Thursday 11 October, 2001
Management gurus
Charles Handy was recently voted one of the world’s most influential managers. In his Guide To The Gurus Of Management he offers World Learning listeners a personal and professional reflection on the theories of the world’s top management experts.
He interviews specialists in cultural management, globalisation, competitiveness and strategic thinking and shares anecdotes with people from all over the world.
No one knows how it happened. Twenty or so years ago the leading thinkers in the field of management started to be dubbed ‘gurus’ by their public.
The uncharitable suggested that the word was a synonym for ‘charlatan’. To others it was a sign that management was an art more than a discipline or even a serious profession.
A book called The One Minute Manager sold in its millions. You could not imagine The One Minute Doctor having a market at all.
Nonetheless, management has always been the invisible ingredient of success. The pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China could not have been built without good management systems. The great military campaigns of history owed as much to good management as to valour or weaponry.
| ‘Great ideas lie wasted unless someone turns them into a viable activity or a business, through management.’ | |
Bad management
Economies shrivel and countries decay unless they are properly managed. It is strange, therefore, that management has always had such a bad press.
The word itself is demeaning. In everyday usage when we say, “did you manage all right today?” to someone we mean, “did you cope?” not “did you plan, organize, staff, direct, co-ordinate, report and budget?” – the traditional definition of the duties of a manager.
No one likes to be managed, and many professions tactfully do not use the word, preferring presidents, principals or partners, heads and directors or even permanent secretaries as the titles in their hierarchies.
Secrets of management
During the last 100 years managers have tried to make their activity more respectable by making it professional. Business schools sprang up, first in the USA, then, much later, in Europe and Asia.
Now every city in the world has a school or institute of management. The MBA degree (Master of Business Administration) is becoming a necessary entrance ticket to career success in many areas.
Irritatingly, however, the secrets of management remain elusive. Unlike the harder sciences there seem to be no immutable laws. Furthermore, unlike the physical sciences, the research laboratories of management are organisations out in the real world, experimenting, adapting, ducking and weaving to stay alive.
Common sense
That’s where the gurus come in. Their role is to interpret and promulgate what seems to be working for the rest of the world. They are the honeybees of management.
Unlike more traditional academics they are addressing the troops in the battlefield, not their fellow researchers. Their books have to be readable by busy people, their lectures exciting, even inspiring, their ideas both memorable and immediately relevant.
The faster the world changes the more necessary become these ‘bees’, carrying good ideas from one place to another, codifying and reformulating as they go.
| ‘In hindsight, most of management seems common sense. The trick is to glimpse the sense before it is common. That’s what gives you the competitive edge. That’s what moves the world along, and that’s what the gurus try to do.’ | |
Gurus
On my list of most significant gurus is Peter Drucker, now in his nineties but still explaining the world in inimitable prose and a guttural Austrian accent. In fact, mention any management idea that works and the betting is that Peter Drucker was writing about it before you were born.
There is also the likes of Tom Peters whose book, In Search Of Excellence, written in 1982 with Robert Waterman first put a management book on the national best-seller lists and probably started the guru culture.
Sumantra Ghoshal, now Dean of Hyderabad’s new business school, was one of the first to herald the arrival of truly global organisations and competition; and Kenichi Ohmae, the Japanese strategist who, among other things, talks about the impact of globalisation on nations.
For cross-cultural issues we turn to Fons Trompenaars from the Netherlands; for other issues from marketing to technology we inevitably look to more Americans – like Philip Kotler and Bill Gates.
And, of course, there’s me, an Irishman masquerading as an Englishman, with my ideas on organisations and culture and my socio-philosophical interest in people. An international cast for what is increasingly the major international challenge – management in a turbulent world.
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| The Elephant and the Flea |
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In his latest book business guru, Charles Handy, presents his insight into modern management techniques. It’s a view of how to survive by being part of something bigger.
Applied to the world of business Handy offers the theory a structure which allows ‘fleas to co-exist with elephants.’
The Elephant and the Flea is published by Hutchinson. |
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| Further reading: |
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'Understanding Organizations', Charles Handy, London 1992 Penguin
'The Age of Unreason',
Charles Handy, London 1989 Business Books
'The Empty Raincoat',
Charles Handy, London 1994
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