From Karim R. Lakhani in Harvard Business Review:
Some tech pundits were surprised that Google decided to shut down Wave yesterday just a year after its launch andchastised the company for its decision. But I’m not surprised and I applaud the company’s decision to pull the plug after it was clear the market wasn’t interested in Wave. From my vantage point as someone who studies innovation, Google’s decision was exactly the right move and provides some very important lessons for managing innovation in both small and large organizations.
The first lesson, of course, is that uncertainty haunts all innovation attempts. Charles Kettering, inventor and VP of R&D and Board Member of GM (1920-1947) famously noted that when it comes to innovation: “You don’t know when you are going to get the thing, whether its going to work or not and whether its going to have any value whatsoever.” In essence Kettering implied that any innovation attempt faces a combination of temporal, technical and market uncertainty. Even a company like Google, recognized for its wealth of intellectual talent in its employees, was not able to figure out before hand if there would be a market for Wave. Some types of uncertainties are simply not resolvable before the fact, and the only true way to find out is to make the investment and launch an innovative product in the market place. Google should be applauded and rewarded for pioneering a risky project and publicly launching it so that it can learn from the market.
For more…
From Matthew Reiez, Times Higher Education
Mission statements form a major part of how many institutions present themselves to the world - and, at least in theory, how they see themselves.
Although the precise terms differ, it is now common for universities to make the effort to define their basic purpose (mission), major longer-term aspirations (vision) and underlying values. There is fun to be had in comparing the self-descriptions that appear in their corporate advertising (see quiz, page 40). Yet mission statements present a far more considered picture, often based on extensive consultation and debate. What is the point of them, and can they justify their cost, especially at times of financial constraint?
Universities are willing to invest considerable amounts of money in getting their mission statements right, as the example of the University of Nottingham indicates (see box, below). Certainly, words that genuinely inspire people are worth paying for. The Conservative Party must have handed Saatchi & Saatchi a small fortune for the phrase “Labour isn’t working”, but it is generally agreed to have played a major role in helping the Tories win the 1979 election. Given the sums universities must spend on developing declarations of their missions, one would hope that the results read like the products of top-class copywriters. So are they genuinely inspirational, banal or positively leaden?
To Read More…
From Omar Malik, Times Higher Education
Philosophers have long pondered the big question: why is life such a bugger? Lesser orders have similarly wondered why life is just one damn thing after another. Why do things always go wrong? The answer is short and simple: the laws of nature.
Some like to believe that we are the highest form of life, blessed with free will. Maybe. But as far as nature is concerned, we are just another of her countless products and, like the rest of them, serve sentence under her laws.
Francis Bacon said that we cannot command nature except by obeying her; sadly, he omitted to say that to obey her, we must first understand her. In macro terms that is surprisingly easy: all we have to do is identify her laws. The micro task of combating them is much more difficult, well beyond the scope of libraries of regulations, however vast.
To Read More…
From Times Higher Education,
In a chilly economic climate, business schools’ ability to deliver research with real-world relevance is essential. Tracey Hudson asks whether they can find the right academics to deliver those goals
“Because of this shortage, many business schools are adopting a model of education that de-emphasises the role of research professors and substitutes others who are not primarily researcher-teachers. Until PhD programmes increase in number and output, this worldwide trend will continue,” he says.
One of the biggest challenges faced by higher education institutions around the globe is the continuing shortage not of academics, but of the right kind of academics. And nowhere is the challenge greater than in one of the fastest-growing areas of the academic world - the international business school community.
According to Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, “there is a continuing shortage of PhD-trained professors, which is causing cost escalation for the very best”.
To Read More…
We are accepting book proposals for the imprint The Organization.
Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.
Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.
If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.
Please continue to check the Management Newsletter for news and information about the 2011 Management Conference. We will announce the dates and location soon.
To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Management Conference in Montreal, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tours and ‘down time’ are all welcome!
Join our Management Conference Flickr group here, and upload your pictures to easily share. Once you’ve joined, simply click on ‘Add something?’, and upload your photos or videos of the conference.
For information on sharing photos with Flickr, please read more here.
As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management, all submissions are sent for peer refereeing, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.
In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.
If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management, please email journals@theorganisation.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.
