A colleague of mine in the Riverside HR office e-mailed me a promotional excerpt from Gary Hamel's new book, “The Future of Management” in response to a discussion we had on the evolution of management philosophy and practices over the past decade. As part of that dialog we observed that there seems to be an extremely long lag-time between innovation and application in the workplace.
The conversation that would have been natural, but which we didn’t have time to get into was how the evolution of management philosophy translated into the hiring model. I was pleased to see a new valuing of the quirky among us, at least from Gray Hamel’s perspective.
I had to chuckle as I read through a long list of quotations from the book. Whereas politicians speak in sound bits, hoping to become recognized by one that catches on, management guru writers look to the quotation to become authenticated and recognized. Gary does have to live down his positive profile of Enron published before the crash and burn, but I think he has taken a good step here.
Some of the excerpted quotations were just a firm grasp of the obvious, said through a verbal Terpsichore. Others did offer a focus to a concept that I thought was informative. But, what I found particularly hopeful was his description of the most valuable human capabilities, and what sounded like the failure of traditional management to embrace these qualities. What this all means is that another paradigm shift is due with new rules of who we hire and how employees are managed to allow full realization of these capabilities.
If the author will allow me a minor amount of deconstruction for clarity, here is what Gary Hamel had to say,
“One can fairly describe the development of modern management as an unending quest to regularize the irregular, starting with errant and disorderly employees. Increasingly,
though, we live in an irregular world, where irregular people take advantage of irregular events and use irregular means to produce irregular products that yield irregular profits.”
“Turns out that in an age of wrenching change and hyper-competition, the most valuable human capabilities are precisely those that are least manage-able. Nerve. Artistry. Élan. Originality. Grit. Non-conformity. Valor. Daring-to. These are the qualities that create value in the 21st century.”
“Self-discipline. Economy. Orderliness. Rationality. Prudence. Reliability. Moderation. Fastidiousness. These are the human qualities modern management was designed to foster and reward. No wonder most organizations are less resilient and inventive than the people who work for them.”
Tomorrow morning you can march into your supervisor’s office and say, “I may not be fastidious, but I do have a boat load of originality, and I am damn proud of it!” Of course, the unwanted consequence may be that you latter march into payroll to pick up your last check. That is if you work for many private companies that are not driven by creativeness.
I think one of the differences between government and private industry is that leading edge management is one of the ideal products of the governmental process. Whereas, private industry is in the business of sales profit, and only looks at management in relation to profit. (You may quote me on that.)