The Book of Dangerous Words in Management E-Book

Fredmund Malik

• Herausgeber: Campus Verlag
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 212

Beschreibung

Disruption? New Work? Agility? Executives are supposed to be charismatic and visionary while staff are expected to be motivated and enthusiastic. Such talk comes easily – and indeed incessantly – to managers. But how much to these all-too-familiar clichés really have to tell us? Fredmund Malik reveals the muddled thinking underlying large parts of the vocabulary of management. His new book cuts through the babble and makes a stand for clear thinking and straight talking. »Not only skeptics will find Malik a pleasure to read. He is skilled at picking apart the fashionable verbiage of management with often sarcastic glee.« Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich)

Leseprobe

Fredmund Malik

THE BOOK OF DANGEROUS WORDS IN MANAGEMENT

Translated from German by Joe Kroll

Campus VerlagFrankfurt/New York

Über das Buch

Disruption? New Work? Agility? Executives are supposed to be charismatic and visionary while staff are expected to be motivated and enthusiastic. Such talk comes easily – and indeed incessantly – to managers. But how much to these all-too-familiar clichés really have to tell us? Fredmund Malik reveals the muddled thinking underlying large parts of the vocabulary of management. His new book cuts through the babble and makes a stand for clear thinking and straight talking. "Not only skeptics will find Malik a pleasure to read. He is skilled at picking apart the fashionable verbiage of management with often sarcastic glee." Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich)

Vita

Professor Fredmund Malik ranks among the foremost thinkers on management. A best-selling author, he is Professor of Corporate Management at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) as well as founder and chairman of the leading institute for the Management of Complex Systems, with branches in St. Gallen, Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, London, Toronto, Beijing and Shanghai.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

What’s new doesn’t have a name yet

Nearly everything is going to change

What we already know

More than the finer points of language

The most dangerous word in this collection – and the most endangered?

CHARISMA

LEADERSHIP

Real leaders concentrate on the task, not their own needs

Real leaders are result-oriented

Real leaders force themselves to listen

Real leaders make themselves understood

We, not I

Unafraid of strong people

Leaders can be inspiring individuals – but they don’t have to be

Leadership is situational

Management is not leadership

LEADERSHIP STYLE

No correlation

Manners matter

No career for ruffians

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY

Why we engage in economic activity

Is that the whole truth?

Understanding economic activity

DOING BUSINESS

Management is not limited to business

Management is not business studies or business administration

MANAGING AND LEADING PEOPLE

MANAGEMENT

Distinguishing management from the operational level

A societal function

Mastering complexity

The profession of effectiveness and the path to viability

CULTURE

Misleading solutions

The culture of functioning

FUNCTIONING

NEW WORK

Just new or actually right?

Doing the right things right

MAKING MISTAKES

Trial and error: the logic of evolution

No license to slip up

The better rule

How to deal with mistakes

CHALLENGES

Obliviousness or egomania?

Out of one’s depth

In it for kicks – or for results?

PERFORMANCE LIMITS

Testing boundaries

Breaking boundaries

MOTIVATION

STRESS

GENERATION X, Y, Z

Dispensing with labels

Finding out what the individual is like

IDENTIFICATION

Precise psychological term or sloppy language?

Pubescent symptoms

No connection with performance

Loss of Objectivity

TALENT

POTENTIAL

PRAISE

HIERARCHY

There’s no boss in the brain – but there are rules

Responsibility is the only tenable legitimation

PARTICIPATION

No end in itself

To interconnect knowledge, amplify intelligence, and for better decisions

For the emergence of meta-information

For effective learning

TEAMWORK

What’s so hard about teamwork?

Unnecessary idealization and genuine performance

TOP MANAGEMENT TEAMS

Three principles

Six rules

PERSONNEL DECISIONS

What to do when treasures become burdens?

VISION

Visions, good & bad

Mission

EMOTIONS

Only positive emotions?

Emotion does not make up for poor thinking

GUT DECISIONS

Head or gut?

Years of experience

The “inner voice” as advisor

ENTHUSIASM

VALUE

DISRUPTION

“Creative Destruction”

From the old world to a New World

Transformation, not disruption

INNOVATION

Market-based definition

No lack of ideas

The myth of the creative innovator

GLOBALIZATION

The world is not a village

COMPLEXITY

Complexity is not complication

Utilizing complexity as a new raw material

GOVERNANCE

From management to self-management, from organization to self-organization

GROWTH

CONTROL

Is control really necessary?