From Wes Davis in The New York Times:
FIFTY-SIX years ago today, a Bell System manager sent postcards to 16 of the most capable and promising young executives at the company. What was written on the postcards was surprising, especially coming from a corporate ladder-climber at a time when the nation was just beginning to lurch out of a recession: “Happy Bloom’s Day.”
It was a message to mark the annual celebration of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” the epic novel built around events unfolding on a single day — June 16, 1904 — in the life of the fictional Dubliner Leopold Bloom. But the postcard also served as a kind of diploma for the men who received it.
Two years earlier a number of Bell’s top executives, led by W. D. Gillen, then president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, had begun to worry about the education of the managers rising through the company’s hierarchy. Many of these junior executives had technical backgrounds, gained at engineering schools or on the job, and quite a few had no college education at all. They were good at their jobs, but they would eventually rise to positions in which Gillen felt they would need broader views than their backgrounds had so far given them.
To read more…
Nuzhat Jafri became the first executive director of the Office of the Fairness Commissioner in September 2007.
She has wide leadership experience in both public and private sectors. She directed diversity initiatives at Scotiabank and previously at the Bank of Montreal, where she delivered awardwinning leading-edge programs. In the Ontario government, Ms. Jafri developed a cultural policy framework at the Ministry of Culture. She oversaw the passage of amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act and the development and implementation of key regulations. Earlier, she was a director at the former Employment Equity Commission. Most recently, Ms. Jafri was the manager of Global Experience Ontario, the information and referral centre for internationally trained persons at the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.
The Office of the Fairness Commissioner is an independent agency of the government of Ontario. Its goal is to make sure that people are treated fairly when they apply to become licensed professionals in one of Ontario’s regulated professions, no matter where they were trained. This goal is widely supported in Ontario, and reflects the principles and core values of its people. www.fairnesscommissioner.ca
Today the Management Newsletter will be re-launched – marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Management Community. The newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.
It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Management Community.
If you are not currently a subscriber but would like to receive future newsletter emails, please go to theorganisation.com and click on “Sign Up: Our Newsletter” in the upper right-hand corner.
If you have inquiries, concerns, or general comments, please feel free to contact the newsletter team at support@ theorganisation.com.
The 2010 Management Conference will be held at HEC Montreal in Montreal Canada from 26-28 July.
Plenary Speakers
- Nuzhat Jafri, Executive Director, Office of the Fairness Commissioner
- Mildred Schwartz, Professor, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
- Emma Stenstrom, Professor, Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden
- Frank Habermann, Managing Director, Becota, The Berlin Consulting & Management Association, Berlin, Germany
- Alain Senteni, Dean, School of e-Education, Hamdan Bin Mohammed e-University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/#ppt. To submit a proposal, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Management Conference, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/register/.
Themes
http://theorganisation.com/ideas/themes/
Conference Dinner & Tours
http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/activities-and-extras/
Accommodation
http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/accommodation/
From Amartya Sen, NewStateman
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith’s first book, was published in early 1759. Smith, then a young professor at the University of Glasgow, had some understandable anxiety about the public reception of the book, which was based on his quite progressive lectures. On 12 April, Smith heard from his friend David Hume in London about how the book was doing. If Smith was, Hume told him, prepared for “the worst”, then he must now be given “the melancholy news” that unfortunately “the public seem disposed to applaud [your book] extremely”. “It was looked for by the foolish people with some impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to be very loud in its praises.” This light-hearted intimation of the early success of Smith’s first book was followed by serious critical acclaim for what is one of the truly outstanding books in the intellectual history of the world.
After its immediate success, Moral Sentiments went into something of an eclipse from the beginning of the 19th century, and Smith was increasingly seen almost exclusively as the author of his second book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which, published in 1776, transformed the subject of economics. The neglect of Moral Sentiments, which lasted through the 19th and 20th centuries, has had two rather unfortunate effects.
To Read More…
From Drake Bennett, Boston.com
Two weeks after it went on sale, the iPad is still the toast of the tech world, with its image gracing magazine covers, market analysts speculating about whether it will transform the worlds of publishing and entertainment, and consumers buying the gadget at a healthy clip. This at a cost of at least $500 each, at a time when Americans are still cautious about large nonessential purchases, and for a device that remains difficult to succinctly describe, much less figure out the purpose of.
