Management Is a Craft E-Book

Fredmund Malik

• Herausgeber: Campus Verlag
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Die Malik ManagementSysteme
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 77

Beschreibung

This Malik eReading application comprises the complete Malik Management Systems: Essentials every manager needs to know, from the essence of the craft to strategy, corporate governance and leadership.

Leseprobe

Fredmund Malik

Management Is a Craft

www.campus.de

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 bea successful executive and manager, in any position, within any organisation.

Fredmund Malik shows what it means to be an effective manager, how ordinary people can achieve extraordinary feats, and what an executive job really entails. Candid and outspoken, Malik sweeps aside the widespread errors and misconceptions that distort our understanding of sound management, proving that professionalism is an acquired skill. Right and good management always follows the same basic principles, irrespective of position, organisation or culture. And above all: Management is a profession – not a vocation.

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:

Principles of Effective Management

Tasks of Effective Management

Tools of Effective Management

The Malik Management System and Its Users

Information about the author

Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik is a university-level professor of corporate management, an internationally renowned management expert and the chairman of Malik Management, the leading knowledge organization for wholistic cybernetic management systems, based in St. Gallen, Switzerland. With approximately 300 employees, a number of international branch offices and partner networks for cybernetics and bionics, Malik Management is the largest knowledge organization, offering truly effective solutions for all types of organizations and their complex management issues. Thousands of executives are trained and advised about wholistic general management systems. Fredmund Malik is the awardwinning and best-selling author of more than ten books, including the classic Managing Performing Living. He is also a regular columnist for opinion-leading newspapers and magazines and one of the most prominent thought leaders in the management arena. Among numerous other awards, he has received the Cross of Honor for Science and Art from the Republic of Austria (2009) and the Heinz von Foerster Award for Organizational Cybernetics from the German Society for Cybernetics (2010).

Copyright notice

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner.

Copyright © 2011 Campus Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.

Cover design: Campus Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main

Konvertierung Koch, Neff & Volckmar GmbH,

KN digital – die digitale Verlagsauslieferung, Stuttgart

ISBN 978-3-593-41268-9

www.campus.de

|8|The Ideal Manager – the Wrong Question

There is hardly a discussion on management that does not mention the requirements of managers. If we get to the root of the matter, a particular concept almost always seems to dominate, sometimes expressed but more often tacit in nature, and that is the image of the ideal manager. As soon as the word “management” is heard, most people instinctively focus on this aspect by asking the question: Who is an ideal manager? This question also dominates the literature on management. The training of management staff is based on this concept, and it is wrong.

The Universal Genius

After decades of empirical research in this field, it is easy to answer this question today, and this makes it the focus of interest to the exclusion of everything else. Everything that could be researched in this field has been researched. In 40 years of empirical social research, every possible questionnaire has been answered, every interview taken, and every test conducted. As a result, we know the profile of an ideal manager in great detail.

It is for this reason that personnel managers, who think that they have attained some level of competence, have a list of some size in their “toolbox” which they consult for personnel-related matters such as staffing decisions, creating profiles of requirements, establishing criteria for performance appraisals, writing job advertisements, and also devising training programs and presenting papers.

|9|This list enumerates all the qualities which, according to common opinion, are expected from a person being considered for a management level position: the skills, the knowledge, the personality and character traits, the experience, qualities, and qualifications. It all sounds so plausible that we hardly think of questioning it. After all, it is also supported by countless research projects. How can it be doubted?

Let us take a few examples. In a recent study, 600 of the largest companies in Germany were questioned on the management qualities they look for. The result was striking: team-builder, visionary, communicative, charismatic, committed to the company, with an international perspective, ecological and social focus, integrity, multicultural skills, and intuitive decision-making. Typically, the characteristic customerfocused came last with the least number of votes.

In the bulletin of a large Swiss bank that operates globally, there was an article by one of its top managers on the “Twelve I’s of the Ideal Profile”. It told us that, apart from possessing other qualities, the manager of the future must be interrogative-integral, an integrating intermediary as well as intercommunicative-instructive – perhaps not quite what we learn in school.

In a recent issue of the most widely distributed management magazine in a German-speaking country “The ABC of New Requirements” was published which listed a total of 45 “key qualities for the future manager”. These were divided into “personal qualities, management qualities and organizational factors” – a compendium of desirable skills. To impart some practical utility the piece was presented in the form of a test which could be taken and evaluated immediately. The fact that certain terms in the test lists, such as communicative competence, empathy, and future-orientation or system integration, are open to widely differing interpretations is magnanimously overlooked. Ifa score of between 1.0 and 2.5 is achieved, it can be assumed that “you or the person taking the test meets all the requirements in the new profile of a business virtuoso”. Aha…

These examples are not exceptions, nor are they compiled out of an obsessive desire to support my outlandish opinion. They are typical and representative of a universal way of thinking that has gained |10|ground not only in business but also in other social spheres. 90 percent of all job advertisements mention these kinds of peculiar requirements. Furthermore, many common management tools are based on these things: performance appraisal systems, potential analyses, personnel selection procedures, salary fixing systems, etc.

I too learnt all of this in my studies and I accepted it for the reasons stated previously. However, as time went by, the more I came into contact with real people in the course of my work, and the more experience I gained, the more I began to have my doubts. Plausibility, or the fact that it is taught in universities or is the prevalent opinion, is no guarantee for the correctness of a concept. In our history many things were taught – even in universities – and believed, even by experts, which were nevertheless absolutely wrong. Plausibility has often also proved to be misleading, as we can learn from theories advanced through the ages from Copernicus to Darwin.

What type of idea is spread by these lists and catalogues of requirements? What is the basic type of manager that emerges here? It would not be unfair to say that the list of requirements essentially portraysa universal genius. In some strange way, the idea has taken root thata manager, especially a top manager, should be a cross between a general from a bygone era, a Nobel Prize winner for physics, and a TV show host.

Although this ideal type can be described and descriptions indeed abound, we cannot find such people in the real world. In my opinion it is this that constitutes one of the most significant problems encountered today in management education as well as management practice.

My comments so far are not meant as a criticism of the science. It renders what is demanded and expected of it: It answers the question by providing the characteristics and skills of the ideal manager. And the answers are right. The ideal managers could well be as they are presented in the studies. It is not the answers that are wrong; it is the question.

|11|The Effective Person

My suggestion, therefore, is to drop the question. Although it can be answered, neither the question nor the answers have much practical relevance. Even if we were to temporarily accept, for the sake of argument, that universal geniuses do exist, we would be forced to conclude – on the basis of statistics alone – that they are rare. Too rare to allow any hope that their numbers could occupy even a fraction of the management positions available in a modern society. I will explain this in more detail in one of the following chapters.

I suggest another question. Instead of: Who is an ideal manager?, the question should be: Who is an effective manager? The formulation of this latter question is very different from the former. Its starting point is not geniuses but ordinary