any industry, organization, or culture – from General Motors to government bureaucracies to mom-and-pop groceries. But few management approaches are universally applicable, and attempts to implement a mismatched approach can do more harm than good. Japanese management practices may transplant poorly to other cultures; TQM may be inappropriate for many producers of basic goods.

  Easy to Cut-and-Paste. Because fad management ideas must be simple and easy to apply, they’re amenable to partial implementation. For instance, you can get quality circles going simply by having a prescribed number of people attend regular meetings. Partial implementation means that certain fad features can be grafted onto standard operating procedures and localized within a few committees or departments. Outside these pockets, it’s business as usual – which means that fads rarely challenge the status quo in a way that would require significant redistribution of power or resources.

  In Tune with the Zeitgeist. Fads resonate with the pressing business problems of the day. MBO became popular with the advent of diversified businesses that demanded coordination and control from generalist managers. Japanese management caught on when the United States began losing market share to Japanese and European companies, often because U.S. products lacked quality. Because fads focus on the concerns of the moment, they tend to apply to a few specific issues rather than addressing the fundamental weakness or soundness of overall business practices.

  Novel, not Radical. Fads grab attention by their apparent novelty. But their freshness is often superficial, and, as such, fads don’t unduly challenge basic managerial values. Many simply repackage or extend ideas or approaches that managers have long embraced. MBO took much from the planning literature; the one-minute manager idea borrowed from MBO; Theory Z tapped Theory X.

  Legitimized by Gurus and Disciples. Many fads gain credibility by the status and prestige of their proponents or followers, rather than through empirical evidence. And stories of corporate heroes and organizat
ional successes suggest prestigious adherents. For example, consultant W. Edwards Deming is inextricably linked with TQM as the architect of the 14 Points for Management.

  The very characteristics that make fads popular also contribute to their decline. Their simplicity, presumed generality, and promise of results that often don’t materialize virtually guarantee that they’ll fall short of managers’ expectations – and soon be abandoned.

  Classic qualities

  If these are the earmarks of fads, what makes a management classic? Consider diversification, decentralization, outsourcing, and supply chain management. Unlike most fads, these likely classics demand real organizational changes at significant cost and have lasting effects. Classics typically arise not from the writings of academics or consultants but emerge out of practitioner responses to economic, social, and competitive challenges. They are complex, multifaceted, and applied in different ways to different businesses. The classics don’t come with simple primers on how to make the changes they propose nor do they have simple rules everyone must follow or any guaranteed outcomes.

  There is no perfect test to distinguish fads from classics; indeed, their features can overlap. Fads can sometimes trigger major organizational change, even if they’re short-lived. And classics, of course, can have gurus – think of Peter Drucker’s association with decentralization. But, if a management approach shares most of the fad features described here, beware. If it looks too simple to work, it probably is.