Management For a New Era E-Book

Fredmund Malik

• Herausgeber: Campus Verlag
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Die Malik ManagementSysteme
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 166

Beschreibung

Management is no matter of ideology, nor is it a question of fashion. Management is a craft - the universal and most important discipline of the 21st century. Fredmund Malik, the leading expert in the field of general management, provides you with the knowledge it takes to be a successful executive and manager, in any position, within any organisation. Faced with the new challenges of an economy in transformation, management too must prepare for changes of an unprecedented extent. Fredmund Malik provides the core tenets for mastering change, explains the fundamentals of formulating a corporate policy and shows how complex systems can be structured and controlled by means of Master Control. Fredmund Malik's theory is system-oriented and can thus be applied regardless of time or place. It is designed to work in all areas and industries of any society, irrespective of changing trends or national and cultural differences. Taking as his point of departure the consistent traits displayed by complex systems - phenomena that executives and managers are likely to address on a daily basis - Malik sets the standard for sound management in a knowledge-based economy. Read more about the Malik Management Systems: Management Is a Craft The Principles of Effective Management Tasks of Effective Management Tools of Effective Management The Malik Management System and Its Users Managing People - Managing a Business The General Management Functions Instructions for Self-Organization Sovereignty and Leadership through Master Control Free Download Cybernetics: Background of the Malik Management Systems

Leseprobe

Fredmund Malik

Management For a New Era

Outline

Management is no matter of ideology, nor is it a question of fashion. Management is a craft – the universal and most important discipline of the 21st century. Fredmund Malik, the leading expert in the field of general management, provides you with the knowledge it takes to be a successful executive and manager, in any position, within any organisation.

Faced with the new challenges of an economy in transformation, management too must prepare for changes of an unprecedented extent. Fredmund Malik provides the core tenets for mastering change, explains the fundamentals of formulating a corporate policy and shows how complex systems can be structured and controlled by means of Master Control.

Fredmund Malik’s theory is system-oriented and can thus be applied regardless of time o place. It is designed to work in all areas and industries of any society, irrespective of changing trends or national and cultural differences. Taking as his point of departure the consistent traits displayed by complex systems – phenomena that executives and managers are likely to address on a daily basis – Malik sets the standard for sound management in a knowledge-based economy.

Read more about the Malik Management Systems:

Management Is a Craft

The Principles of Effective Management

Tasks of Effective Management

Tools of Effective Management

The Malik Management System and Its Users

Managing People – Managing a Business

The General Management Functions

Instructions for Self-Organization

Sovereignty and Leadership through Master Control

Cybernetics: Background of the Malik Management Systems

Information about the author

Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik is an orderly professor for corporate management with a teaching license from the University of St. Gallen, an internationally renowned management expert, the founder and chairman of Malik Management, and the creator of the Malik Management Systems® framework. He is also a bestselling and award-winning author of over ten books, including classics like “Managing Performing Living” and “Strategy of the Management of Complex Systems” (in German language), as well as a columnist for opinion-forming media and one of the most distinguished thought leaders in the area of management. As a board member and chairman of several governance bodies at renowned world market leaders, Malik also has broad first-hand knowledge of international corporate governance practice. In the 1990s, Malik was the first macroeconomic thinker – and for a long time the only one – to point out the damaging effects of neoliberalism to society as a whole. He was also the first to criticize the Anglo-Saxon business administration theory with its one-dimensional fixation on shareholder value, which Malik identified as one of the main causes of the global financial crisis. Thanks to his cybernetic methodology and toolset, Malik was one of the first to realize the imminent danger. As his tools enabled him to read the warning signs early on, Malik and his team developed innovative solutions to manage the complexity of today’s major challenges. With his cybernetic-based management theory, Malik has been setting standards for Right and Good Management.

His numerous distinctions and awards include the Cross of Honor for Science of Art from the Republic of Austria, 2009, and the Heinz von Foerster Award for Organizational Cybernetics from the German Cybernetic Society, 2010.

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Two CEOs over late-night drinks

A: This is going to be my last whisky for the day, I’ve got a stack of documents to go through tomorrow.

