Beyond Management Taking Charge at Work_1 docx

vi Contents5 Left-brain management and right-brain organizing 51 Left-brain management and right-brain organizing 54 Knowledge-work is social and in “the spaces in-between” 70 7 The work

Beyond Management

Taking Charge at Work

Mark Addleson

© Mark Addleson 2011

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 978–0–230–30816–9

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

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

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

MPG Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

For Rob and Kate (a.k.a Dan and The P) – they have always been beyond management

This page intentionally left blank

C ONTENTS

Breakdowns with tragic consequences 11

Looking the wrong way, at the wrong things 14

“Inside” or “outside” is a matter of involvement 16

4 Jeff’s journal: project work on the inside 31

v

vi Contents

5 Left-brain management and right-brain organizing 51

Left-brain management and right-brain organizing 54

Knowledge-work is social and in “the spaces in-between” 70

7 The work of organizing with giant hairballs and

The work of building networks and negotiating boundaries 86

Fragmentation contributes to boundaries 88

Contents vii

Multitasking makes connections tricky 89

The work of aligning (the “bottom line” of organizing) 94

8 Tools are the empty heart of management or why

Work practices that are missing in action 100

Redesigning processes or structures isn’t the real work 109

9 Practices that break the mold with agility and care 113

10 In search of low-control organizing practices:

community, care, cooperation, and commitment 125

Alternatives to control and compliance 126

Caring relationships make the difference 132

Closing the divide between work and organizing 136

viii Contents

Cultivating a new narrative is tough 144

Three words that must go: management, organization,

12 Conversations for aligning: openness, commitments,

Conversations for accountability serve a dual purpose 167

We are still short of an answer to “how” 170

Organizing moves from below: extricating yourself

Contents ix

Conversations for openness, accountability, and

Change “on management’s terms” is not practical 187

Most IT departments don’t understand collaboration 191

A god’s-eye perspective and a human one 204

L IST OF F IGURES

5.1 Parallel universes of management and organizing 55

6.1 Two pictures of factory-work, ca 1930 666.2 Diagram of an organizational network 686.3 The standard view of what happens in networks 70

7.1 Comparing organizing with technical work 93

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people—friends, colleagues, and others—have had a hand in ing this book Dana Dolan generously read the final version and offeredcareful, detailed comments She also asked me to remind readers who havethe stamina to tackle the chapter notes that there is another book there(I have the impression she thinks it is the more interesting one!) JessicaHeineman-Pieper, Tony Joyce, Art Kleiner, Mark Leheney, Eric Meyer,Neil Olonoff, and Bill Tulloh all went beyond the call of duty and/orfriendship in reading and commenting on typescripts

shap-Working with Jennifer Berger was a spur to start putting fingers tokeyboard Jeff Conklin introduced me to wicked problems many yearsago and things have gone downhill ever since My consulting colleagues,Scott Brumburgh, Christiane Frishmuth, and Mikaela Seligman, have triedvery hard to keep me focused—against my natural impulses—on practicalmatters; as has Raj Chawla, to whom I owe a special thank you for hisencouragement as well as his friendship From the Hermanus crew, whoadopted us during Cape winters, I want to thank Beth and Noel Hunt, ofHemingway’s Bookshop, for their company and encouragement

On the publishing side, John Wright, literary agent, very generouslyguided me through the process of creating a prospectus, then StephenRutt at Palgrave Macmillan was kind—or, I’d like to think, wise—enough

to take the manuscript I am grateful to all who have helped turn wordsand a few images into a handsome volume, in particular, Eleanor Davey-Corrigan at Palgrave Macmillan, and Keith Povey with Nick Fox, who, aseditors, enabled me to handle the hurdles of the important final phases.Ioana Belcea did the marvelous drawings for Chapter 11 How fortunate

I am to have a gifted iconographer as a neighbor

I’m especially privileged to work with bright, experienced graduatestudents, my real teachers Their enthusiasm and willingness to run withhalf-baked ideas brought this book to life

