0:03
Welcome to the end of the fourth week of the course Managing the Company of
The Future.
I'm going to just give you a couple of comments on the,
on the discussion forums that, that many of you took part in this week.
I noticed quite a few additional threads.
There was an interesting one about can being, can I,
can politeness somehow earn my management skills.
There was some interesting ones about Millennials and their own workforce.
Some interesting comments about why change in the first place.
Why, why do we need to change our organizations at all?
But obviously I want to spend this next five minutes or so
just talking about the two specific questions.
One was really about the, the management model as a whole.
What are the kind of the forces pushing or,
our organizations towards the more future oriented mod, version.
Towards sort of getting back to, back to sort of a historical context.
And then the second one was of course around whether top down or
bottom up change is, shall we say, more effective.
Let's take them in that order.
What are the forces pushing us to the left or
to the right on the management model as I've described it.
Those are pretty straightforward and most of you I think fairly quickly got there.
There are some very obvious forces of inertia pulling us to the left,
and these are of course around the size and the age of the company,
the bigger and older they are.
The more sort of traditional structures become the, the standard way of working.
Any sort of external factors around for example the recession, regulation,
all of those things pull us to the left.
To the right there are trends which we've been talking about during
this course around the Millennial generation, around Web 2.0.
And new com, new competition.
All of these are forces which are stimulating companies to say,
what can we do differently.
And, of course, the right hand side of my,
of my framework is all about doing things differently.
But we mustn't lose the fact that the forces to the right are things that
we have at our disposal.
Call it courage, call it leadership.
Essentially, given that there's inertia pulling us to the left, it does take
dramatic efforts, in many cases, to actually take our organizations out of
their comfort zones and without very good role models to try something new.
So that's the forces, both sides, ultimately they,
they typically cancel themselves out to a large degree.
In other words, when we look over a ten, 20, 30 year period,
we have not seen dramatic changes in the way that big companies run.
Sure, startup companies are absolutely more likely to be on the right hand side.
2:36
But I'm an optimist at heart, so I do tend to think that
over time we are seeing a little bit of a push to the right.
Gradually, the opportunities, if you like, for better ways of working
are becoming not just apparent, but also things which are starting to stick.
So, we're not, I'm not expecting any dramatic shifts.
But I would expect a, a gradual push towards the right-hand side overall.
The other question I asked was around top-down
versus bottom-up mechanisms to shift our management models.
And here again, the actual answer if you like is quite straightforward.
It's kind of a bit of both, but let me just be, be clear on, on why I say that.
We do occasionally see.
Very dramatic shifts in management model, which are top down led.
We heard the story of HCL Technology.
We heard the story of, of Oticon.
But the trouble is that those stories I've chosen
because they are the exception, not the rule.
I mean, those are the fewest cases I know of where a chief executive is really come
in and shaken things up through his or her own words of personality and effort.
So I do actually believe that, that all of us have a responsibility
to take initiative to try pushing new ideas from the bottom up.
To try little experiments to create pockets of expertise and excellence.
3:54
And to hopefully then get those at the top to take notice because
the people at the top, of course, their job is very much to amplify and
to build on project and ideas that they see from below.
So, it is, of course, a bit of both end but for the most part, 95% of the time,
we have to expect people in the middle of the organization,
I don't mean right at the bottom, but typically people who have some, some,
some sort of responsibility for you know, a team of people, or a budget.
Those are the sorts of people who can actually make the specific changes,
which the people at the top of the organization can then build on.
So, a few reflections, hopefully that's useful.
And I look forward to speaking to you again, for the last time, next week.
Thanks.
Julian BirkinshawProfessor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship
