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Business for the 21st Century: Towards Simplicity and Trust PDF

208 Pages·2011·1.179 MB·English
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Business for the 21st Century Towards Simplicity and Trust François Dupuy Business for the 21st Century This page intentionally left blank Business for the 21st Century Towards Simplicity and Trust François Dupuy Partner, Mesa Research, California Translated by Rupert Swyer Palgrave macmillan © François Dupuy 2011 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-29263-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-33239-7 ISBN 978-0-230-30772-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230307728 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Thank you Dominique and Camille. Sociology owes you a debt of gratitude This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction 1 Part I How Companies Lost their Grip (1): ‘Managerial Sloth’ and its Consequences 1 We Have Let Work ‘Slip’ 11 2 Silo Organizations and their Unwanted Side-Effects 40 3 We’ve Let the Customer Get Away 59 Part II How Companies Lost their Grip (2): Front-line Managers Have Been Sacrificed on the Altar of Intermediate Bureaucracies 4 Sacrificing the Front-line Managers 79 5 Integration and Processes: A Marriage Made in Hell 100 6 Trust Destroyed, Trust Rebuilt 116 Part III Can We Do Things Differently? 7 The Difficulty of Changing Endogenous Organizations 141 8 Simplicity, Trust and Communities of Interest: Can Things Be Done Differently? 166 Notes 193 Index 198 vii Introduction Why write about the everyday life of companies and in the workplace at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Because I believe it is urgent to do so, given the gulf that has opened up between what is said by and about organizations and things as they really are. Speaking the language of ideology On the one hand, there is the language businesses use, especially when talking to their employees: their language quickly lapses into abstraction and coded allusions. In a word, it is ideologically tainted. It comes as a great surprise to the outside observer to note the com- plicated relationship (to say the least) that these organizations have with reality. Complex reality strikes fear into organizations, because it is not what they would like it to be. So organizations ‘filter’ their apprehension of it through stock phrases, weasel words, code words and a body of terms and notions, some of them very vague, which the system’ s actors ritually bow down to; the less they relate to real- ity, the more unquestioningly they swallow them. Organizations speak of ‘values’, for instance, regardless of whether they truly reflect actual, recurring behaviour or whether their manage- ment systems (those famous ‘HR policies’) actually foster those values. They issue charters spelling out ‘management principles’, an idealized vision – or mere ‘marketing’ for external consumption – that bears little relationship to the everyday work of the people concerned. In other words, the actual constraints on collective action, and its essen- tially systemic nature, are denied in favour of soothing declarations or, 1 2 Business for the 21st Century worse, notions that hold individual behaviour responsible for things that are in fact simply due to a lack of understanding of how human groups really function. Obviously, this can work only up to a point! This suggests to me that some of modern management’s buzzwords are destined to van- ish as quickly as they arrived, with no mourners. Take the terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’, for example: I wouldn’t stake much on their future. Yet today’s managers bring them up at the drop of a hat. There’s barely an executive training programme worth its salt that doesn’t tout ‘leadership for (this or that)’. This is a goldmine for con- sultants, coaches and specialists of every type. Yet, on closer inspec- tion, the more people focus on the ‘leader’, the weaker their grasp of the complexity of collective action is. However, it is precisely the responsibility of the leader to understand and master the activity of the group. Unable to cope, leaders prefer to train their subordinates in leadership, hoping their individual qualities will compensate for the lack of any reasoning built on the way in which human organiza- tions actually work. What better illustration of this than the widespread fiasco of project management in the car industry and the subcontractors of that industry especially? Functioning in ‘project mode’ (a good example of management-speak) means deciding that, to construct a project or ‘solution’, one needs to bring together a cross-functional collection of actors hitherto content to work in their ‘silos’ or ‘métiers’ (i.e., their trades, specialities or crafts). In a word, one ‘de-layers’ some of these and gets them to work horizontally, under the management (leadership) of a ‘project manager’. The rest depends on the latter’s managerial capacity to execute the project successfully. Forgive me if this sounds brutal, but this betrays an intellectual laziness that pervades the life of modern business, no doubt a quid pro quo for the growing harshness of life in the workplace. The hope is that the personal qualities of the man or woman in charge of this peculiar way of working will suffice to make the operation a suc- cess. This is not the case, of course, and the most tangible outcome is to make it ever harder to find volunteers for this function of ‘project manager’. Needless to say, this is not just a vague question of ‘leadership’, nor it is a ‘technical’ matter (as in project manage- ment techniques). What is at issue is the nature of the real power available to the project manager for dealing with the ‘business lines’.

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