Lastly, but certainly not leastly, I am deeply grateful to Jen,

compan-ion and advisor on this and many other journeys Beyond Management

would not have seen the light of day without her wisdom, humor, patience,and care

MARKADDLESON

xi

xii Acknowledgments

The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission toreproduce copyright material as indicated:

Figure 6.1 “Two pictures of factory-work, ca 1930” (p 66)

Source: “Behind the Scenes in the Machine Age,” 1931, a film produced

by the Women’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor.Figure 6.2 “Diagram of an organizational network” (p 68)

Source:Valdis Krebs (www.orgnet.com/decisions.html) Reproduced withpermission

Figure 8.1 “Work practices” (p 101)

Source: Adapted from Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice:

Learn-ing, Meaning and Identity, p 63 Used by permission of Cambridge

University Press Copyright c 1998 by Etienne Wenger

“Manifesto for Agile Development” box (p 113)

Source: The Agile Alliance (agilemanifesto.org) Reproduced withpermission

Figure 9.1 “The waterfall model” (p 115)

Source: Adapted from a diagram by Paul Hoadley Used with hispermission

Figure 11.1 “Letting go!” (p 139)

Drawn by Ioana Belcea Used with her permission

Figure 11.2 “A delicate balance” (p 147)

Drawn by Ioana Belcea Used with her permission

Figure 15.1 “A pyramid-maze puzzle” (p 206)

Source: Based on a puzzle marketed by Loncraine Broxton Used withpermission of the Lagoon Trading Co Ltd

C HAPTER 1

The end of the line

Talk about a revolution

Management is dead, but don’t take my word for it Peter Drucker saw

this first He begins The Practice of Management, the book that made

him famous, with a bold prediction: “management will remain a basicand dominant institution perhaps as long as Western civilization itselfsurvives”.1 What a surprise, then, to find him administering the lastrites to management a little more than 40 years later: “as we advancedeeper into the knowledge economy, the basic assumptions underlyingmuch of what is taught and practiced in the name of management arehopelessly out of date As a result, we are preaching, teaching, and

practicing policies that are increasingly at odds with reality and thereforecounterproductive.”2

For most of his long and illustrious career, Drucker, who had a largefollowing, wrote about how to be a good manager, maintaining that man-agement is fundamental to a prosperous and progressive society Towardthe end of his career, “the father of modern management” turns his back

on the profession he helped to establish, warning that management has

run its course He now says that management practices are

counterpro-ductive, meaning they do the opposite of what you want Intended to make

organizations more efficient and more profitable, this is an admission that

they are actually disorganizing What should we make of this dramatic

reversal?

Prolific writer that he was, it is relatively easy to keep track of Drucker’sintellectual journey and see why he made this U-turn You might say it wassimply a matter of putting two and two together, although doing the mathneeded someone not only well versed in management but also attuned towhat was happening in the world of work.3By the 1960s, noticing indus-trial work was on the wane, he coined the expressions “knowledge work”and “knowledge worker” to describe professionals in the nascent infor-mation technology (IT) industry What Drucker saw, and what knowledgeworkers know instinctively, is that management is all right for organizingfactories Factories run with the regular rhythm of machines, but old-style

1

2 Beyond Management

factory-work had been solitary, repetitive, mindless, with workers littlemore than automatons Knowledge-work is an entirely different story.Manufacturing jobs have all but disappeared, “off-shored” to countrieswhere labor is cheap, productive, and, for lack of regulations, exploitable.The rest of us—administrators, bankers, consultants, designers, entertain-ers, IT specialists, journalists, lobbyists, musicians, nurses, restaurateurs,secretaries, social workers, trainers, and writers—are knowledge workers,

as are janitors, landscape crews, and plumbers Knowledge workers nize themselves With a common interest in what they are doing, theycooperate, share knowledge, learn from one another, assign tasks, andmake decisions while they work Using management tools and techniques

orga-to organize knowledge-work makes a mess of work, which we’ve beendoing for half a century or more