B: What for? Nobody else knows what they’re all about.

A: That’s why I need to know – otherwise no one will have a clue of what’s going on, complex as everything is these days. Don’t you ever take any work home with you?

B: Pretty much never. In our company, because of all the complexity everyone has to know their stuff at all times. So our folders are usually quiet thin. I can read them at the office.

Manifesto for Corporate REvolution

This book is a program for Revolutionizing top management. Its main focus has to be on top managers, as only they are in a position to take the decisions needed in due time.

Radical changes are managed at the top – or not at all. In the latter case, they simply happen. There is no choice, no option to say yes or no. The only option we have is to carry through this REvolution, well or badly, to be proactive and precipitate it or to be passive and let it happen – in which case we will probably be on the losing end.

The REvolutionary Transformation

The reason for REvolution is simple. Both the world of business and society at large are going through one of the most fundamental transformations that ever occurred in history. What is currently happening is not simply change. It is change of a new logical dimension, a metaand mega-change. About one-third of the managers I work with are aware of this but do not see a solution. Another third sense the change, but feel uncertain and are unable to pinpoint it. The final third turna blind eye, believing in today’s world as the only possible one.

The REvolution will not leave any of today’s organizations unscathed, be it commercial enterprises, universities, hospitals, or government. This must be the a basic assumption for top managers. I have been discussing this with top executives for years. They force themselves to accept this premise, in order not to run the risk of underestimating the change ahead. Many organizations will go down, either because they are unable to accomplish the transition or because they are no longer needed. Almost everything will have to be given a new order and many new organizations will emerge, with new purposes and tasks.

Forecasts are useless, but certain outlines are already discernible. One thing that is quite certain is that we are in the midst of the emergence of a new society, which can most accurately be referred to as the society of complexity – in a transition from the information to the knowledge society, from the society of organizations to the society of complex systems. Companies will no longer essentially be engines of force intensification but of intelligence intensification; rather than economic money machines they will be information and communication systems. Steering, regulating, and organizing become self-steering, selfregulating, and self-organizing. Predominant terms will be complexity, system, and cybernetics.

Categorical Change – Change of Categories

I prefer the term categorical change to the well-worn “paradigm change”, which has become useless for anything save banalities. What is happening is nothing less than a revolution of the fundamental categories in which society and economy have to be perceived in order to understand them – comparable to the Copernican transition from the geocentric to the heliocentric concept of the world, but encompassing many more dimensions.

Few of today’s categories for understanding the economy, organizations, and management will remain useful; they will no longer be able to guide people’s actions in any reliable way. That is true even for the world and for what we call reality, as the sciences teach us ever more spectacularly – in particular the bio- and neurosciences, but lately also physics again.

These sciences and their results are visible and they shape public awareness. By contrast, the sciences truly relevant for top executives in societal institutions have not had that much influence to date, although they are already bringing permanent changes to our lives: specifically the sciences of complexity, cybernetics, bionics, and the systems sciences. From a logical perspective, these sciences rank even “higher” because they will bring a change of categories, thus revolutionizing traditional sciences as well.

Quite certainly, in retrospect historians will speak of an epochal change and of a profound break in thinking, when they attempt to categorize the epoch we live in. And the crucial effects will have been brought about by executives’ actions and by the workings of societal institutions.

Will the Company Survive?

In parts of the business sector, enterprises of the current type will continue to exist. But even they will have to restructure radically and redesign their management from scratch.

In the New Society there will be many top managers who will be functioning as the nervous systems and brains, as it were, but “below” them there will not necessarily be companies in the current sense because everything can be sourced from outside. It will not even be necessary to buy resources because it will suffice to control them; it will be possible to source, re- and outsource, to form alliances and other forms of cooperation, create networks, dissolve them, configure and reconfigure them. A substantial share of the smartest top management bodies will confine themselves to “composing and directing” while the “orchestra” will keep changing, as is common in the world of music.

From Money to Knowledge: Will There Still Be Shareholder Meetings?

