The management monster

“Is management dead?” asks Gary Hamel (although he somewhat gives the game away by entitling his book “The Future of Management.”)  It’s an intriguing question and one which could obviously cut consultants to the quick: how can you be a management consultant if there’s no such thing as management?

“Having evolved rapidly in the first half of the 20th century,” writes Hamel, “the ‘technology’ of management has now reached a local peak.  Rather than being perched atop some Everest of accomplishment, it is reclining contentedly on a modest mound in the Appalachians...” Management, he argues, has given us the structures, organisational process and ability to measure on which today’s mega-organisations are based.  The world before management was one of craftwork: small groups of people working largely without supervision because they knew what they were doing and because their output wasn’t standardised.  Management innovation at the start of the 20th century – what Hamel calls its “vigorous adolescence” – has been the bedrock of economic progress and prosperity.  The fact we’ve reached a period of senescence doesn’t invalidate management, just the current way of managing.  What’s needed, he argues, is another great leap forward: we need to revolutionise management.

But is that right? What if management is a monster we need to tame?  It may have allowed us to create organisations on a scale undreamt of a hundred years ago, but bigger organisations require more management, and thus the cycle continues.  A report we recently produced with Atos Consulting highlighted the amount of time in any organisation that goes on activities which don’t add value.  Chief among wasted time is the 40% that a quarter of the people responding to our survey said they spent simply checking that other people had done things.

Maybe we got too good at management.

20 years ago, Michael Hammer and James Champy’s ideas around business process re-engineering centred on stripping out layers of accumulated process and management, and in analysing processes from start to finish rather than in functional segments.  But perhaps this is less a debate about what bits of management can be jettisoned from the corporate balloon and more one about what, if anything, should be in the balloon in the first place.  One of the fundamental reasons management evolved was to help people in large, dispersed and complex organisations co-ordinate their activities, but surely we can now use technology to do that, not “management”.

There are some interesting ironies – and opportunities – here where management consultants are concerned.  Consulting has never been industrialised: although some services have indeed become commoditised, the most valued consulting can’t be standardised because no two client problems are exactly the same.  To the frustration of procurement professionals and, I suspect, many consulting firms, the best consulting remains craft-work.  You could therefore argue that consultants are well-placed to talk to clients about how they might adopt a style of working which revolves around groups of experts who know what they’re doing and therefore require minimal supervision.  However, success in applying in large organisations depends on excellent internal communication and technology – and the consulting firms’ track record in this space is patchy.  Many still rely on personal relationships and that would need to change.

But perhaps the biggest irony is that, while management consultants spend a lot of time agonising about the value of consulting, they should be focusing on the value of the management..