Self-control, self-regulation

Control by communication

Founded on trust

TRUST

RESPONSIBILITY

What one decides to do

The manager’s responsibility

CUSTOMER

RISK-TAKING

The different kinds of risk

For want of a choice?

FUN

Unrealistic expectations

More differentiation

Work or results?

As long as it’s meaningful …

CONCENTRATION

CORPORATE SUCCESS

PROFIT

SHAREHOLDER

An investor is not an entrepreneur

If you can’t sell, you have to care

Money: the primary resource

STAKEHOLDER

Stakeholder orientation leads to poor management

The business itself is at the center

Securing jobs is not a company’s purpose

Customers are not stakeholders

INFORMATION

“Big data” does not equal information, and information does not equal knowledge

All noise, no signal?

“… what could have been said”

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

How do people change their knowledge?

Making knowledge productive

REORGANIZATION

Organizing or functioning?

Refunctioning: self-organization

DIGITALIZATION

Evolving operating systems

Digitalization and Systems Cybernetics share a foundation

INTERCONNECTEDNESS

AGILITY

Stop doing the wrong things!

Purposes are even more important than targets

SUSTAINABILITY

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED BOOKS BY FREDMUND MALIK

INTRODUCTION

In the world of information technology, every effort is made to keep computer systems free of viruses and malware. Their dangers are obvious, which is why systems and networks must be secured. The best way to do so is by continual updates, allowing computers to correct themselves, repair damage, and learn to deal with threats.

But how to prevent “viruses” from infesting the thoughts and ideas of human beings? How to prevent “malware” in the form of misguided ideas and dangerous misconceptions from entering our heads – and particularly the heads of executives in societies’ countless organizations? How can we prevent the functioning of our organizations being “hacked”? A still more important question is: How can the thinking of executives be provided with the right updates, containing the concepts that point the future?

What’s new doesn’t have a name yet

These questions are important because we are witnesses to the emergence of a New World. Economy and society are undergoing one of the greatest transformations in history. The Old World, as we knew it, is turning into a New World, which we still can know only in outline, and in some of its rudiments. We can conjecture a little more, from which we can infer that in this New World, nearly everything will be unlike it is today.

The greatest challenge is to move from the Old World to the New, for in the period of transition, the Old World will keep functioning less and less, while the New World is not yet up and running. Since 1997, I have been referring to this process of profound change as “The Great Transformation21” and offered a detailed discussion of it in my books. In order to describe it, I needed a largely new language – that of cybernetics, from which the term “governance” is borrowed. The language of the Old World masks and distorts nearly all the New World’s important traits, precisely because they are new. In fact, we probably do not yet even have words for what may turn out to be the crucial properties of the New World. In times of transition, we are in particular danger of failing to notice such properties until we are suddenly confronted with them.

Such was also the case with earlier transitions. What was new did not have a name. After all, what to call an apparatus able to do something that, according to the “laws of nature,” was not even possible? The Germans came upon the imaginative idea of calling it Flugzeug or “flying-tool.” The English word aeroplane (or, in American usage, airplane), derived from the French aéro and the Greek planos, “wandering,” seems more lyrical, but similarly baffled by the sheer novelty of what it seeks to describe. If we tried to describe today’s computerized world in terms of the mechanized office of the 1960s, we would struggle to understand computers.

Nearly everything is going to change

Many of the terms used today are “dangerous” because they describe the new wrongly, because they prevent its understanding and thus impede progress. For nearly everything will change in the course of the Great Transformation21: what we do, why we do it, and how we do it – and consequently also who we are. One day, we may look back on it as the most profound transformation in history, greater that the Industrial Revolution, than the Renaissance and Reformation, and the earlier transformations of the thirteenth century. The Great Transformation21 is taking place all over the world and affects all areas of society, above all its millions of organizations.

The Great Transformation21 is driven by four principal forces, which join to form a new reality. The most important drivers are technology, particularly digitalization and biotechnologies, the profound changes in the demographic makeup of most modern states, the global ecological challenges as well as the global economy and above all its debt. These four forces are closely interconnected. They influence, reinforce, modify, and hasten each other. From their interconnection, a new, all-encompassing reality emerges: exponentially growing, dynamic, and self-reinforcing complexity on a scale hitherto unknown.

