"The key to management is to get rid of the managers," advised Ricardo Semler, whose TED Talk
went viral, introducing terms such as “industrial democracy” and
“corporate re-engineering”. It’s important to point out that Mr. Semler
isn’t an academic or an expert in management theory, he is the CEO of a
successful industrial company. His views are unlikely to represent
mainstream thinking on organizational design. But perhaps it is time we
redefine the term “manager”, and question whether the idea of
“management” as it was inherited from the industrial era, has outlived
its usefulness.
The World Bank estimates the size of the global workforce
at about 3.5 billion people, and by no means would I expect, much less
advocate, that those who are employed today will transition into a
management-free structure in the near or even medium term. The vast
majority of work involving human labour is still best carried out in a
traditional organisational structure.
In a world of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and
ambiguity), it is the tech unicorns that will be the early adopters of a
post-hierarchical model. In fact, some have already
embraced it. Today’s competitive landscape is defined by one word:
disruption. The ideas of incremental progress, continuous improvement,
and process optimizations just don’t cut the mustard anymore; those
practices are necessary, but insufficient. It is now impossible to build
enduring success without “intrapreneurship” - creating new ideas from within an organisation.
The organisational dilemmas faced by ambitious disruptors are best exemplified by Netflix. Their human resources guru, Patty McCord,
identified a problem that appears obvious in retrospect: as businesses
grow, so does their complexity. But that comes at a cost of shrinking
talent density: the proportion of high-performers within an organistion.
The slide deck she developed with the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, went viral, and Sheryl Sandberg referred to it
as possibly the most important document to come out of Silicon Valley.
That said, Patty McCord did not earn her accolades by identifying
problems. What captivated everyone’s imagination were the unorthodox
solutions that she offered: “Over the years we learned that if we asked
people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies,
most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost.”
The commentary on Netflix’s corporate culture often focuses on its
concrete HR policies, such as self-allotted vacations, and the absence
of travel expense reports. But these are just derivatives of a larger
vision: high business complexity need not be managed with standard
processes and ever-growing rulebook. Patty McCord advocated the exact
opposite: limit the tyranny of procedures, bring on board
high-performers, and let them self-manage in an environment of maximum
flexibility.
Today, we define management as the process of dealing with or
controlling things or people. And if this is not a red flag to a CEO
running anything other than a widget factory, I don’t know what is.
Controlling things no longer appears plausible,
and controlling people is downright counterproductive. Steve Jobs hit
the nail on the head when he said: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart
people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can
tell us what to do.”
Apple’s co-founder is rightfully considered one of the greatest
visionaries of our time, but had he been born in, say, the 17th century –
or even 50 years earlier than he was – I doubt such a pronouncement
would have resonated with his contemporaries. The post-management era is
only just beginning to dawn. And it is the ever-accelerating pace of
technological progress that is responsible for destroying old paradigms.
Having smart people tell landowners what to do in a pre-industrial
society would not have led to better economic outcomes. In the best-case
scenario, it would have invited ridicule. There was no evidence to
suggest, at the time, that the production and population growth were not
one of the same.
While the division of labour was the hallmark of the industrial
era, it is becoming increasingly difficult today to parse out and
allocate white-collar work in the form of specific tasks. Regardless of
how we describe the present, be it the digital epoch, the Fourth
Industrial Revolution era, or the “second machine age”, what it boils
down to is that all work that requires supervision is being outsourced
to robots and algorithms. Non-standard, creative, experimental work, on
the other hand, doesn’t naturally lend itself to management.
The second fundamental shift we see now is that a strategy of
making a plan and then executing it is no longer viable. What used to be
known as “muddling through” is now seen as adapting to the
fast-changing environment. Strategy, as we know it, is dead. Dealing with uncertainty
is the number one challenge and, as the cliché goes, it’s the number
one opportunity too. If your company isn’t the disruptor, it’s a clear
sign that it’s about to be disrupted.
The bottom line is that the hierarchical management mode is no
longer suited for the challenges of the modern economy. Every pillar of a
traditional organization is now in flux, as was brilliantly
conceptualized by Tanmay Vora.
The status quo is often protected by the vocabulary of business:
directors direct, presidents preside, and managers manage. But all those
activities are adding much less value than they used to be. They
constrain innovation and stifle creativity in the pursuit of order.
Contextual awareness, peripheral vision, design thinking and a
multi-disciplinary approach – these are all terms that are trending in
modern office-speak. And deservedly so. A project-based and titles-free
organization — where yesterday’s team member is today’s team lead — can
deliver the flexibility and agility that businesses yearn for.
“Context Curator” is the term I’d like to introduce to the business
dictionary. To lead a project is not to assign tasks and monitor
performance, but to empower, to define the broader context, and to
organically link the work of one team with the rest of the business.
Following the example of Netflix and striving for higher talent density
is only half the battle. Curating the context in which high performers
can excel – rather than attempting to manage them – is the key to
unleashing their full potential.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/12/is-management-era-over/
@administração @economia
