Myth of management

1. Myth Of Management?

2. Contd..
Strictly speaking, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it would seem that in a
few years time it might well be true. Giant businesses are being built by
people who cannot buy a beer in Delhi. A bunch of kids are dreaming up
ideas, hiring people much older than them, negotiating tough deals with a
bunch of cut-throat investors, and generally re-imaging the world as we
know it. Their parents presumably approve.
Apart from making older people look ridiculous, the emergence of this new
breed of leaders also dramatically challenges the idea that doing certain kind
of jobs requires qualifications, the relevant experience and a host of qualities
that are deemed absolutely essential by management consultants
(delegating effectively, getting hands dirty, being good listeners, leading from
the front, reinventing oneself frequently and so on). These young people not
quite out of college seem to rush into everything and find it remarkably easy
to do all the things that we have been told are very difficult.

3. Contd..
And they are not the only ones who pose this question to us. The idea that
only people with proper education, requisite experience and formal training
can over time become capable of handling ever more complex tasks is
something that gets challenged in different ways all around us. Politicians for
instance, run ministries without having a clue about the subject that they are
final arbiters of.There is no formal training that they undergo, and although
they might not be the finest advertisements for a lack of qualification, as we
have seen in the recent having highly qualified leaders, does not necessarily
translate into meaningful action. Young scions of business families are
routinely parachuted into top management where they get to lord over
professionals who not only have eye-popping qualifications but have spent
weeks sitting in various training programmes painstakingly `developing
competencies' and working on their team building and leadership skills. By
and large, this model works just fine, for if it didn't the market would have
ensured that only professionals ran companies.

4. Contd..
Could it be that the idea of competence is in part a device used to deter
mine who gets to leadership positions when there are no other means
available to figure this out? So when it is possible to either elect people
through voting as is the case with politicians or with lineage as is the case
with family business, we rely on these methods. When such universally
transparent and culturally incontrovertible methods are not available or
seem inappropriate, we turn to an invented system based on the notion that
competence and capability need to be acquired systematically by going
through a certain institutionalized process.
Or is that the idea that management is a standalone discipline that can be
taught is by itself a somewhat dodgy proposition, constructed as a way of
establishing a certain kind of order?

5. Contd..
Reading popular management texts, business self-help books or even the
newspaper supplements that peddle what passes for strategic wisdom seems to
confirm that management science consists largely of wrapping some staggeringly
self-evident cliches in waves of self-important language. Among the top 20
business bestsellers on Amazon currently include titles like Rising Strong (by the
author of Daring Greatly), The Rich Employee, Strengths Finder 2.0, Platform: Get
Noticed In A Noisy World, 10-Minute Declutter, Get What's Yours, Getting to Yes
and that old faithful, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. At the considerable risk of
judging books by their titles, it would seem that these texts seem to represent a
discipline that is less about science and more about assorted shortcuts to get
successful, without having to tax the intellect mightily .
The management myth arrogates to itself great complexity which requires strategic
vision and other such lofty skills while simultaneously valorizing concepts that even
half wits would find rudimentary .

6. Contd..
This is why organizations go to great lengths to hire really smart people and
then go to even greater lengths to ensure that this smartness is rarely put to
use. The truth might well be that there is nothing that requires deep intellect
in managing organizations--it does require sophisticated life skills, which
does not need any great formal training. But without the air of self-
importance, the suits, the salaries that bear no relationship to reality , the
PowerPoint presentations and the technical language, maintaining an orderly
and stable system would be difficult.
Perhaps something fundamental has changed. As new ideas become the
dominant source of energy in any ecosystem, the power of the management
myth begins to subside. In a world where settled structures based on size,
history and power are the dominant forces, being qualified is of great value.

7. Contd..
One has to fit into a complex framework that already exists, and that is not easy . A
stable system needs order, and a predictable set of processes. But a world founded
on ideas is fundamentally a more unstable one.What matters here is the power of
the idea--ecosystems follow ideas and capabilities develop in the gap that exists
between an idea and its execution, or can be bought off the market.
The opening up of the digital space, which in many ways is a completely new
universe that needs to be colonized, has thrown up a new set of pioneers who are
known more by their ideas than by their antecedents.These are creators, not
managers, concerned more with building new ways of imagining the world rather
than with efficiently distributing scarce resources over competing priorities. That
they are as young as they are is no accident, for the freshness of perspective they
bring needs them to be free of the stifling order embedded within the very idea of
organizations.They will, in time, develop their own cliches and find their own
mental prisons, but for now, it is time to acknowledge the coming of a new order.

8. For details and bookings contact:-
Parveen Kumar Chadha… THINK TANK
(Founder and C.E.O of Saxbee Consultants & Other-Mother
marketingandcommunicationconsultants.com)
Email :-saxbeeconsultants@gmail.com
Mobile No. +91-9818308353
Address:-First Floor G-20(A), Kirti Nagar, New Delhi India Postal Code-110015