Principles of Effective Management E-Book

Fredmund Malik

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

Seitenzahl: 169

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

Principles of Effective Management

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:

Management Is a Craft

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 978-3-593-41269-6

www.campus.de

|9|Introduction

The principles I shall be covering lay the foundation for professionalism in management. They are a guide for carrying out management tasks and the application of management tools. They form the core of management effectiveness. I suggest that they also be considered as the essential part of every practical corporate culture. I have never considered the term “corporate culture” to be particularly useful, though I do think what it refers to is useful. Organizations require “the spirit of an organization”; they require values such as the value of effectiveness among others. I think these values can be most usefully and clearly expressed in the form of principles. Principles govern people’s actions.

Before I explain the principles individually, a few preliminary notes are necessary to prevent misconceptions.

1. Simple but not Easy

The pattern of behavior, which I will explain in the form of principles, is not easy to recognize unless we have learnt to perceive it. Neither is it very easy to explain in words. However, once these principles are clearly formulated, they are easily understood. No academic study is required for their understanding.

Their simplicity, from an intellectual point of view, is perhaps also the reason why these principles are seldom, if ever, taught. This is true particularly in the academic field. Teachers are not very interested in them and, among the students, only those who already have considerable practical experience are interested. The others are not in a position to relate them to practice, as they have no experience of practice. |10|Therefore, they do not realize the relevance of the principles suggested here.

In this sense, they are simple to understand; but acting in accordance with them is difficult for many. Why? There are three reasons for this; of which the last one is to be taken particularly seriously. Firstly, the application of principles requires discipline; we must overcome our natural inclinations – something not many people like to do. Secondly, many believe that principles cause them to lose flexibility. This is almost always an error; flexibility is often confused with opportunism.

However, there is a third reason, a genuine one that makes the application of principles difficult. Though the principles as such, and this is my theory, are the same for all organizations and applicable to the same extent, they are always applied in a specific individual case, which can be quite unlike previous cases, has probably never occurred before, or has never been experienced by a particular manager. A principle can be simple, but the individual case and its specific circumstances are usually very complex. Therefore, understanding principles is something very different from their application, because it is not only the principle that has to be understood. More important for the application of principles is what I know and understand about the actual details of the specific situation. Even the issue of deciding which, if any, principles are to be applied in a particular case can create difficulties.

All of this may sound complicated but most people are familiar with the essence of it. Lawyers are entirely familiar with this idea; it governs a substantial part of their profession. It is one thing to know the laws, it is quite another to apply them. However, everyone has already experienced this kind of situation to some degree. Before we can get our driving license, we have to first learn the traffic rules in theory; even if we have learnt them very well, it does not mean that we are good drivers who can drive confidently and with experience – I will use this word often – in accordance with the provisions of the Road Traffic Act. The key to the application of principles is training and experience.

|11|2. Useful in Difficult Situations

As long as we have to deal with situations that are easy to cope with, we do not require principles either in management or anywhere else. The principles to be discussed here are useful, or even necessary, only in a difficult situation, when we are confronted with complex issues for which there are no obvious solutions. We need principles when we are still sitting in the office late on a Friday evening, working on a difficult problem, when everyone else has already begun their weekend and we ask this question: What should I do in this situation?

The situation must be portrayed in such graphic detail because one school of thought in management emphasizes the complexity of organizations and consequently the situation faced by managers. With regard to this perception, it disputes or doubts the utility of simple principles. I agree with this in so far as I accept the basic assumption of great complexity and consider this to be one of the main problems of management. Beyond this point, opinions differ significantly with regard to the solutions to this problem, or to express it in a better way, with regard to suitable, sensible or correct behavior within a highly complex environment.

