Fast Company | How Business Is a Lot Like Life
An old article from April 2001 tweaked my interest while playing around with Feed Demon:
the old rules of the game rested on a management method that I call "social engineering," which operates according to three premises. First, intelligence is located at the top; Leadership is the head, organization is the body. Second, change is predictable. That is, when you design a change effort, there's a reasonable degree of predictability and control. Third, there is the assumption of cascading intention: Once a course of action is determined, initiative flows from the top down, and the only trick is to communicate it and roll it out through the ranks.
New Rules:
And the sentenaces that sum it up for me are:
Old-fashioned leaders work under the preconception that their job is to make the hierarchy perform. They think that if they can figure out the best course of action, communicate it down to the troops, and then measure the results, then they'll have a high-performance organization.
I wish my current management team would read this because they fit into the old, despite what they or other may think and,
they're really producing organizations that are less adaptable to change -- and that may cause a cataclysmic failure. Leaders have to remember that in living systems, things happen that you can't predict, and once they do, those events can set off avalanches with consequences that you could never imagine.
I don't want to be around for the cataclysmic failure...
Posted by Paul Goodison at August 22, 2003 10:53 PM | TrackBack