While we might continue to pay with money, the complex world will not be driven by it. It will be driven by knowledge, even though economists and analysts will try to uphold the monetary illusion for quite a while. For instance, the knowledge of how to set up successful business deals in China is several times more important than the money required to invest there, since without such knowledge investments will be lost faster than they are placed. Conversely, those who know how it is done will always be able to raise the necessary funds.

Taking this into account, what kinds of rights should be conceded, for instance, to shareholder meetings largely populated by investors, who – apart from their money – usually have little to contribute to the knowledge and intelligence required for the business, or to the functionality of its complex systems? Let them have generous dividends, let them enjoy handsome share price gains – but why should they havea part in electing the supervisory board, the group of people that is responsible for directing and supervising the company’s fate? So will there be two general meetings, one for investors and one for the owners of knowledge? Imagine, say, three dozen companies cooperating in constantly changing network structures, which jointly establish an integrated management of the entire problem-solving process, from the identification of the customer’s problem to its solution. How is our present form of corporate governance supposed to work in sucha structure? Instead of corporate governance we will need systems governance. But how will it have to work when the performance networks of a global society will be systems continually reconfiguring themselves?

From Knowledge to Insight: Mundus Novus

Even knowledge is not enough. What we need is perspective, insight, and comprehension. After all, knowledge is nothing but a resource. Only its application, comprehending and understanding how complex systems work, lets us take the decisive step towards exploiting complexity – utilizing it to persist in a new dimension of global competition and to succeed in a new business environment. To create and apply knowledge and transform it into benefits, we also need knowledge – but of another kind: rather than knowledge of the subject matter we need system knowledge.

Most of the ingredients of the New Society are in place for everyone to see, even if not everyone can understand them. Hence, a better comparison than Copernicus, although less known, is Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine explorer after whom America was named. Amerigo realized that it was a New World, while Columbus, who had discovered the new territory, never until his death understood what he had accomplished. He kept on thinking he had landed in India, and so, regardless of his discovery, he tragically remained a citizen of the Old World. Amerigo Vespucci was the first citizen of the New World because he had understood the significance of the newly discovered territory. Stefan Zweig has left us an impressive account of these events.

As discussions regularly show, seasoned top executives are well able to conjecture how the existing components will reconfigure themselves to form systems of systems. But even they find it difficult to recognize the parts as elements of a new whole, because they still lack the categorization system, the grid, the coordinates of the new dimensions that one would need for true understanding. Hence, many are only able to see a number of puzzle pieces – but they have yet to develop an idea of the image that these pieces will form.

Management in the Age of Complexity

Important as it may be, the economic dimension alone does not suffice for the management of a company, and even less for other kinds of societal institutions. Hence, the issues raised in this book go beyond the prevalent one-dimensional, economics-centered way of looking at things, as well as the associated neo-liberal perspective with its exclusive focus on profit optimization. The book addresses the following questions:

What is a functioning system?

How can it be made to work, and maintained that way?

What are the regularities underlying its functioning?

How do systems need to be regulated so that they can basically expand without limits?

How can systems be regulated so as to make them regulate and organize themselves?

The answers to these questions can be found in the laws of complex systems. They have been investigated and described in both cybernetics and systems sciences. They apply in a double sense: for all productive social systems that need to be managed and for all systems needed to manage them (i.e., their management systems).

Cybernetics as the science of functioning provides new solutions to many fundamental issues and unsolved problems of management, solutions that are more effective than traditional concepts. For some questions it provides the very first answers. Hence, the insights from cybernetics are what my understanding of general management and the Malik Management System is based on.1

Among other things, a cybernetic consideration of the issues of corporate policy and governance will provide the following:

new answers to questions of influence, power, and leadership at the top,

new solutions for a professional way to deal with and take advantage of complexity,

new opportunities for and requirements of the regulation, control, direction, and development of companies,

new possibilities for the organization of companies,

new solutions for change management,

new possibilities and requirements for information and communication,

in general, new approaches to questions of the overall functionality and viability of any institution.

Furthermore, my perception of right and good management, as outlined in Management. The Essence of the Craft and in Managing Performing Living, has new consequences for the abilities, ways of thinking, and skills required both from the professional manager and from management as a profession. Above all, this concerns the continuous education of an ever greater number of people with general management tasks. In the 21st century they face unprecedented challenges. This calls for different concepts, models, methods, and tools than have been customary so far.

