Monday, April 23, 2012

Stoos: Is Great Management Timeless?


The Stoos movement is off to a great start. More than 850 people have joined the Stoos Network on LinkedIn since January and the Stoos Stampede in Amsterdam is scheduled for July 6-7, 2012. Still, as with any movement, the enthusiasm felt by many isn't shared by all. In fact, it appears that the work of Stoos enthusiasts might be ruffling some feathers.

In my opinion, this is undoubtedly unintentional, because every person I've met associated with this movement is passionate about fixing the dysfunctions in our organizations today. So what is it about the Stoos message that might not resonate with some people?

I've been mulling the message over in search of an answer. In my posts, as well as those written by Jurgen Appelo, Steve Denning and others, the message has been about transforming management. But are we talking about transforming the discipline of management or transforming organizations through better management?

Check out Peter Stevens' related blog post on this topic: Agile is the Vanguard of the Transformation of Management.

Perhaps, upon reflection and with introspection, we can say that great management is timeless. Isn't it that we uncover the immutable principles of great management slightly differently in each age? After all, there is nothing in the agile management movement not previously covered and espoused by Peter Drucker, W. Edwards Deming and Taiichi Ohno.

Should we be talking about transforming management, or should we be aiming to implement timeless best practices in our organizations using the best methods of our age? We can use videoconferencing to achieve real-time collaboration when not collocated. We can implement “commander’s intent” through self-organized teams.

Is great management timeless or not? Do we really keep reinventing management or do we just uncover different ways to manifest principles of great management? What do you think?
at

2 comments:

  1. PeterApril 23, 2012 at 5:54 PM

    I think good management evolves in a context. Taylor (measurement) and Ford (mass production) created the a context which enabled the decentralized enterprise (Sloan) which we know today.

    This model worked extremely well in the first half of the 20th century, stumbled through the 70's, but is creaking and shuddering today.

    More recently, the advances at Xerox PARC and elsewhere (Smalltalk, IDEs, rapid feedback, not to mention the whole internet) enabled new management approaches, e.g. Scrum, XP, Kanban. The same advancements also put pressure on companies to do better, not just developing software, but at innovating for their customers. This requires more enabling management than was necessary 100 years ago.

    I don't know how the world will have changed in 50 or even 20 years from now, so it is even harder to predict what 'management' will then mean or what will be considered good management, or even if management will be necessary.

    So I think it will be difficult to talk about timeless management simply because the human condition is changing so rapidly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sanjiv AugustineApril 26, 2012 at 10:25 PM

    Peter

    Thanks for the comment! I think this might be dialectical.

    Simultaneous with creaky industrial management we have had the Shewart, Deming, Ohno, and of course Peter Drucker.

    Based on what you've pointed out, I think the older industrial management is creaking and shuddering today.

    But I also think the Lean model is thriving through Toyota and others. Also, very little we propose in agile management cannot be found in the works of Drucker.

    Perhaps both models exist simultaneously today, once in its ascendancy, and the other dying?

    More food for thought?

    Thanks again!

    Sanjiv

    ReplyDelete