Management has changed. Or at least, it has for the most successful. Unfortunately some people have yet to get the message and too many are stuck – managing or on the receiving end – in the old world.
While some reject the idea of managers and management entirely I don’t. I think the anti-management ethos is a reaction to bad management and outdated management thinking. “Management” is a messy, varied field, it is a practice, part administration, part leadership and several other parts too. Unfortunately, few managers ever study or reflect on management practice. There is a lot of poor, outdated management out there.
New technologies, new thinking and a new generation mean the idea of management, and what it does, needs updating. If management had a standard model it is the model of General Motors and General Electric in the post-war years. The model continued into the 70s and 80s as the baby-boomers replaced the managers who learned their craft in the war years. Today the management baton has passed to Gen-X and Millennials with a Gen-Z workforce.
These generations have attitudes and expectations of work which means management needs to change in order to do their job. Managers who follow Alfred Sloan’s model are going to have problems. While I love the visionary writing of Peter Drucker it too is a historical document.
Obviously technology has changed but technology has always changed, that is the nature of technology. Remember: technology change demands process change. That is why management can’t stand still.
Sloan’s writing about GM was replaced by Grove’s writing about Intel. Google replaced GE as a role model to work for, and Spotify replaced P&G as something a bit different. The “agile transformations” of the last 10-20 years have been about that process change as digital tools permeated every workplace.
Unfortunately some fields move more slowly so there is an impedance mismatch: think about accounting standards, or the way banks fail to consider knowledge as loan collateral. (Capitalism without capital contains a great discussion around topics like these and again demonstrates the change.)
In the last few years many of the new ideas and management trends have found a home under the Agile umbrella. Even I am guilty here with Succeeding with OKRs.
It is hard to work out which begat which: did the agile movement give us #NoProjects and lead to Product over Project, or was it the ascendancy of Product model in digital which drive agile adoption?
Eric Trist might have documented self-organising teams in the 1950s and General Mills might have experimented in the 1970s but it was the agile movement which brought them into the mainstream (even if they are still the exception).
But as “agile” absorbed more and more it has itself become harder to define because of that breadth.
Does agile include diversity? – I’ve asked before is agile dyslexic. Both the standard management model and the agile manifesto were created by men. Women, not to mention other groups, have since contributed and emphasised different ideas.
Organizational learning and Psychological safety are key to making agile work but should they be considered part of agile? The former pre-dates agile while the latter seems to be a movement on its own. Similarly Beyond Budgeting fits very very nicely with agile and shared-leadership but it isn’t a standard part.
I wrote last time about the Good Jobs Strategy, and in my work on OKRs I emphasis purpose in work. Should good jobs and OKRs be added to agile? Certainly they are part of modern management.
Agile isn’t big enough to add all these. To do so makes it unwieldy even if they are all fellow travellers on the road to realising Theory-Y.
Agile has always had the potential to be about more than IT. Indeed, as more industries adopt digital tools they need both agile and other ideas to get the most from those tools – including AI. The evidence that agile like processes work in healthcare, hotels, law firms and elsewhere is growing. (I’ve got some experience here and I’m actively seeking “outside IT” opportunities now, so I want to learn more.)
Recently I’ve taken to calling agile and all these other ideas: Modern Management.
Taken together all these ideas are consistent and compatible. They represent a break from General Motors and GE so they break from the standard management model. Management as commonly conceived in 2000 doesn’t cut-it.
If you consider yourself an agile coach or consultant today you need to have these ideas in your tool box. The toolbox used to be labeled “Agile” and those who knew the word thought of it as very IT. Now needs to be called “Modern Management” – there is are more tools and the ideas are more widely applicable.