0:44
And saying to yourself, what is our management model now?
My hunch is that, in actually filling in that questionnaire five years from now,
the answers that you would get would actually be probably closer to
the existing model, than the one that you are aspiring towards.
In other words, they'd be closer to the blobs, the circles,
on the left rather than the circles on the right.
Now, can't prove that to you, but whenever I present this to audiences where we
have a chance to discuss it, most people actually agree with me.
Most people agree that despite the fact that they would love to,
to move their model a little bit to the right, they actually end up
with a very similar, and sim, similar story to the one that they've got today.
Why is that?
Is it that companies for
whatever reason are completely inert, completely unable to change?
Well my argument is the following.
On the chart here, you see that there are forces pulling us in both directions.
In other words, while there are absolutely some forces pulling us
to the right side here, forces for change, forces that we
talked about a little bit in the course of the, of the last few weeks.
But, there are also forces for
stasis, for inertia, in other words, there are things that are holding us back.
2:01
Now, I'm not going to tell you what exactly I think those forces are.
I've got a pretty good idea.
I certainly know what some of them are.
But, what we're going to do is in the course room we're going to ask you to
have a little bit of a discussion.
And we're going to actually deliberately ask you to,
to kick these around with some of your peers, people who are doing this course.
and, and myself and the teaching team will also provide you some with this,
with some assistance on that.
And, the three questions we want to ask you are pretty straightforward.
First of all, what are the major forces pulling us to the left hand side,
if you like, that do it, holding us back?
What are the forces pulling us to the right or,
or allowing us to change, to get out of our traditional ways of working?
And, which of those forces do you believe ultimately, are stronger?
2:47
That is a big question.
In some ways, it almost serves as a bit of a summary for
the way that the entire course has been developing over these last few weeks.
And so, after you've had a chance to, to discuss it in the course room, I will
actually write some sort of analysis, some sort of summary and, and give that to you.
Because, I think it's quite useful to hear my point of view on it.
But, I don't want to tell you now, because that would kind of give the game away.
So, in your own time during the course room,
you'll, you'll, you'll have an opportunity to talk about that.
Before we finish this little segment, I just want to make one, one interesting
historical observation which kind of reaffirms the, the challenge we face.
And, it's a slide showing, showing a book.
A book that was printed 20 years ago by the current Dean of
Harvard business school, Milton Nohria and his colleague, Bob Eccles.
They did a study 20 years back, and, and they called it Beyond the Hype,
where they were trying to find the future of management.
In some ways, you know, they were trying to write a book on exactly the same
topic as, as I've written books on in the last couple of years.
And, they were looking at these, these attributes of, of, of modern companies.
They were flat, they were decentralized, they were empowered.
You can see the list of features they came across.
However, what they concluded, was that even though lots of companies were talking
about this stuff, even back then, 20 years ago, there wasn't anything like as much
progress being made on those things, as the companies would have liked to believe.
And, what Noria and Eccles claim in that particular book
is that what's happening is that companies use these words almost as
a rhetorical way of pushing people to do things a bit differently.
They're not saying that those things aren't happening,
they're just saying that the rhetoric is rather more important than the reality.
Now, I'm not sure I particularly agree with all of their conclusions.
My point here is a much more simple one, which is that, do not get trapped into
thinking these words about engagement, and being flat, and being empowered, and
emergent, rather than bureaucratic, and collective wisdom, rather than hierarchy.
You don't be confused into believing that these are somehow concepts which have
only just been invented.
They were around 20 years ago when Nohria and
Eccles wrote that book, and they have been around many years before that.
So, there is a fascinating dynamic here.
Absolutely, there were things changing, but
there's an awful lot of things staying the same.
So, to summarize this segment,
the framework that I've developed, the one that we
spent the last two weeks really kind of putting together is extremely useful.
I use it a great deal when working with companies as a consultant,
as an adviser, to try to understand what's happening.
It's a good way of identifying the current model of management.
It's a good way of identifying where the company's trying to go.
And, if you think about it,
the gap between where they are today and where they want to go.
That's the gap that has to be filled,
if you like, with innovative approaches to management.
However, we have to be realistic as well as looking for
opportunities to make changes to things we have to be realistic, for there are a lot
of forces which make it quite difficult for us to do the things that we want to.
As I say, that's been a theme of this course, and it really comes out very,
very clearly as we put this framework together, and
we evaluate where companies are, and where they would like to be on this frame
Julian BirkinshawProfessor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship
