Thursday 1 December 2011

This Article Presents No Suggestions, Guidelines Or Recommendations on Management

Browsing via a digest of management and leadership articles on an aggregating site, it wasn't hard to choose up the overall tenor of most of what was provided. 'Three leading guidelines to accomplish organisational effectiveness' 'five approaches to hire smart people' 'the seven "musts" of powerful strategic planning'. Alongside these, my own articles need to have seemed an anaemic contribution. No grids, no frameworks, not leading guidelines.

As a social object, articles about management fit into a extended and distinguished tradition of offering precepts about how to live your life modelled to begin with by the perfect religions. There are ten commandments in Christianity, 5 pillars of Islam and the eight-fold path of Buddhism. Why not, then, have 5 factors to bear in mind when carrying out strategic planning? It's effortless to bear in mind and perhaps gives a defence against anxiety if 1 could at least bear certain factors in mind when undertaking some complicated management initiative.

Secondly, the notion of offering three, 5 or seven (does it normally will need to be an odd number?) guidelines for achieving something is consonant with the popular humanistic notion that nature operates by straightforward guidelines underlying the complexity of what we encounter. The notion carried over directly into theories of management is that if we could identify these straightforward guidelines we could cut via the complexity of what we are dealing with. The notion is a comforting 1 that this daunting method that we are engaged in is basically rather straightforward if we could just identifya few guidelines to cut via the mess, so that we could be at 1 with the mysterious forces that shape the universe. This aspiration for a kind of mystical 'deep synergy' is evident in a number of prominent writers, not least Meg Wheately and Peter Senge.

Thirdly, we are pattern-forming animals who make sense of the amazing amount of data that we have to screen every day by reducing and simplifying, or, as I demonstrated in a prior post, by ignoring certain events in rapidly altering and dynamic scenarios. Mostly we are not even aware of what we are screening out, so caught up are we in the hurly burly of what we are carrying out. This perspective would surely destabilise the notion that we are generating rational and conscious alternatives about how we decide on to shape the world.

So, what are the complications with leading guidelines, grids and frameworks of suggestions? A number of difficulties arise from the truth that suggestions is regularly quite generalised, so generalised in truth that it would be difficult to know what to do about it. Is it genuinely any help to be provided suggestions which counsels you only to decide on small business proposals which are most likely to succeed, or only to hire staff who are most likely to fit in, or only to decide on initiatives which will have a transformative impact on the small business? How will you know in advance? Promises of transformation regularly get bogged down in the politics of everyday life.

In addition, suggestions is ordinarily provided on the basis that it is only the manager who is acting. The 'must-do's' can offer no insight into how other consumers could respond to what the manager is attempting to do. In this sense they are not even half of what we could will need to know in any scenario, unless we are intending to manage according to our precepts irrespective of how consumers respond to us. And of course, how consumers take up our suggestions is unknowable in advance of our offering them. Management takes location in particular contexts with particular consumers with specific factors going on and a history of relating that informs action and reaction. Generalised guidelines and suggestions can have nothing to say about these. You could make the case that the specificity of the specific scenario, with all the constraints on action that these imply, are basically the hardest component about managing.

If managers come across articles offering leading guidelines useful, then it would be hard to argue against them. Having said that, if the articles are taken up as a substitute for thinking, and/or an escape from paying attention to the day to day interactions that inform our judgment about what is necessary and when, then basically they grow to be a distraction from what managers could be carrying out to manage nicely.


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