Management Innovation
The last month I’ve been reading two books: an excellent (Origin of Wealth), and a flawed one. I’m going to write some notes on the latter: The Future of Management by Gary Hamel.
Hamel attempts to turn management on its head and following Gibson’s advice that “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”, he looks for signs of the future in innovative companies.
The major problem with the book is that it’s written like a journalist article one might see in Business Week and not like a well-researched book. Like a review in Amazon mentioned this book is a mix of Drucker (good) and Tom Peters (bad!). It presents the cases of companies like Whole Foods, Google, W.L. Gore as well as the terrific work of Ricardo Semler at Semco. Although, these case studies are interesting, the problem is that they are presented as just-so stories without analysis.
After presenting the cases, Hamel attempts to answer the 6 challenges of management:
- Democracy of Ideas – modeled after the Web and Wikis
- Amplifying Human Imagination – give your employees the right data and tools
- Dynamically Reallocating Resources – decentralize R&D
- Aggregating Collective Wisdom – create a prediction market (and use the brilliant askmarkets for the job!)
- Minimizing the Drag of Old Mental Models – adopt OSS organizational models
- Giving Everyone the Chance to Opt In – Google’s 20% rule, Linden Labs task list
Often the real problem for an established company is not a dearth of ideas, but management processes and practices that favor “more of the same” over “new and different” (p.216):
