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Gary Hamel's latest book 'The Future of Management', coauthored with Bill Green, is an apt sequel to his previous bestseller 'Leading the revolution'. Where Leading the revolution (LTR) was about differences between incremental and radical innovations, shaking old guard out of its slumber and incorporating profit-inducing innovations as a systemic capability;  'the future of management' has 'management innovation' at its core. In the preface, Hamel underlines that this book is for everyone who feels hogtied by bureaucracy and wants to do something about it. It is a defacto manifesto for those want to rid their organizations of the ravaging poltergeists (old guard's orthodoxies) which have inhabited the system since there has never been a threat of exorcism.

 

Hamel has carried forward many themes from LTR to this book. In the first chapter, Hamel stigmatizes the sameness between the present day of management and Taylor's era of management. According to Hamel, we still continue to chug along with the traditional rules of management - Silo-based approaches to work, division of labour, decision-making flows from top to bottom. He emphasizes later in the book that industrialization had disconnected employees from creativity. It's quite clear that in order to be the enterprise of the future, organizations must jettison Tayloristic approaches and adopt management innovation. Author professes that no other genre of innovation - operational, product, strategic - creates as disproportionate amount of value creation as management innovation does.  He also asks for continuous self-renewal in absence of crisis to mount any unprecedented challenge.  

Part one of the book lays out the agenda for management innovation. Hamel's mantra to this genre of  innovation is simple: "First imagine, then invent." He spots loopholes in our management systems; lays bare the innovation/creativity sector and the treatment it gets in today's organizations. According to Hamel, since innovation, tacitly, is considered to be a prerogative of the top-management, any chance of 'grassroots innovation' is stifled in the bud. Hamel's directive: Make innovation everyone's job. Everyone's job? This is where it becomes debatable. Hamel's agenda is soothing for, perhaps, upper echelons but how does someone from the frontline go and challenge the notions of the 'Chain of command'? This is more contentious, especially, in family-owned businesses in let's say India and China, where getting through to the top management is an arduous task, let alone challenging their whims and notions. I am not doubting Hamel's conviction about grassroots innovation. I contest the fact, however, that 'any' organization could be a Google or a Whole Foods. These organizations, which are also incorporated in 'the future of management' as case-studies, have a risk-oriented, innovations-from-anywhere culture only because their founders took the initiative to establish one. If employees at 'Whole Foods' can access the financial details of the company or if they can peep into executive compensation system, it's only because their top management lets them.

In Third part of the book, Hamel gives the ammunition to deconstruct the orthodoxies that have become so strong over the years since they were never challenged. The contrarian spirits in the management layers won't let go of their vested interests easily. The moot point of this part is that we are committing a fallacy abiding by management structures of the past since the world has moved beyond 'command and control'. Today nothing galvanizes workers so much as motivation and freedom does. Hamel also takes up the interesting topic of coupling discipline with freedom. Much to the annoyance of old guard, Hamel favors discipline and freedom and proves the counterexamples that two can coexist. Hamel and Green put forth five design principles to order to take the leap into the new paradigm -

1) Life - In life,Experimentation beats planning. So,too, in organizations, success depends less on planning what will come next and more on experimenting what could come next.

2) Markets - In most companies, 'wisdom of the few' prevails, unlike markets which are apolitical. Success mantra is to get the right resources to right people at right time.

3) Democracy - Everyone in the organization should have a voice. In organizations,too, power should flow up and accountability should flow down, just like in democracies.

4) Faith - People put more effort into what they believe in. Faith empowers transformation. Give your people a vision to follow.

5) Cities - Diversity in an organization can spawn deluge of creativity, as is the case with progressive cities.

 

Having struck a chord with his reader throughout the narrative, Hamel towards the end instructs him to undertake his own mission rather than merely be inspired by the accounts of those mentioned in the book. To cap it off, I would reiterate Hamel's most significant rules for a management innovator -

 

1) To solve a systemic problem, understand its roots first.
2) Run the new in parallel with the old. Keep your metrics about what you want to improve clear.
3) De-risk the process by starting small or by experimenting in your own backyard.
4) Experiment, learn, Experiment, learn.
5) Don't give up!