What management is?
Despite its unprecedented success, management remains the least understood of the professions that shape modern life.
By TNN |
Despite its unprecedented success, management remains the least understood of the professions that shape modern life. For many, management is something to be tolerated. The cynical view is that we’ve inherited a society of organisations, therefore we need management to run them. That’s getting the story backwards, mistaking cause and effect. It’s because we’ve become so good at managing that we choose to create organisations to achieve a vast array of purposes that none of us could achieve acting alone....
Over the past century, the discipline of management has transformed the experience of work and multiplied its productivity. Yet we rarely see management in this light. Hierarchical corporate structures may be flattening, but management isn’t primarily about occupying a privileged rung in the chain of command.
Management’s real genius is turning complexity and specialisation into performance. As the world economy becomes increasingly knowledge based and global, work will continue to grow more specialised and complex, not less. So, management will play a larger role in our lives, not a smaller one.
This, then, is a fundamental paradox at the heart of modern economies: the more highly educated and specialised we become, the more we need other people to perform.
Over the past century, the discipline of management has transformed the experience of work and multiplied its productivity. Yet we rarely see management in this light. Hierarchical corporate structures may be flattening, but management isn’t primarily about occupying a privileged rung in the chain of command.
Management’s real genius is turning complexity and specialisation into performance. As the world economy becomes increasingly knowledge based and global, work will continue to grow more specialised and complex, not less. So, management will play a larger role in our lives, not a smaller one.
This, then, is a fundamental paradox at the heart of modern economies: the more highly educated and specialised we become, the more we need other people to perform.
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