Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 64, by Joe Podolsky:
From: JOE_PODOLSKY@HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 96 08:03:23 -0800
Subject: Musings on Management
Henry Mintzberg is a well-known management educator and writer who currently teaches at INSEAD in France and McGill University in Canada. While I don't know if he has any actual hands-on industry management experience, he at least has spent lots of time consulting and observing and has been involved in the management of university programs, arguable one of the most complex of all management environments. Mintzberg was recently challenged by a colleague to give a presentation on management that would fit into the attention span of chief executives, "about 15 minutes." So, to be on the safe side, he devised ten "musings," each of which would take up a minute, and, being a thrifty person, he decided to "recycle" his presentation into a short article in the July-August 1996 issue of _Harvard Business Review_. Here are his ten musings. How do you think they fit in your organization? "1. Organizations don't have tops and bottoms." We've all heard of "top managers," but who would admit to being a "bottom manager"? Mintzberg suggests that organizations are sort of circular, with "inner" people and "outer" people, and with "middle managers" working to keep the two linked. I prefer the analogy of the web (see Jottings #59). But both those analogies suffer because they are two dimensional and don't reflect changes over time. The challenge to us in information technology (IT) is to enable the real-time connections across all dimensions, to our allies and partners as well as within our own organization, and, at the same time, to create the databases that are virtual connections across structure, space, and time. "2. It's time to delayer the delayerers." Mintzberg is reacting to overzealous downsizing, and he is especially critical of "delayering" that focuses primarily on short-term financial results. He also notes that eliminating middle managers may disconnect the people at the outer edge, isolating them from the inner "real (political?) database of the organization." We in HP have mostly avoided simply "downsizing-by-the numbers." But we have flattened structures, and we have also created additional and more subtle communication barriers by outsourcing many of our functions at both the inner and outer layers of the organization. To remain cost competitive in many of our markets, we need to be lean (see #3 below), but, again, IT has an important role in enabling the bridges across these gaps, a non-trivial task given the physical and organizational mobility and fluidity of the businesses' value delivery processes. "3. Lean IS mean and doesn't even improve long-term profits." Mintzberg suggests that systematic layoffs keeps people from using their creativity for fear that their departure may be the way that their productivity suggestions get implemented. He even suggests that anxious employees may sabotage the business, by sins of omission if not by purposeful overt acts. I don't see a lot of that kind of attitude at HP. For the most part, people feel they are being treated fairly even when organizations and jobs are cut. And, even in those cases where a person feels mistreated by local circumstance, there is "due process" that gets issues well-considered. But, those positive practices are fragile. Our HP values are easy to acknowledge now, when things, in general, are pretty good, but maybe we should repeat them often so that we will follow them automatically when (if) we are ever tempted to be mean for the sake of lean. "4. The trouble with most strategies are chief executives who believe themselves to be great strategists." Mintzberg rails against the boss-as-chess-master, the MBA who views people as "resources." (See #8 below.) Most of the time at HP we don't have a "grand strategy." We're great experimenters. In our business units, we try lots of things, feed our successes, and close our failures. But our business units do that a lot better than we do in IT. For example, we might recognize those projects that aren't working and stop them sooner rather than later. "5. Decentralization centralizes, empowerment disempowers, and measurement doesn't measure up." Here, Mintzberg echoes the employee-as-entrepreneur theme of other writers like Peter Block. Empowerment is only an issue in a hierarchical culture. Mintzberg muses, "Imagine a hospital director empowering the doctors. They are perfectly well empowered already, with no thanks to any hospital managers." (Although that might be changing thanks to managed care.) Mintzberg pleads with us to "meet the customers, not the numbers." He pushes back against the remote manager, the left-brained analytic. He leaves a warning for those of us in the data business: "Measurement mesmerizes no less than management. We had better start asking ourselves about the real costs of counting." So, where are those information systems that will show anecdotes and vignettes rather than data? "6. Great organizations, once created, don't need great leaders." Mintzberg feels that companies might need parents, but, in the Collins and Porras, _Built to Last_ tradition, he feels that the great companies become "hives," where the queen works for the drones, not the other way around. He says that the press, and thereby all of us, have evolved a "cult of leadership," where we look for the heroes to save sick organizations or keep the good ones thriving. We in IT have a big responsibility in the great organizations. It is our systems that form the nerves of the organizations, the networks that join all parts of the body. It's our legacy systems that become the autonomic nervous system creating the unconscious responses to customer and employee situations. It's our systems that must embody the values of the organization. "7. Great organizations have souls; any word with a 'de' of a 're' in front of it is likely to destroy those souls." By now, we know that Mintzberg hates management fads and mindless management by numbers. Surprise! He hates reengineering, delayering, restructuring, and decentralization ... and wants us to start thinking, instead. "8. It is time to close down conventional MBA programs." As you might guess, he thinks that great managers are made in the field and factory, not in the classroom. He names Jack Welch, Andy Grove, and Bill Gates as examples of non-MBA business builders. He doesn't mention Bill and Dave, but they sure fit in his list. Mintzberg thinks that the best managers are simply very thoughtful people who are also highly action oriented. And they are mostly people who devote their entire careers to one company. IT managers are not made in school either. They are made in projects and in infrastructure operations. IT managers are made by enabling the needs of their business partners, by enjoying their successes and suffering with their failures. IT managers best do tours of duties in business organizations to internalize the empathy needed for successful partnership. In HP, all managers, but especially IT managers, need to build their networks of personal relationships so that they can get the important things done with those people. "9. Organizations need continuous care, not interventionist cures." Mintzberg suggests the continuous care "nursing" model as a good one for management. He admits that it's not glamorous, but it produces healthy organizations that will not become so sick that they need the abrupt intervention of the doctor-leader. He prefers management as a craft not as a profession, managers who inspire rather than empower, managers who work with their customers and employees in an atmosphere of "mutual respect rooted in common experience and deep understanding." "Mutual respect" is a great concept for all of us in technical professions to internalize. We take pride in our mastery of our toys. We look down on mere mortals who can't write UNIX commands, who can't appreciate the intrinsic beauty of having to hit the Ctrl+Alt+Del keys to start up our PCs, who can't understand why software will always have defects. "10. The trouble with today's management is the trouble with this article: everything has to come in short, superficial doses." These jottings resemble that. Thanks for reading them. Regards, Joe