The more complex the world becomes and the more it changes, the clearer our thinking needs to be if it is to help us find our way. And the clearer must also be the language and terminology that enable us to communicate effectively.

What we already know

What can we already know about the Great Transformation21 today? After all, it is not beginning only now, nor did it begin only with the iPhone. A more useful date might be 1994, when Netscape released the first web browser accessible to non-specialists and inaugurated the internet as we know it – the General Public Internet, as it were. Previously, only specialists or enthusiastic hobbyists had used it. The scientific foundations for the Great Transformation21 were already laid in the late 1940s by Cybernetics, which studied nature’s third fundamental entity: information.

We know that the new society is at once a knowledge society, an organization society, and a complexity society. We know that it needs to be an effectively functioning society and that, in order to be so, it needs effectively functioning organizations. And thus, we also know that it will be a society in which management will be the key function, and that such management must be of the systems-cybernetic kind, based on sciences of complexity  – on systems theory, cybernetics, and bionics. On account of their inherent risks, some types of organization began early on to work systematically to achieve ever better functioning, among them airports and hospitals.

In a world of functioning, the previous ideologies will be of little significance, for they are typically Old World modes of thought. Just as the natural sciences were never socialist, capitalist, or imperialist – or Catholic, or Buddhist –, the functioning of organizations, too, will come to be considered outside any ideological framework. Yet perhaps it will bring forth a meta-philosophy of applied functionism, as I have suggested in several of my books: by functioning management for functioning organizations. Only thus will true leadership be possible for the first time.

Effective communication will be decisive for functioning societies in the New World, at the level of computer networks, and of organizations and the people working in them. A functioning language may thus turn out to be crucial to the New World and its functioning. This does not pose much of a problem for computer networks, which have always made use of the cybernetic properties of feedback networks to correct themselves, have long worked with “Double Loop Feedback” and, in doing so, became self-teaching systems. Much greater difficulties are faced by people – not people taken by themselves, but people in organizations.

More than the finer points of language

Language exerts a decisive influence on perception, thought, communication, and action. Language is the foundation of right leadership, and language is the tool of those who use it to mislead. My concern in this book is with neither the finer points of usage nor questions of style or preference, but with right thinking and effective communication in management. But this is not an issue just of lucidity and concision. It is easy to put the greatest nonsense in clear and simple terms. All some people need is 280 characters and a few hashtags. Clarity has nothing to do with a statement’s inherent accuracy.

At stake are clarity, accuracy, and professional precision. “Dangerous” words are sources of misunderstanding. They impede accurate understanding and sensible communication. They lead to misguided expectations and wrong behavior in people and organizations.

A clear and precise terminology is the hallmark of developed sciences and disciples. Professionalism and competence depend on a command of the core concepts. Nobody in a scientific or technical discipline could expect to be taken seriously without grasping the distinction between speed and acceleration. A lawyer unaware of the difference between possession and ownership would be not just incompetent, but dangerous. Precision is key when subtle but important decisions are at stake.

Analogous problems are not a rarity, but a common occurrence in management, where we are still far from the precision and clarity long ago attained by and indeed taken for granted in advanced disciplines. In virtually every discussion, my experience is that executives, as professional as they may be in their respective specializations, either lack a clear sense of the meaning of certain terms or assume that the same clarity obtains in management as it does it their own disciplines. As a consequence of this assumption, they are often surprised to find themselves in a linguistic quagmire.

The most dangerous word in this collection – and the most endangered?

Of all the “dangerous words in management” collected here, barely any single one is misunderstood as often as management itself. Major uncertainty exists as to what management actually is, what it is not, and what it ought to be. This is the main source of misunderstanding and error, and the reason for the slow advance of this practical discipline, for the recurring fads plaguing the profession, and for the Babylonian confusion and disorientation in which so many people feel stuck.

It is also one of the principal reasons for the animosity – often latent but increasingly open – and indeed hostility toward management and managers. In my work as teacher, coach, and adviser to executives, I was nearly always able soon to ensure clarity and to reduce or assuage such antipathy by means of the distinction between right and wrong, good and bad management that I have developed over decades.