It’s early yet, but it looks like another success for a company that, more than any other consumer brand, is synonymous with the new. Apple has forged a unique and lucrative reputation for creating irresistible, intuitive objects of techno-desire, shaping along the way how we work, communicate, and procrastinate, and the look and feel of the electronic gadgetry that increasingly fills our lives.
To Read More…
From John Dickerson, Slate
Risk has taken a beating recently, thanks to the financial crisis. Risk is supposed to be about choice and consequence. You take a chance and you win or you lose. But then banks and insurance companies found ways to pervert this. They devised ever more esoteric ways to pass risk on to others, so there was, in fact, no risk to them at all. In this distortion, insurance techniques, created to limit risk, exposed millions to it. The laws of probability, originally devised to solve a moral dilemma—how to equitably distribute winnings in a game of chance—wound up inequitably distributing losses to people who didn’t even know they were at the table. The architects of these gambles left their jobs with enormous bonuses, and companies that helped cripple the financial system were repaid by the government bailout. They took a chance, and lost—but they still won.
To Read More…
From David Bolchover, The Economist
In these times, the overpaid fat-cat in the corner office makes a barn door of a target. Particularly in the financial services sector, where even at those companies bailed out by the taxpayer, senior executives have been quick to return to obscene bonuses, often coupled with poor performance. To add insult, such behaviour is justified by the alleged need to “let the markets decide” or to ensure that talent is “justly rewarded”.
Typically, sanctimoniousness at the top comes with a veiled threat to pack up and head abroad if the government even thinks about reining them in. Understandable, then, that many feel fury at such a sense of entitlement and enrichment, and that sensible discussion tends to evaporate in a flare of mass indignation.
Understandable but ultimately unsustainable. Such populist anger risks taking down innocent entrepreneurs and financial firms as the blunt instrument of regulation is wielded. More reasoned debate about the issue of excessive executive pay is needed. This is David Bolchover’s ambition in his highly readable and punchy polemic.
To Read More…
From Virginia Postrel, The New York Times
Sheena Iyengar is the psychologist responsible for the famous jam experiment. You may have heard about it: At a luxury food store in Menlo Park, researchers set up a table offering samples of jam. Sometimes, there were six different flavors to choose from. At other times, there were 24. (In both cases, popular flavors like strawberry were left out.) Shoppers were more likely to stop by the table with more flavors. But after the taste test, those who chose from the smaller number were 10 times more likely to actually buy jam: 30 percent versus 3 percent. Having too many options, it seems, made it harder to settle on a single selection.
Wherever she goes, people tell Iyengar about her own experiment. The head of Fidelity Research explained it to her, as did a McKinsey & Company executive and a random woman sitting next to her on a plane. A colleague told her he had heard Rush Limbaugh denounce it on the radio. That rant was probably a reaction to Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice” (2004), who often cites the jam study in antimarket polemics lamenting the abundance of consumer choice. In Schwartz’s ideal world, stores wouldn’t offer such ridiculous, brain-taxing plenitude. Who needs two dozen types of jam?
To Read More…
Congratulations to Tracy Freeze the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of knowledge, culture and change in organisations with their paper Transforming the Cynic: Recommendations for Leaders Implementing Organizational Change.
Paper abstract: This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on attitudes, employee cynicism toward organizational change and transformational leadership. Many researchers agree that successful implementation of organizational change is essential to the health and progress of organizations (e.g., Armenakis & Bedeian, 1999; Stanley, Meyer, & Topolnytsky, 2005). One barrier to the successful implementation of organizational change is cynicism. Cynicism in the work context is considered to be a state-based attitude and consequently, may be amenable and responsive to leadership behaviors such as those outlined by transformational leadership theory (e.g., Bommer, Rich, & Rubin, 2005; Reichers, Wanous, & Austin, 1997). It is hypothesized that current research and knowledge from the areas of attitude theory, employee cynicism and transformational leadership can inform leaders and offer recommendations for the successful implementation of organizational change. More research is needed to determine the effectiveness of transformational leadership behaviors in the context of employee cynicism toward organizational change. If transformational leadership behaviors are found effective in transforming cynicism, future research should focus on furthering a framework for understanding the underlying determinants of that effectiveness as well as examining the possible detrimental effects of suppressing cynical attitudes.
