Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged managers → View Popular, Search in Google

Aug

2011

The Manager's New Role

"In the workplace, a similar transition is taking place with the widespread adoption of information technology. Managers are increasingly taking a back seat as information providers. From the moment employees sign up, organizations direct them to company intranets to understand different aspects of the job, the organization, clients, company policies, and often, the performance development program and its measurement metrics. "

blogs.hbr.org/...the-manager-new-role.html

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management managers

For the first time, perhaps, managers find themselves overshadowed by the net's omnipresence in answering questions about the what and how. Their authority as information-providers is eroding quickly, putting to rest that once-key role
At a recent meeting with young managers, I asked them what value they felt they added to teams. These smart people recognized the change in their roles. Instead of being controllers or hoarders of knowledge, they viewed themselves as collaborators or mentors, trusted for their experience — not their gigabytes of memory.
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- By transferring the ownership of change to team members and assuming the crucial role of empowering the value creators, a manager could end up earning more respect as the navigator who guides the ship to the port of success.

Jan

2011

Will Enterprise2.0 Leaders Replace Middle Managers Entirely?

"I’m beginning to wonder what function middle managers and line managers perform these days. Can these functions be replaced entirely by new Enterprise 2.0 roles and systems? Is something going to fall between the cracks in a rush to remove these roles? Is the traditional Middle Manager heading towards obsolescence? "

blogs.forbes.com/...place-middle-managers-entirely

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management middlemanagement jobdescription leadership managers projectmanagers

Part of the problem is that while we move towards implementation of E2.0, and introduce change in roles that support it, we have yet to strongly define some of the job characteristics and functions
Another crucial function of a line manager is in managing the team’s budget. While it may require input from their team, trying to manage a budget and make such decisions as a group often leads to disaster.
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- On the other hand, there are functions of a line manager that can be supported via technology and organizational work culture, obviating the need for strong skills in this area by any single role

Aug

2010

The End of Management - WSJ.com

"But can this great 20th century innovation survive and thrive in the 21st? Evidence suggests: Probably not. "Modern" management is nearing its existential moment."

online.wsj.com/...4476104575439723695579664.html

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management managers bureaucracy change transactioncosts coase resources resourceallocation costallocation

Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.
The weakness of managed corporations in dealing with accelerating change is only half the double-flanked attack on traditional notions of corporate management. The other half comes from the erosion of the fundamental justification for corporations in the first place.
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- He argued corporations were necessary because of what he called "transaction costs." It was simply too complicated and too costly to search for and find the right worker at the right moment for any given task, or to search for supplies, or to renegotiate prices, police performance and protect trade secrets in an open marketplace. The corporation might not be as good at allocating labor and capital as the marketplace; it made up for those weaknesses by reducing transaction cost
- Complicated enterprises, like maintaining Wikipedia or building a Linux operating system, now can be accomplished with little or no corporate management structure at all.
- They believe corporate hierarchies will disappear, as individuals are empowered to work together in creating "a new era, perhaps even a golden one, on par with the Italian renaissance or the rise of Athenian democracy."
- Transaction costs are rapidly diminishing. And as a result, everything we learned in the last century about managing large corporations is in need of a serious rethink. We have both a need and an opportunity to devise a new form of economic organization, and a new science of management, that can deal with the breakneck realities of 21st century change.
- The new model will have to be more like the marketplace, and less like corporations of the past. It will need to be flexible, agile, able to quickly adjust to market developments, and ruthless in reallocating resources to new opportunities.
- Resource allocation will be one of the biggest challenges. The beauty of markets is that, over time, they tend to ensure that both people and money end up employed in the highest-value enterprises. In corporations, decisions about allocating resources are made by people with a vested interest in the status quo.
- Because engineers don't have to compete for funds, the Google approach doesn't have the discipline of a true marketplace, and it hasn't yet proven itself as a way to generate incremental profits. But it does allow new ideas to get some attention.
- Information gathering also needs to be broader and more inclusive. Former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley's demand that the company cull product ideas from outside the company, rather than developing them all from within, was a step in this direction. (It even has a website for submitting ideas.) The new model will have to go further. New mechanisms will have to be created for harnessing the "wisdom of crowds." Feedback loops will need to be built that allow products and services to constantly evolve in response to new information. Change, innovation, adaptability, all have to become orders of the day.