“Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0,” according to Gary Hamel in his book The Future of Management. I read the book because Hamel was a highly-touted speaker at the 2009 Global Leadership Summit and, as the cover of the book says, he is “ranked #1 influential business thinker by the Wall Street Journal”.
In order to thrive into the future, Hamel says, companies need to accelerate the pace of strategic renewal, make innovation everyone’s job, and create a highly engaging work environment. He then refers to three model organisations: Whole Foods Market, where employees are organised into autonomous work groups which make the key operating decisions affecting themselves; W L Gore & Associates, where employees negotiate their job assignments with their peers; and Google, which has a highly consultative management style and gives employees “20 percent time” to experiment with new ideas.
Hamel then goes on to challenge the principles of modern management, such as standardisation, specialisation, goal alignment, hierarchy, planning and control, and extrinsic rewards. He says that experimentation beats planning, strategic efficiency requires a resource allocation process based on market principles, and democracies outperform other styles of governance.
In my opinion, Hamel correctly identifies many of the problems of poorly run organisations, but his proposed solutions are far too impractical to be useful to most organisations. He proceeds on the assumption that there have been almost no advances in management techniques over the past century. His Wall Street Journal Blog post of 21 October 2009 says that he is too busy to read business books, and this may explain his lack of awareness. Hamel’s book is worth reading to provoke your thinking, but uncritical acceptance of his solutions is likely to lead to disaster.