If you have read this paper and would like to make comments please add a review.
From Joshua Brustein in the New York Times blog Bits:
A service released earlier this week by Teneros, an online communication services company, makes it much easier for companies to keep tabs on their employees’ social networking activities.
The software, called Social Sentry, will automatically monitor Facebook and Twitteraccounts for between $2 and $8 an employee, depending on the size of the company and the level of activity being monitored.
…
Social Sentry draws only on publicly posted information on Facebook and Twitter; the company plans to add YouTube, MySpace and LinkedIn by this summer. The company is marketing the product as a way to watch for the release of confidential or embarrassing information and to measure how much time employees are spending on social media during work hours.
For more…
From Chris Cameron at readwriteweb.com:
We have talked about the power of utilizing social networks for businesses before in our Weekend Reading series with books like The Facebook Era, by Clara Shih and Crush It!, by Gary Vaynerchuk, and this week we’ve got another book under a similar vein. Published just last month, Social Networking for Businesses: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs, by Rawn Shah is a guide for companies looking to take advantage of the collaborative communities of social networks to improve their business.
Author Rawn Shah has plenty of experience in this very subject as he is the Best Practices Lead on the Social Software Adoption Team at IBM. In Social Networking for Businesses, Shah breaks down the essentials and methods of modeling social experiences for businesses to get the most out of their users and customers. One of the most important factors to the success of social business experiences is the leadership of those experiences, says Shah, who points to the success of blogs and Wikipedia as examples.
For more…
From the International Center for Research on Women:
In a new, groundbreaking study, International Center for Research on Women examines how cutting-edge innovations can transform women’s lives. The ICRW report analyzes how a variety of innovations that used technology, changed social norms and strengthened economic vitality helped women.
Researchers identified seven core approaches – or levers – needed for any innovation to create meaningful change for women.
They include:
- Creating strategic partnerships among governments, the private sector and civil society.
- Including women in the design and implementation of innovative ideas.
- Having committed support from governments as well as efforts at the grassroots level.
ICRW’s findings come at a critical moment.
Social, political and economic shifts globally are creating a perfect storm for innovations to benefit and potentially empower women. Take foot-pedaled water pumps. In sub-Saharan Africa, women in rural communities traditionally are responsible for collecting water to irrigate the crops that feed their families and that sell in markets. It can be a time- and labor-consuming effort.
For the web page…
For the research brief…
From Edward Tufte, as told to Jimmy Guterman in the MITSloan Management Review:
On the (Very, Very Bad) Design of Corporate Web Sites
The front page of a good news site will have 300 links on it. That’s great. And so the question is: How come your corporate Web site has only seven links on its opening screen, and the links are called “sharing our values,” “participation” and so on? No user has ever asked Google to show him all the Web sites about sharing your company’s values.
A corporate Web site should do what a good news Web site does. If you look at the really successful Web sites where there are millions of hits, especially nonfiction Web sites, the New York Times and Google News, they all have 300 links on the opening page. How come businesses don’t do that? How come the links are to “sharing,” “participating” and “our values”? That’s flabby design for flabby content. The models for presenting nonfiction should not be what your competitors are doing, but rather excellence in reporting nonfiction. And there are terrific examples out there for reporting nonfiction.
The kind of conformity toward flabbiness in corporate Web sites is astonishing, and they’re imitating each other in their content and design flabbiness. It’s silly. People are inherently distrustful of them. And yet most of those sites are, in fact, about reporting facts. But they get softened up by the marketing people. You get all these pressures that tend to normalize design, that tend to make it like other corporations and that make things intellectually flabby and visually flabby. They turn into pitches.
For the article…
Training the Next Generation of Knowledge Workers: Readings for Effective Secondary Education & Workplace Learning Practices an edited collection by Jonathan H. Westover is now available from The Organisation imprint.
