Management Innovation

I have been reading, or at least having read to me, The Future of Management by Gary Hamel and Bill Green. I heard an interview with him on Radio four's In business.

My understanding of his message is that for years we have tuned our management princibles for greater efficiency and looked for innovation in our technology and research but not in our management. A theme that runs through the book is that you can make people work efficently but in order for them to bring more to work each day the have to want to. The book is a mix of his insites into management pratice up to the present, some real world examples of how some people have forged ahead with management innovation and then some ideas on how you can influence your management to change.

He looks at a company like Gore, the makers of Gore-Tex with their complete lack of management and Google with more formal enviroment that forces people to be always innovating. He also looks at large established companies like IBM and GE that have created the change in very stayed practices.

Advodating a stock market approach to new business and invovative ideas he again shows examples from companies like ?CostCo that show getting the masses to make decisions can lead to better results than some died in the wool managers who have self interests to protect.

I really like reading books like this with intelegent analysis of what the clever people are doing. You have an idea that in the back of your mind the status-quo is not right but having it stated like this makes my mind spin with ideas. While I will not be proposing a mass of innovations for my managers I will squirrel away his ideas and keep making wild suggestions where I see fit.

As a side note at one point he suggest that some of these management innovations come about because the people at the top have not been trained in traditional management princibles and so are not held back by knowledge. It has always worked for me.