The McKinsey Quarterly has a good interview (registration warning) with Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan on innovation management and building organizations for a century in which managing the old way is a going out of business strategy.
Gary Hamel has a new book, The Future of Management, due out this month. Lowell Bryan, a director at McKinsey, co-authored Mobilizing Minds with McKinsey principal Claudia Joyce.
Most of the interview focuses on how to bridge the gap between people and technology (i.e. Internet, Enterprise 2.0) and globalization. I found the observations useful reminders on how managers fall into common traps. Quoting Gary Hamel from the interview:
In a market where talent is largely a commodity and can be bought anywhere, the secret sauce is creating an environment in which you push that frontier out, in which you can steadily raise the returns on human capital. The combination of technology and talent is a powerful catalyst for value creation, but to take advantage of the Web’s capacity to help us aggregate and amplify human potential in new ways, we must first of all abandon some of our traditional management beliefs—the notion, for example, that strategy should be set at the top.
"Hiring and retaining top talent" is one of those managerial platitudes that finds itself in every corporate mission statement. As if companies go out looking for laggards. The mission statement for HR (please excuse the management-speak) should now be "to find and fill gaps in our human capital portfolio that complement and augment our highly valued investments."
To make an observation on deconstructing hierarchical management: when you set the creative and motivated free to develop new ideas, eventually you'll run into moments of conflict and indecision. Good managers diffuse the conflict and drive the decision without anyone knowing it has happened.
Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx
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