As pretty much everyone is a knowledge worker nowadays, we’d ter do something about this The question is what Drucker only hints atknowledge-work being a game-changer He doesn’t explain why or tell ushow to deal with the fact that management practices are ubiquitous anddeeply entrenched What is wrong with “old” management? What does

bet-“new” management look like in the age of knowledge-work? And how do

we remove the old and replace it with the new? Here are three large gapsthat need filling, and I plan to fill them To offer a way forward I’ll posefour questions, answering a what, a why, a couple of wheres, and a how.What is knowledge-work? Why don’t management and knowledge-workmix? And, once we know where management is deficient and where tolook for new practices, how do we replace the old with the new? So, if youfollow my story, you’ll understand and be able to respond to the growingdisillusionment with management

Having lived in the shadow of management for generations, almosteveryone still seems to take it for granted that when it is a question ofgetting the best results from work you turn to management for answers.4True, there is some disagreement about exactly how to get the best results;for example, whether the usual measures of managers’ performance, towhich their compensation is often tied, contribute to an unhealthy empha-sis on short-term outcomes.5But, leaving aside serious criticism from theLeft, disagreements about the substance of management, over how to man-age organizations, are generally mild The most common complaint is thatsomething or other is missing; that there isn’t enough emphasis given to,say, processes as opposed to structures.6Such complaints invariably comewith the assurance that the problem can be fixed, with the promise that,when fixed, management will once again be in good shape, and with theclaim by the critic that he has just the tool to put things right

The end of the line 3

Lately, we’ve been hearing a different kind of objection from stream writers much like Drucker, who are dissatisfied with managementand doubtful about its future Gary Hamel is one; convinced that man-agement has passed its sell-by date yet evidently not ready to toss it allaway (he makes a handsome living as a management consultant, so this

main-is probably not surprmain-ising) Writing in the Harvard Business Review, an

establishment stronghold, he maintains that “management, like the bustion engine, is a mature technology that must now be reinvented for anew age.” What is needed is a “management revolution no less momen-

com-tous than the one that spawned modern industry.”7 This probably soundslike the kind of hyperbole we’ve come to expect from management gurus,but Hamel is dead right and, I’m sure, realizes that redoing manage-ment from scratch involves a far-reaching agenda that calls for profoundlypolitical action

How seriously should we take Hamel and other agnostics? Having held

an orthodox line, we can be certain that their past disagreements withmanagement have been relatively mild, probably over practices, and thatthey’ve come to their new positions only after some soul searching Agnos-ticism covers principles as well as practices and, if their status in theprofession isn’t a good enough reason to pay attention to what they’resaying, there is another compelling one They speak for a very large groupwho are fed up with standard management methods Actually, there aretwo groups

One is the workers caught up in “change management” initiatives, fused and disheartened by a maelstrom of internal organizational changesthat they’re unable to make head or tail of In the course of a restructuring,reorganization (a “reorg”), downsizing, or merger, divisions are renamed,sales teams which were organized by product are reorganized by region,new mission statements and organizational (org) charts appear magically

con-on the walls and the web, and they have new job descripticon-ons What is thepoint of it all? When the smoke finally clears little has changed With theold systems and procedures still in place, everyone continues to work asthey did before, with one important difference: some of their colleagueshave been fired and those who still have jobs feel insecure and anxiousabout theirs Is this an improvement and, if so, why and for whom?

Then, there are managers at all levels, in all kinds of organizations, who,when they talk frankly about their work, will tell you they, too, are frus-trated Often referring to their subordinates’ lack of commitment and/oraccountability, they’ll say they aren’t getting the results they want Theyblame poor teamwork for slippage that includes missed deadlines andprojects that are over budget and may tell you that the tools and techniques