I am of the opinion that the formation and functioning of complex structures, systems and organizations can, above all, be explained by rules, and that successful behavior within them should also be guided by rules. I have explained this in detail in another of my books.1 In the final analysis, principles are nothing more than rules. It is precisely this perception that made me search for rules of behavior for managers in organizations which would help them deal with complexity – to seek principles of effective management. The principles can be very simple, though the outcome of applying and observing them can be highly complex. Or vice versa: Highly complex systems can result from the observance of very simple principles.2

|12|3. Not Inborn – Must Be Learnt by Everyone

No one I know of was born with these principles or with behavior that conformed to these principles. Everyone has had to learn them. Not everyone has immediately or readily admitted this. However, whenever I have had the chance to look behind the scenes, I have found that even those who, for some reason, did not want to agree with this view, did not have natural talent but had had to learn management just as everyone else did. Why they were inclined to portray themselves as naturally talented has never been clear to me.

If everyone had to learn management, where did they learn it? Time and again, the same three ways crop up: The vast majority learnt management, and this is the first way, simply through trial and error, by trying out all sorts of solutions. This is a lengthy and laborious way, many mistakes are made, and the manager is relatively old by the time the lessons have been learnt. At the age of 20 we do not know what is important in management. Most were well into their late thirties and many way past 40 when they realized, to some extent, what was essential in management.

A small majority, and this is the second way, was very lucky to have had a competent boss in their first or second job, that is to say quite early in their career. Please note that I am not talking about a cooperative, pleasant or modern supervisor but a competent one. There are people who are both pleasant and competent, but most are not. Neither are they cooperative on principle or because it is considered modern. They are cooperative when it is sensible and effective to be so.

Therefore, the people who belong to the second group have, at the start of their professional life, had a supervisor from whom they can learn something. In the case of a few, the drive and sometimes even the passion to learn something about management, and be better at it, stems from the opposite experience, namely an incompetent boss, from the trouble they had with their bosses, or because they suffered under them. However, only the impulse was born here; they then learnt in the first or second way.

|13|The third group comprises those people who were able to gain their first experiences of management very early in life, usually in their childhood. Typical examples are people who were heavily involved in youth organizations, those who were actively involved in certain types of sports, or others who were always, not just once, selected in school to be the class representative by their schoolmates. It is easy to see that this third way is a variant of the first; it is learning through trial and error. However, since these people started early, they gained experience much earlier.

These three ways in which management is typically learnt are not characterized by any particular system.3 It is a lengthy process of learning through experience. At some point in time, we learn enough to be able to carry out our tasks to some degree. I do not hold the opinion that our organizations are filled with bad managers. However, the ways in which people assume or rather stumble into important and sometimes top positions are often highly problematic. It is inconceivable that people in other professions would rely on this type of learning.

4. Ideal and Compromise

If something is formulated as a principle, it sometimes has the appearance of being an ideal. Anyone with any experience would not be naïve enough to believe that an ideal could ever be implemented in management. Compromises must always be made. It is precisely because of this that principles or ideals are required, not in order to implement them but to gain the ability to differentiate between two types of compromises. Banal though it may sound to some, these are right and wrong compromises. Reaching the right compromise more often than the wrong one is one of the elements that differentiate good management from bad and responsibility from irresponsibility.

Every organization requires a few people in key positions who can differentiate between opportunism and clever behavior. Managers are required who, in difficult situations, not only ask the question mentioned |14|above, What should I do?, but also the more important and more difficult question: What would be right in this situation?

There are such people, even though some people who are very attached to clichés may find it hard to believe. There are managers who do not look for the easiest or most pleasant option, who are not concerned with what the media or the unions expect, with what would best serve their careers or income, but who are sincere and honest in searching for what is right.

This does not guarantee that they will always find an answer. Even these managers strike a wrong compromise sometimes. However, the occasional incorrect compromise does not cause any lasting damage. It is damaging and dangerous when wrong compromises accumulate, and this usually happens when the ideal is no longer set as the standard and the principles are forgotten or ignored.

5. What Type Should Be a Model?

What type of manager do I mean when I talk about good or competent managers? I first want to mention the type I do not mean. I am not thinking of what could be called the “three-year wonder”. In three years, a short time, almost anyone can be successful. This is relatively easy. However, this does not prove anything and is not evidence of success. Previously, such people fascinated me because they shot into the limelight. However, short-term success is meaningless. What counts is being successful in the long run, for a period of not three but 30 years, always making fresh starts, despite all the setbacks encountered by everyone at some time.