Right and good management I take to be the societal function that allows a society’s organizations and systems to function in a right and good manner. That is why, in this new edition, I have decided to include the worst misunderstandings surrounding the concept of management itself.

In this book, I address a selection of words whose careless use I regard as a widespread habit as well as often being, in the sense outlined above, dangerous, confusing, or deceptive. Examples are charisma or gut feeling. Others are words – motivation, for instance – around which a misguided practice or comprehensive misjudgments – as in the case of emotion – have accrued. Such words have been so much used in recent years that they have entered the standard vocabulary of management and appear to have a clear meaning. In this apparent clarity and apparent intelligibility there lie dangers.

In part, these words are the expression and consequence of fads. Indeed, few other areas are as prone to the vagaries of fashion as management. But to a large extent the words addressed here are also the consequence of insufficient or one-sided training in management. The “danger” of these terms goes beyond that of general miscommunication. They steer thought in action in wrong directions. They transport ideas about leading businesses, treating employees, and dealing with customers that are harmful and can sometimes lead businesses to collapse.

The terms I class as “dangerous” are put to numerous purposes. They are uses to shape opinion and policy, to do business, to bolster interests, and to legitimize status. They are also terms that are used to impress. Trying to impress is the strategy of a particular kind of expert. To create an impression is their crucial means of making a living – after all, they have no other. That is why they will do anything to maintain semantic illusions. Their tools of choice are cloudy language, high-flown terminology, and fashionable but empty phrases. Yet good executives are not so easily impressed, but demand precise knowledge. They use the strongest heuristic device to obtain it. They ask, well, is any of that right?

Knowledge can help guard against most mistakes and immunize against fads. It saves time and money, the laborious learning and unlearning of misconceptions. Each of the words discussed here represents a moment of imprecision, a logical fallacy, a misguided theory, or a widespread but erroneous opinion in management – and to correct them is to work on the bridge leading to the New World, to contribute to better, functioning, and responsible management.

I wish to thank Tamara Bechter for her uniquely sensitive contributions to this new edition’s conception, style, and content, Selina Hartmann at Campus Verlag for taking good care of the manuscript and Joe Kroll for his unmistakable feeling for the subtleties of the English language which is just for this text so important.

St. Gallen, Switzerland, September 2019

CHARISMA

“We need charismatic leaders!” is a demand that recurs periodically, and in recent times quite emphatically. Little wonder, for we face great challenges. Of course, it is not enough for managers to be able to read and write and otherwise be averagely decent human beings. But why fall into the opposite extreme? Somehow, an idea has taken hold that managers, especially those at the top, ought to be a mix of a Nobel Prize winner, a Roman military commander, and a TV personality: a jack-of-all-trades, if you will, or the perfect Renaissance man.

We have learned to tolerate, or rather to suffer, a great deal of nonsense in connection with management. But to add charisma makes the nonsense dangerous. In the light of the experiences of the twentieth century, should we not be a little more careful what we wish for? Was not the last century that of consummate charismatic leaders – Hitler, Stalin, and Mao? Are we safe in the knowledge that such history will not repeat itself, is over and done with?

I am far from denying the effect charismatic leaders have on people. But this is precisely why what matters is not that we are led, but where. The effect of leaders is important. It must be tempered with responsibility. Historically, charismatic leaders have all too often wreaked disaster – in so many fields.

Charismatic leaders can be dangerous because, knowing the effect they have, they flout rules. They can be unpredictable and pursue utopias. Charismatic leaders are as likely to mislead, to lead astray, as they are to lead well. Real leaders who successfully overcome even the greatest and hardest challenges do so not by depending on charisma. They lead by self-discipline and example, not by sloganeering and bluster. Their capital is not charisma, but trust.

At the head of organizations, it can sometimes be important and often advantageous, although not absolutely essential, to exert a pull over people. Charismatic personalities can always be a risk factor, too. Indeed, the very clamor for “great” leadership figures can be dangerous. The few to have been not only great, but also good leaders are exceptions. They can all too easily lead us to overlook the many excellent executives at the head of thousands of organizations necessary to the functioning of economy and society.

