Like Russell, we’re big fans of Peter Day’s In Business and Global Business (BBC).
In the latest Global Business, Peter chats with Professor Gary Hamel, a leading management author and thinker, about some of the themes in his new book, The Future of Management.
His key message to leaders is to shift from a culture of control to one that embraces personal creativity, posturing that this is the only path to future innovation, growth and prosperity.
The chat contains some really stirring stuff and strikes a perfect resonance with the zeitgeist (unleashing personal creativity, wisdom of crowds, bottom-up innovation, global talent etc.). We liked it so much that we spent the time to pick out some choice quotes:
“You can buy obedience and diligence and even intellect almost anywhere in the world for next to nothing.”
“We’re going to have to get people to bring to work their initiative, their creativity, their passion, and those are human capabilities that cannot be commanded. Those are gifts that people either choose to bring to work or not.”
“The existing management model was built to drive alignment, enforcement and control. What management tried to do over the last 100 years was to regularise the irregular, to drive the variety out of processes…we happen to live in a world today where it’s irregular people with irregular ideas who create all the new economic value and the wealth.”
“Organisations are less human than the people who work there. [people are inherently creative and innovative] but somehow when we get to work that adaptability, that innovation literally gets bleached out of people between 9 and 5.”
“The ability to aggregate human capability via the web, that’s not going to go away.”
Management innovation at W. L. Gore & Associates: “Every employee is free to say yes or no to any request. Most managers would have a very hard time imagining how you can get things done in an organsation where you can’t use any of your positional power (because you have none); people have to be persuaded. People are annually evaluated by 20 peers on the value they create [rather than via a hierarchy based on following strict instructions].”
Management innovation at Google: “The folks who run that they don’t primarily see themselves as the authors of strategy, they see themselves as editors of strategy…ideas bubble up.”
Pop here for the episode (hopefully it will stay archived).
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My senior management team, I made sure that they could do stages 1 (turnaround) and 2 (growth), with a real emphasis on delivering 2.
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