In today’s shifting global economy and the emergence of the technology and service-oriented knowledge organization, how do we train the rising generation of knowledge workers with the knowledge, skills, and the ability to perform and add value in a hyper-intensive competitive global marketplace?
What are the methods and strategies for effectively preparing the future knowledge worker generation? What needs to be done in our institutions of higher learning? What initiatives and methods need to be adopted by organizations for greater engaged learning and transference of knowledge to practical application in the workplace? These are just some of the pressing questions facing the organizations of today.
This edited collection provides a comprehensive introduction to organizational learning and explores the wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. It will be informative to management academics and instructors, while also instructing organizational managers, leaders, and human resource development professions of all types seeking to understand proven practices and methods to train the next generation of knowledge workers that will drive an enhanced competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive global economy.
From The Economist
It is
hard to overstate the importance of Toyota in Japan’s business psyche. The company has long been regarded as the pinnacle of Japanese innovation, manufacturing quality and industrial strength—particularly since it overtook General Motors in 2008 to become the world’s biggest carmaker. Its “lean” manufacturing techniques and culture of continuous improvement were the envy of the business world. Companies sent delegations to tour Toyota’s factories in the hope that some of its magic would rub off on them. Within Japan the firm was considered the nation’s industrial champion, as the sun seemed to set on other giants such as Sony and Hitachi.
But within a few weeks all this has changed. Problems with “unintended acceleration” of its cars, which the firm has only belatedly taken seriously, have triggered an escalating crisis and the recall of a whopping 8m vehicles. Toyota’s woes were compounded on February 9th when it said it would also recall 440,000 hybrid vehicles, including the celebrated Prius, to fix a problem with their brakes. The firm’s reputation for quality, on which the business was built, is shattered. Its market capitalisation has dropped by an amount roughly equal to the entire value of Ford. But the greatest damage has been done by its misreading and mishandling of the crisis.
To Read More…
From The Economist
• London Business School has topped the first of the year’s important global MBA rankings. It has taken the top spot outright in the Financial Times list of the top 100 full-time programmes, after sharing the honour with Pennsylvania’s Wharton School last year.
• Two business-school heads are on the move. Arnoud De Meyer, the director of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, is stepping down to become president of the Singapore Management University. Professor De Meyer had previously helped INSEAD set up its Singapore campus. Meanwhile, Ted Snyder, who confirmed he was leaving Chicago’s Booth School in December, is to take up the reins at Yale School of Management.
• No surprise that 2009 wasn’t a good one for the MBA job market. The MBA Career Services Council has just released the results of its autumn survey, which show that 79% of business schools saw a decline in on-campus recruitment last year. Traditional sectors such as financial services and consulting were hit particularly hard. But the CSC did note signs of recovery, with some areas—including energy, government and healthcare—seeing increased activity.
To Read More….
Globalization, Labor & the Transformation of Work: Readings for Seeking a Competitive Advantage in an Increasingly Global Economy an edited collection by Jonathan H. Westover is now available from The Organisation imprint.
“Globalization” is a key concept that represents a wide range of complex processes in our modern world. These processes have wide sweeping impacts on the international political economy, international capitalism, and the ability for organizations of all types to gain and maintain a competitive advantage and successfully compete in an increasingly global economy. Additionally, increasing “globalization” over the past several decades has changed the dynamics of an increasingly international labor force, how organizations compete for this labor, their internal labor dynamics, and ultimately how they do business. As such, the nature of work and the workplace has also shifted dramatically over the past several decades.
This edited collection provides a comprehensive introduction to “globalization” and its wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. It will be informative to academics and students interested in the interplay between macro global processes and the more micro organizational and individual impacts, while also instructing managers, policy makers, and practitioners of all types interested in the role that “globalization” is playing in shifting international labor dynamics and the transformation of the modern workplace.
From The Economist
Henry Hazlitt, one of the great popularisers of free-market thinking, once said that good ideas have to be relearned in every generation. This is certainly true of good ideas about business. A generation ago Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did an excellent job of making the case in favour of business. Today it looks as though the case needs to be made all over again.
It is hardly surprising that business has fallen from grace in recent years. The credit crunch almost plunged the world into depression. The new century began with the implosion of Enron and other prominent firms. Some bosses pay themselves like princes while preaching austerity to their workers. Business titans who once graced the covers of magazines have been hauled before congressional committees or carted off to prison.