Systemic Corporate Policy

Important subjects like corporate policy and corporate governance are not to be viewed as an isolated topic in the context of my management system. They are architectural elements of my overall system for general management. As such, the subjects of corporate policy and governance in several important respects assume a different meaning than they would if they were considered separately, that is, independently of the overall context of management, as is still fairly common today.

In my management system, corporate policy and corporate governance are part of a greater whole. Their function and their design result from the interaction with all other parts of the overall system. On the one hand, they are only systemic modules within a greater configuration, just as atoms are modules of molecules and molecules are modules of more comprehensive structures. On the other hand, the modules of corporate or systems policy are what turns systems into effective systems.

It is fairly comparable to the way a computer needs an operating system so that individual software programs running on it can function properly. Hence, corporate policy and its “little sister”, corporate governance, have particular and absolutely crucial significance. Whatever goes wrong here cannot be corrected in any other part of an organization. Whatever is regulated correctly here will not have to be dealt with anywhere else, because it will enable the system to function.

Systems Logic and Subject-Related Issues

As one component in an overall system, however, this manifesto has to fulfill its function in the context of my management system. To this end, I need to lift corporate policy to a higher logical level than is presently common in expert discussion. In my management system, corporate policy and corporate governance are not addressed at the subjectspecific level but at the subordinate level of system regulation. Corporate policy and governance are the existential and constitutive controls required for an organization to work. They are the architectural and functional principles which rank similarly to the articles ofa constitution, and which I refer to as Master Controls.

This overriding perspective of system regulation is necessary because statements referring to concrete subject matters at companies can hardly be generalized, or if they are, they quickly become outdated because they are overtaken by reality. Consequently, books about corporate policy tend to become irrelevant within a short period if they focus on the subject level. Attempts to generalize statements at the subject level, in order to make them permanently valid, will usually render them devoid of meaning. At this level, statements of true political significance – that is to say, fundamental, general, and permanent stipulations – are hardly possible.

By contrast, at a higher level – from the perspective of system regulation and direction – we encounter an invariant logic; that is to say, rules, basic principles and organizing principles which we could actually refer to as “eternal truths” because they have two critical qualities: they have significance with regard to content and they are universally valid. Hence, their effectiveness results from providing orientation above and beyond the specific issues at hand. Using them as a point of reference, it is possible to define in advance how specific issues are to be dealt with. They are superordinate to specific issues. It is a question of knowing how to avoid problems from the start, or how to solve them thoroughly enough to prevent them from reappearing.

Effective Master Controls

The effectiveness of superordinate system regulations, in the sense of system or corporate policy, is powerfully demonstrated using a few examples. For instance, a principle often violated in company acquisitions is the system rule to never buy a company unless you will be able to manage it with your own people within 12 months. The proven failure rate for mergers & acquisitions of over two-thirds could be reduced to less than one-third, íf this system-political rule was strictly observed.

Another example is the principle permanently disregarded in innovation management: separate the new from the existing business! This rule helps avoid most of the typical difficulties and failures occurring in innovation efforts.

Rules like these not only exist in corporate management but in practically all areas, such as sports or games. Modern game theory, which was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, is the scientific approach to dealing with such rules. It exceeds the realm of economic issues by far and also originates from cybernetics. In chess, apart from the wellknown rules of the game there is also a set of principles not everybody is familiar with, such as: keep your knights in the center. Or, to put it more generally: try to strengthen your position with every move.

Principles of this kind – we call them heuristics – are part of the wellguarded know-how of every chess pro, and they allow him to keep his calm in situations where anyone with a lesser knowledge would long have lost his bearings. Heuristics gain relevance when any other type of decision has become impossible due to the immense complexity of the game. In a detailed study of the decision routines of humans and computers in chess, the Russian grand master and former world champion M. M. Botvinnik has dealt with principles of this kind. They are the principles of succeeding and winning in hypercomplex situations.

Issue Policy vs. Systems Policy