Harvard Business Asks – Where Will Management Innovation Take Us?
By Michelle Malay Carter on March 11, 2008
Jim Heskett has posed this question over at Harvard Business Online.
My Comment is Proving of Interest
I’ve posted my comment with a conglomeration of thoughts and links?from Mission Minded Management.? Google Analytics tells me that my comment is bringing international traffic into Mission Minded Management.? The ideas are piquing interest.
Rightful Attribution – Elliott Jaques
I can’t take credit for the origination of the ideas.? They are from Elliott Jaques’ Requisite Organization model.? His ideas?prove innovative when compared to the status quo, but they are not new.?
Jaques’ ideas are like buried treasure that I dig up, one jewel at a time, and wave at readers.? Most can’t help but be struck by their simple elegance.
Elliott Jaques was a man before his time.? Such men rarely befall kindness in their times.? At the heart of everything Elliott did was his concern for human dignity at work and the heartbreaking societal implications of dysfunctional workplaces.
Will You Choose Curiosity or Defensiveness?
His innovative theories and models were not met with curiosity but rather defensiveness.? That is why I made deliberate decision not to mention the model within my Harvard Business comment.?
The model has been misinterpreted, misunderstood, misappropriated, and maligned.? Hence, I was hoping to re-offer the ideas detached from the model name, in the event that the model name carried any baggage for readers.
More Humane Workplaces?
My poem, Organization Design – Seek and Ye Shall Find, was republished on another blog.? The blogger says:? “Half of the time I don?t even understand what she [Michelle Malay Carter]?is talking about, but she sounds like someone with a very humane perspective on management.? And she has mastered ManagementSpeak?.? There is hope yet for the world.”
If someone reads my writing which is rooted in Dr. Jaques’ vision, and it reads as humane, it means my blog is fulfilling its mission.?
I’ve got to believe if I can paint a picture of what work could be?and some insight as to how to get there, character-filled executive leaders?will no longer settle for what is.
Does your organization feel humane or schizophrenic?
Filed Under Corporate Values, Employee Engagement, Executive Leadership, Organization Design, Requisite Organization
Comments
2 Responses to “Harvard Business Asks – Where Will Management Innovation Take Us?”
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Michelle,
In case your readers don’t follow the comment thread at the HBR blog site, I’d like to share my comment on Jim Heskett’s article and the subsequent comments:
“As a practitioner in the organizational performance field (including process design and continuous improvement), I remember looking with more than a little interest at Hammer’s concept of BPR. In the end, though, I decided that BPR was just the organizational equivalent of brain transplant surgery–almost all risk with a low probability of any reward (let alone a reward sufficient to justify the damage done while removing the old brain). The consequent BPR disasters of the early 90s confirm that assessment (despite the BPR supporters who protest, “But if only those projects had been done correctly…”).
“It occurs to me that the reason BPR sounded tenable is that most managers and executives who committed to it really didn’t know how to identify a capable process, let alone design one. Consequently, they came to the conclusion that the only solution to incapable processes was to totally start over (and throw a lot of technology into the mix, since that was the route to the future).
“Do you see the analogy? If you don’t understand what makes a hierarchy capable, your first choice of fixing your organization design is to throw out the hierarchy and go with something else, rather than making the hierarchy capable.
“Good luck with that.”
Hi Will,
Thanks for the comment. Good points. I love the line: BPR was just the organizational equivalent of brain transplant surgery?almost all risk with a low probability of any reward (let alone a reward sufficient to justify the damage done while removing the old brain).
Michelle