I have long since given up taking the media wonders seriously and studying them. These people either disappear into oblivion just as quickly as they emerged from it, or there is a very different, much more dangerous species: the multiple three-year wonder. These are people who apparently have a brilliant career and sometimes occupy the top positions in the business world and society. If their curricula vitae are properly examined, however, it turns out that they have only one skill, |15|which they have mastered to perfection and that is that they know exactly when they should leave, and they always leave exactly six months before any sniff of the mess they have created starts to get around. Outwardly, they have brilliant careers; in reality they leave behinda mess everywhere and often even a “trail of blood”. They are not managers, especially not good ones, nor are they leaders, they are careerists.

Managers must meet a minimum of two criteria before they are or, for the sake of good management, should be of interest to me as potential examples. Firstly, they should have occupied the same position for a sufficiently long period that they realize the mistakes they have made. Every manager has made serious mistakes. It is just that there are those who do not admit to them. However, of course this alone is not enough. Anyone can make mistakes. What is important, secondly, is how the person has corrected the mistake. This is far more important. Has the person not only committed a mistake but also admitted to it, or has he tried to escape responsibility?

What is also important to me are those people of whom their subordinates and colleagues say, often years after they have left the organization, “We have learnt a lot from him”. It does not matter if they also add: “He was difficult; it was not easy to work with him; he could bea bastard…” as long as they qualify it by saying: “…but we learnt a lot from him…”. When I hear such statements about someone, I know this person probably provided an example of good management.

Finally, I would like to draw attention to the following aspects, which are sometimes difficult to understand. Firstly, each individual principle may, at first glance, appear to be somewhat limited when taken by itself and in isolation. It must be considered in its entirety and, above all, thought must be given to its wider ramifications. To some extent, the consequences resulting from applying these principles may be diametrically opposed to prevailing thought. Therefore, contradictions will become apparent.

Secondly, for those who think that contradictions should, if possible, be eliminated, the question arises which of the two contradicting opinions is better, more correct and practical. I consider this to be one of the most important effects of principles. They provide an opportunity |16|for a critical debate on the issue and, in certain circumstances, this leads to the elimination of wrong ideas and opinions. Compared to other disciplines there is hardly any critical discussion on management issues. In my opinion this is one of the most significant reasons for the fact that there are many fads in this field but little progress.

The application of these principles restricts charlatanism to a great extent. This is because they function as regulatory ideas, standards and criteria that separate right from wrong, practical from impractical, good from bad, and acceptable from unacceptable.

|17|First Principle: Focusing on Results

Only the Results Are Important in Management

The thoughts and actions of competent managers reflect a general pattern which is their focus on results. They are primarily, sometimes exclusively, interested in results. Everything else is of secondary importance to them or does not interest them in the least. The fact should not be concealed that their focus on results can sometimes assume even pathological proportions which I do not consider good nor do I recommend it as, to some extent, it is difficult to tolerate. Nevertheless, it is the results that count for them.

My basic assertion is that management is a profession. With regard to this first principle, it may be said that: Management is the profession of achieving results or obtaining results. The yardstick is the achievement of objectives and carrying out tasks.

This principle is not always important to the same degree. As long as results are relatively easy to achieve, perhaps due to a particularly favorable economic situation, management is not really under pressure and, in certain circumstances, management may not even be necessary. Under such conditions, this first principle is hardly used. Its application becomes necessary, useful, and even urgent when results are not achieved automatically; when real effort is required.

Of course, adherence to this principle does not mean that all targets will be achieved. To expect or presume such a thing would be naïve. Even managers who have made the principle of focusing on results the foremost maxim for their actions suffer setbacks and must accept failures. However, they do not give up because of this, they do |18|not resign, and, above all, they are not satisfied with explanations and justifications.

A Self-Evident Fact?

It may occur to us to believe that this principle is a self-evident fact that managers act according to this principle in any case, and that it therefore hardly needs to be mentioned. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Firstly, this can be observed; we need only look for it. Secondly, every experienced manager will confirm it. Thirdly