Modern Boss

I had the misfortune of being lent a book by my boss. Not reading it wasn't really an option, but it turned out to be great. Well, not great, perhaps (it was about management theory), but fascinating. It's called The Future of Management and it's by Harvard Business School's Gary Hamel (who I recently found out advised Enron, but we'll ignore that).

The reason I enjoyed it was that it's really about the end of management, rather than the future. This interests me greatly and not just because I'm not a manager myself. I've been thinking the same thing for a while now, that what we need is fewer, not more, managers/bosses, so it's nice to see such a luminary as Hamel giving voice to the idea. He told me a few (alright, many) things I didn't know, too. The idea of the employee, for example, is a fairly recent development in management. Before the Industrial Revolution, or something, people were almost all self-employed. The idea of one person being another's minion was totally alien to people. Not in the 20th Century, though, where we all became Henry Ford's assembly line bitches. That made some sense, though, I suppose, when there was a very clear ruling/boss class and an army of the Great Unwashed to perform single, repetitive tasks in the production of Model Ts. Not today, though, when employees are perfectly likely to be more educated or intelligent than their employers. Not that I'm either, you understand.

Hamel's argument is that today, in the global economy of the 21st Century, creativity and innovation are more important than ever before. It's hard to innovate, though, if you're relying on a few specially labelled "creatives" or even the dreaded "blue sky thinkers" to do it all for you. Hamel uses the example of Toyota, which has vastly outperformed/innovated it's competitors, largely by utilising the brainpower of its entire workforce, not just the higher echelons.

That's quite true, but isn't the whole story, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe it's the liberal in me, but I'm not at all keen on the boss/minion model. I want to look my colleagues in the eye, not at my shoes. That's impossible while one of you has the power to fire the other at the drop of a hat, no matter how nice individuals might be. It's stifling, then, and not just of creativity. The future will be non-hierarchical, I'm quite sure. Living in someone else's pocket was soooo 20th Century.