Business people have been at pains to point out that it is unfair to judge all of their kind by the misdeeds of a few. The credit crunch was the handiwork of bankers (who lent too much money) and policymakers (who fooled themselves into thinking that they had abolished boom and bust). Corporate criminals like WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers and Tyco’s Denis Kozlowski were imprisoned for their crimes. Avaricious bosses like Angelo Mozilo, who pocketed more than $550m during his inglorious reign at Countrywide, are exceptions. The average American boss is actually paid less today than he was in 2000.
To Read More…
From, Matt Pressman Vanity Fair.
AOL went from pioneering powerhouse to laughed-at laggard when changing technologies made their business model of charging people for e-mail accounts and Internet access obsolete. So now
they are remaking the company with an entirely different strategy: selling ads against original content produced by an army of well-paid professional journalists. Unfortunately, that’s the same business model that has driven America’s newspapers to the brink of ruin.
When most people think of AOL, they think of it as the e-mail provider for people who aren’t with it enough to switch to a free service such as Gmail. But while the bulk of AOL’s revenue still comes from its old-school subscribers, the company’s future is in the content business (with a sideline in social networking). In advance of its long-awaited split from Time Warner, which will occur next month, AOL has been on a hiring-and-acquisition spree. It now owns upward of 75 niche blogs and news sites, including DailyFinance.com, Engadget.com, and Fanhouse.com, staffed in large part by reporters who used to work in print. C.E.O. Tim Armstrong said at a conference last month that AOL employs more than 3,000 journalists.
To Read More…
From Schumpeter, in The Economist.
In the normal run of things the management world is divided into dozens of mutually suspicious tribes—theoreticians versus practitioners, publicity-hogging gurus versus retiring academics, supporters of “scientific” management versus advocates of the “humanistic” sort. But this month has seen unusual comity: the leaders of all the management tribes came together to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Peter Drucker, a man who is often described as “the father of modern management” and “the world’s greatest management thinker”.
The celebrations took place all around the world, most notably in Vienna, where Drucker was born, in southern California, where he spent his golden years, and in China, where he is exercising growing influence. The speakers were not limited to luminaries of management: they also included Rick Warren, the spiritual guru of the moment in America, Frances Hesselbein, a former head of the American Girl Scouts, and David Gergen, an adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents.
To mark the centennial, the Harvard Business Review put a photograph of Drucker on its cover along with the headline: “What Would Peter Do? How his wisdom can help you navigate turbulent times”. Claremont Graduate University in California, where Drucker taught, boasts not one but two institutions that are dedicated to keeping the flame alive: the Peter Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management and the Drucker Institute. The institute acts as the hub of a global network of Drucker societies that are trying to apply his principles to everything from schools to refuse collection. It also produces a “do-it-yourself workshop-in-a-box” called “Drucker Unpacked”.
Why does Drucker continue to enjoy such a high reputation? Part of the answer lies in people’s mixed emotions about management. The management-advice business is one of the most successful industries of the past century. When Drucker first turned his mind to the subject in the 1940s it was a backwater. Business schools were treated as poor relations by other professional schools. McKinsey had been in the management-consulting business for only a decade and the Boston Consulting Group did not yet exist. Officials at General Motors doubted if Drucker could find a publisher for his great study of the company, “Concept of the Corporation”, on the grounds that, as one of them put it, “I don’t see anyone interested in a book on management.”
Read more here…
The Economist writes in praise of the ideas of Russ Ackoff,
Today’s crisis is the result of a catastrophic failure, primarily in the financial system but also of our economic and political systems. Mr Ackoff spent most of the past half-century as the premier evangelist of systemic thinking, which he contrasted with the reductionist, atomistic thinking that had long dominated humanity’s approach to problem-solving in his view. Time and again, he would point out, decision-makers faced with crises failed to heed Albert Einstein’s warning that “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
More…
From Tim Hindle, The Economist.
Matrix management is a structure for running those companies that have both a diversity of products and a diversity of markets. In a matrix structure, responsibility for the products goes up and down one dimension and responsibility for the markets goes up and down another. This leaves most managers with a dual reporting line: to the head of their product division on the one hand, and to the head of their geographical market on the other.