LEADERSHIP

Leadership fascinates. That is why it is important to distinguish the fads from the real substance. For most people, leadership hinges on personality. That is where the source of leadership is supposed to be, and from there personal fascination emanates. But this is exactly what distracts from the matter of real importance: to look closely at what actual leaders are doing, and how they are doing it. For this reason, I distinguish – as discussed above – between “real leaders” and “mis-leaders”. After the disasters into which leaders led humanity in the twentieth century, we should know better than to accept a notion of leadership blind to history. And is not without reason that in German, the English leader has largely supplanted the all too familiar word Führer.

In history, successful leaders in politics and business have displayed very different personalities. One trait they shared was effectiveness, for even the best properties are of no consequence if they cannot be converted into actual performance and results. Rhetoric and showmanship will not suffice in the long term. To make leadership effective, effective management is needed, which is founded on knowledge and experience – and talent is a welcome addition. Leaders, too, cannot do without management. Often, they are themselves good managers and have effective managers in their teams, though they will not leave it at that.

Real leaders concentrate on the task, not their own needs

Real leaders do not ask, what do I want, what would suit me?, but what needs to be done in this situation for the benefit of all? They are not guided by potential rewards for themselves, but see the duty to master a situation in which they often find themselves by accident – to avert danger or to seize an opportunity. They accept their own insignificance relative to the task in hand. They put themselves at the service of the objective. In doing so, they earn trust, respect, and approval. The internal stance of privileging the task ahead of oneself allows real leaders to display courage and character in decisive moments, particularly when they are forced to decide between the importance of the task on the one hand and their own careers on the other. In the worst case, leaders will sacrifice their careers for the sake of the matter in hand. Nothing could better persuade others that such leaders really mean what they say.

Real leaders are result-oriented

Words are not enough, though leaders are often able to deploy them masterfully. If results fail to materialize, they will not seek refuge in threadbare excuses, for they know their credibility to be on the line. Here, we can easily identify the juncture at which the downfall of so many historical personalities began: their leadership began to lose its luster when they started to cover up their failures with alibis and excuses, or to lay blame on scapegoats and imaginary conspiracies.

Real leaders force themselves to listen

“Force themselves” should be emphasized, for few find it easy. Many leaders are impatient because they are convinced that their actions are, at heart, right. Yet they also know just how important this makes the information that they cannot themselves obtain, particularly that from the bottom of their organizations. Time and again, they muster the will, the time, and the self-discipline to listen – because they know that otherwise, they stand to lose their organization’s trust. Often, they listen only briefly, for they are usually pressed for time. But in that short time, they are noticeably attentive.

Real leaders make themselves understood

They know that what is obvious to themselves – their views, their ideas and imaginings – are by no means as clear to others, nor, as a rule, can they be. That’s why they are constantly working on making themselves understood by others. They tirelessly restate their core messages, again and again, patiently and tenaciously. To make themselves understood, they deploy clear language. Often, they avail themselves of the clearest means of communication of all: They demonstrate what they mean. They lead by example.

We, not I

For all their well-earned achievements and all their conviction of being abler than others in many respects, real leaders will not take credit on behalf of others. They think in terms of we, not I. They understand the contributions made by their employees and the organization as a whole, and they recognize them. Their concern is with the success of their cause, not their own personal success.

Unafraid of strong people

This applies in all direction, with regard to superiors and inferiors, equals and colleagues. Leaders know that only the best people are capable of meeting an organization’s big challenges. Therefore, they will do anything to attract the best people, to support and promote them, and to set them to work where they are needed most. They may respond in a tough, even harsh manner to attempts at undermining their authority. But they will not eliminate string people out of fear for their own position. To gather weaklings, favorites, and yes-men around oneself is a sure sign of weak leadership, and can often be detected early on. Real leaders don’t care for yes-men who parrot their every word.

Leaders can be inspiring individuals – but they don’t have to be

One constantly hears the demand for leaders to be inspiring individuals, able to arouse enthusiasm in others. This is a misconception, for inspiration and enthusiasm are decisive obstacles to leadership in truly critical situations. The call for inspiration is obviously made with only the positive and easy leadership situations in mind. But real leadership comes into its own in difficult situations, in which unpopular and tough sacrifices are demanded of people. As long as it is easy to win people over to the matter in hand, there is little need for true leadership. Rhetoric and showmanship will usually be enough.

Leadership is situational