Global Strategy - blog

Gary Hamel was giving a talk at London Business School for an academic audience. Having heard how nice his Italian suits are, I had to go.

The topic was related to his recent HBS article, how to "speed up" the "evolution" of "management knowledge". While "speeding up evolution" does sound like a plot of a bad science fiction movie, the talk was fairly interesting. Based on  the great engineering challenges ("moon shots") recently funded by U.S. government, Hamel and his collaborators had began to think what are the great "engineering challenges" in the management. Such challenges could range from wacky "make Dilbert not funny anymore" (whether by means of removing cynicism or improving the workplace was left unspecified) to rather technical.

The smartest man in the room was once again Jacobides, who made a point that planned "social experiments" and theory-led interventions into workplace that Hamel proposed were rather unrealistic. Machines are rather easier to 'engineer' than social systems. Best-known social experiments being the Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China, one ought to put more hope on gradual evolution than top-down design.

Hamel also proposed a new model for diffusion of management knowledge, emphasizing the power of Wikis and open source sites that would collect and document management innovations. A true anti-humanist in the audience posed a question why anyone would bother with best practices because they provide no competitive advantage. It is slightly disappointing to that a strategy academic in LBS can be so thoroughly socialized in managerial thinking there is no room for common good. 

These seminars are often more thought-provoking that thought-providing, as was this one. Another professor (of entrepreneurship) suggested the management challenges we tackle should be concrete (Hamel had put up some vague theory-laden problems in his slides). For example: to develop the management tools that enable a firm to go from 0 to $100 million revenue firm without hiring a single employee. While my initial reaction was "why would you want to do that?", it really got me thinking. 

If one looks back at great advances in management that have provided society with value, these are almost all related to employment. Taylorism, fordism, human resources perspective, performance-based compensation, knowledge-management, organizational design, work on decision making, etc. are all theories and frameworks aimed at managing employees. It seems credible to assume that much more headway can be made in management innovation related to non-employment relationships than in traditional intra-organizational practices (such as 360-evoluations and the kind). Generic licensing schemes, such as open source and creative commons licences are examples of highly influential new inventions - many of them actually developed by professors in law (creative commons originates from Stanford).  One might conceive that the legal terms and the rating systems in Ebay are a type of management innovation which foster anonymous market transactions. 

Such management innovations could be important for Finland's economy which relies on trade across geographic boundaries. A lot of work has been done on geographic clusters but such research seems oblivious to the notion that innovation can reduce the boundaries set by geography. If management research wants to become more useful, maybe we could put some thought into actual practices that go in facilitating knowledge-intensive transactions, matching resources, creating credible reputation-tracking systems, and fostering non-hierarchical organization.

But then, such work is not overly exciting and probably not worthwhile in terms of academic career advancement. And in any case, innovations are being done in start-ups and non-profits (Wikipedia). Arguably consultants have always done a better job in diffusing management innovation than management scholars.