Despite the potential confusion that this duality creates, matrix management was enormously popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Leading the fashion was Philips, a Dutch multinational electronics company, which first set up a matrix structure after the second world war. It had national organisations (NOs) and product divisions (PDs), and for a while they operated successfully as a network. The network was held together by a number of coordinating committees, which resolved any conflict between the two.
Read more…
Oct 19th 2009 From Economist.com
It aims to combine the flexibility and quality of craftsmanship with the low costs of mass production
Lean production is the name given to a group of highly efficient manufacturing techniques developed (mainly by large Japanese companies) in the 1980s and early 1990s. Lean production was seen as the third step in an historical progression, which took industry from the age of the craftsman through the methods of mass production and into an era that combined the best of both. It has been described as “the most fundamental change to occur since mass production was brought to full development by Henry Ford early in the 20th century”.
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The methods of lean production aim to combine the flexibility and quality of craftsmanship with the low costs of mass production. In lean-production systems a manufacturer’s employees are organised in teams. Within each team a worker is expected to be able to do all the tasks required of the team. These tasks are less narrowly specialised than those demanded of the worker in a mass-production system, and this variety enables the worker to escape from the soul-destroying repetition of the pure assembly line.
By Cosma Shalizi American Scientist
THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL MARKET: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street. Justin Fox. xviii + 382 pp. Harper Business, 2009. $27.99.
The Myth of the Rational Market, by Justin Fox, is an account—popular but thorough—of the roots, rise, triumph and ongoing fall of the theory of efficient markets in finance. This school of thought is an exemplary specimen of a type of social science that flourished after World War II: It has mathematical models at its center, has supposedly been empirically validated by statistical analyses, is indifferent to history and to institutions, and takes as an axiom that people are intelligent, farsighted and greedy. Unlike many economic theories, the efficient-market school has been influential beyond academia. It helped reshape ideas about how companies should be run, how executives should be paid, and indeed how the economy should be regulated (or not) to promote the general welfare. (In comic-book form: A mild-mannered social science by day, at night efficient-market theory puts on a cloak of ideology and struggles for the Capitalist Way.) The theory contributed, arguably, to setting up the crisis that has gripped the world economy since 2007. Its story is of much more than just scholarly interest.
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Accommodation for the 2010 Management Conference in Montréal, Canada may now be booked. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information.
A new analysis of the original data from the famous Hawthorne Studies by Steven D. Levitt, and John A. List questions the conclusion found in most textbooks.
The “Hawthorne effect,” a concept familiar to all students of social science, has had a profound influence both on the direction and design of research over the past 75 years. The Hawthorne effect is named after a landmark set of studies conducted at the Hawthorne plant in the 1920s. The first and most influential of these studies is known as the “Illumination Experiment.” Both academics and popular writers commonly summarize the results as showing that every change in light, even those that made the room dimmer, had the effect of increasing productivity. The data from the illumination experiments, however, were never formally analyzed and were thought to have been destroyed. Our research has uncovered these data. We find that existing descriptions of supposedly remarkable data patterns prove to be entirely fictional. There are, however, hints of more subtle manifestations of a Hawthorne effect in the original data.
Common Ground Publishing has launched a new imprint, The Organisation.
You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:
Books should be between 30,000 words to 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.
Maria E. Burke, University of Salford, Salford, UK
www.ManagementConference.com
Dr. Burke’s research is based in the area of Information Management. She currently holds a position at the University of Salford’s Business School within the Information Systems Group which was awarded a 6* rating in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. In addition she is a Visiting Fellow at the Jagiellonian University in Poland and has held visiting posts with the Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Budapest University of Technology and the Nicholas Copernicus University in North Poland. More…
Richard Harris, University of Glasgow, UK
www.ManagementConference.com
Richard Harris is the Alec Cairncross Chair of Applied Economics and the Director of the Centre for Public Policy for Regions at the University of Glasgow, UK. His research interests include micro-analysis of firm/plant level productivity in the UK using panel data; differences in (UK) regional performance; evaluation of government industrial policy; and, relative performance of UK SMEs. Future research includes Gibrat’s law - estimates for UK industry; Evaluation methodology for impact of government assistance on TFP; and, Relative performance of family-owned SMEs. More…
The London Review of Books has recently published The Money that Prays, an article by Jeremy Harding about banking in the Islamic world and how it fares in the economic downturn.
