BROKEN LINK APOLOGIES

So sorry that the "FIRE ALL THE MANAGERS" link was broken in my message yesterday.

Here is the Harvard Business Review [HBR] short story:

How essential is it to have

layers of executives supervising
workers?

Managers are expensive, increase the risk of bad judgment, slow decision making, and often disenfranchise employees.

et most business activities require greater coordination than markets can provide. Is there a way to combine the freedom and flexibility of markets with the control of a management hierarchy? Economists will tell you it's impossible, but the Morning Star Company proves otherwise.

It has been managing without managers for more than two decades. At Morning Star, whose revenues were over $700 million in 2010, no one has a boss, employees negotiate responsibilities with their peers, everyone can spend the company's money, and each individual is responsible for procuring the tools needed to do his or her work. By making the mission the boss and truly empowering people, the company creates an environment where people can manage themselves.

 

Are you interested in not firing all managers but how the manager's role should change?

FIRE ALL THE MANAGERS

This is the title Gary Hamel used is this HBR article.  He says that there are four reasons why management as we know it needs to dramatically change.

One is that with greater levels of management, the greater the risk of bad judgment.

"In the case of G.M., the crucial insight was that a faulty ignition switch could cause vehicles to lose power and deactivate the air bags. The link between the ignition and the air bags was not a secret; it was an intentional goal of the design, to protect people in parked cars from being injured by air bags that were deployed mistakenly. " NY Times June 8, 2014

“Senior decision makers are basically isolated from safety information,” If companies did not have a culture in which individuals took responsibility for problems and alerted superiors to them, then big failures would follow.

Virtually all of my clients exhibit Hamel's four reasons why we need to relook at the role of managers.

Fire all the Managers: http://whispersandshouts.typepad.com/r1112b-pdf-eng.pdf

 

G.M. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/business/gm-report-illustrates-managers-disconnect.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As