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

May

2011

Cisco and a Cautionary Tale about Teams

"The news that Cisco is dismantling its unique structure of councils and boards to reduce bureaucracy presents a cautionary tale and an insight into the true meaning of teamwork and collaboration in organizations."

blogs.hbr.org/...-and-a-cautionary-tale-ab.html

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cisco casestudies councils communities boards organization management hierarchy teamwork accountability resourceallocation

But rather than reorganize to move from a functional structure to solutions groups, or implement a matrix organization, Cisco created overlays on top of the same organization structure. Councils and boards had their own hierarchy — boards reported to councils, projects emanated from boards, and they all drew resources from the functional groups
for a technology company that must be nimble and responsive, this became a drag not an accelerator.
5 more annotation(s)...
- But no, that does not mean the end of a division of labor, identification of decision-making authority, and individual accountability.
- A small work group I observed recently heard the word teamwork and thought it meant that everyone should be in on everything, and everyone should discuss everything before anyone did anything. This produced wasted time, lack of clear accountability, and balls dropped all over the place,
- No group is actually leaderless, although it might be highly collaborative. The group might distribute and rotate leadership roles and responsibilities
- But when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.
- Winning teams combine specialized roles, in which players have deep expertise that they continue to refine through practice, with knowledge of others' roles and how to support them. They have the flexibility to mobilize fast for particular plays, guided by a common strategy, but each person has clear accountability for his or her performance in the service of the team.

Feb

2011

Gary Hamel: Inventing Management 2.0

"To create organizations that are fit for the future, we need to dramatically retool the management systems and processes that govern . . .

* How strategies get created
* How opportunities get identified
* How decisions get made
* How resources get allocated
* How activities get coordinated
* How power gets exercised
* How teams get built
* How tasks and talent get matched up
* How performance gets measured
* How rewards get shared"

blogs.wsj.com/...inventing-management-20

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management2.0 management resourceallocation opportunities decisionmaking talents tasks performance measurement strategy

Management 1.0 was built to encourage reliability, predictability, discipline, alignment and control. These will always be important organizational virtues, but in most industries, getting better at these things won’t yield much of an upside
But even that is starting to change: Around the world, “ordinary” managers of all sorts are starting to resist their captors. Most of these renegades aren’t HR directors, CFOs or even EVPs. Yet they are experimenting boldly with new ways of motivating, organizing, compensating and goal setting. They are reaching out to peers, taking risks, and running small-scale pilots. They are acting first and asking permission later. Even more remarkable is the scope of their aspirations. They are not just hoping to become better leaders; they are hoping to build better organizations. They are the harbingers of Management 2.0.

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.
8 more annotation(s)...
- 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.