Last September, as dust and debris from the tellers’ floors began raining onto the empty vaults below, a note of satisfaction was sounded by bankers in the Arab world. Financial institutions sticking to the tenets of Islam, they announced, were largely immune from the debt crisis. Devout Muslims may lend and borrow under certain conditions; they can even buy and sell debt in the form of ‘Islamic’ bonds, but most other kinds of debt trading are frowned on. Al Rajhi Bank, based in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwait Finance House posted impressive profits in 2008. Both have come under some nervous scrutiny in 2009 but their ability to weather the recession that has set in behind the credit crunch is not at issue.
Accommodation for the 2009 Management Conference in Boston, USA may now be booked. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information.
26 - 29 July 2010
HEC Montreal, Montreal, Canada
http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/
On Wednesday, 24 June 2009 - Museum of Fine Arts Tour
Join us at the Museum of Fine Arts. We’ll enjoy a private one-hour tour of the Museum’s rich and extensive collection led by a trained guide.
On Friday, 26 June 2009 - Heart of the Freedom Trail Walking Tour
Join us after the last session for the perfect introduction to Boston.
On Saturday, 27 June 2009 - North End Walking Tour
Relax after a successful conference and join us for a walk through America’s oldest neighborhood.
For more information please see the Conference website.
Join us at the Prudential Center Top of the Hub Restaurant and Skywalk for our conference dinner at one of Boston’s finest dining destinations.
For more information please see the Conference website.
Marcus Breen, Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Cynthia Lee, Professor of Management and Organizational Development, College of Business Administration, Northeastern University, Boston, Masssachusetts, USA
Kathrin Zippel, Assoc. Prof. of Sociology, Sociology, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
We are pleased to announce that The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has been accepted for inclusion in Scopus.
Scopus is Elsevier’s abstract and citation database; one of the largest in the world.
Verna Allee, President, Value Networks LLC, Martinez, CA, USA
Susan Bolt, Coordinator Teaching and Learning, Curtin Business School, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
David P. Boyd, Professor, Management and Organizational Development Group, College of Business, Northeastern University, College of Business Administration, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
24-27 June 2009
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
www.ManagementConference.com
Congratulations to Susan Bolt, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of knowledge, culture and change in organisations.
Tina’s paper ‘Building the Capacity of Learning Professionals through an Infusion of Formal and Informal Learning’ can be accessed in the online bookstore: http://ijm.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.28/prod.844
Paper Abstract: The success of many organisations depends on their capacity to learn and because of this learning professionals in the fields of education and training are often engaged to build workforce capacity. The success of this scenario depends on the expertise of these learning professionals, but how is their capacity built? Formal learning is typically standardised, centrally controlled and vertically integrated approaches to the transmission of knowledge through organised curriculum modules that can lead to a qualification. Informal learning is more horizontally integrated, dynamic and occurs when people make a conscious effort to learn from their experiences and engage in individual or group reflection (Burns, 2002; Foley, 2004). In the past formal and informal learning were considered separately but an infusion of formal and informal learning may be a more appropriate approach in this new economy. This paper, based on results from an interpretive study investigating professional development in large Australian organisations in 2007, explores the professional development experiences of staff employed in training and educational organisations. Semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, using mixed methods, were conducted with staff from all levels of these organisations to investigate the relationship between adult learners’ professional development and organisations’ change agenda. Results indicated that in some situations there was considerable blurring of boundaries between informal and formal learning experiences. The conclusion is made that a balkanised approach to professional development is insufficient to build the capacity of learning professionals in the 21st Century and a more dynamic approach that moves flexibly between formal and informal learning approaches is recommended.
Paper submissions are now open for Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management.
You will first need to submit a presentation proposal for the conference as either an attending or virtual participant. If accepted you will be able to submit your full paper for refereeing and possible publication in the Journal.
Please check the submission guidelines prior to submitting your paper.
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