Hi Jamal
These are excellent questions. You are right to be nervous about embracing the predominantly Western religion of management. This site’s twenty-five moonshots are really twenty-five paradoxes, twenty-five places the social construct of management is breaking down. Just turn them around. Management is soulless, reactionary, narrow-minded, undemocratic and unbalanced. This is not a good recommendation. Therefore, to answer your first question, you should approach management innovation very carefully indeed, because it sounds like it is intellectually, morally and pragmatically bankrupt.
The traditional answer to your second question of hierarchy would be to start with vision, then values, then the rest. However, before you buy into the whole scheme of management thinking maybe you should look at the wonders it has wrought, at how it has enriched very few and impoverished very many.
If you adopt the management thinking of Harvard Business School then you also embrace many of the pathologies of Western society. For example, the West has an extremely destructive liking for positive mental attitude (neatly batted into touch by Barbara Ehrenreich, here http://vimeo.com/10454695 ). As an associate at McKinsey, my reports were continually edited into the one storyline “you have a great little business here; there are just three things you need to do that will make it better still”. It did not matter if this was true or not, our clients were deemed too insecure to handle anything more critical (the Firm’s eternal youthfulness ensured repeated instances of the Dunning–Kruger effect, i.e. “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect ).
Fortunately, the East has a far more useful model in the person of Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for creating “economic and social development from below”. There is a lot of material on Yunus on the web. For example, in one video he explains how he rewards his bankers by giving them gold stars (not million dollar bonuses) and how he takes the stars back if their performance slips.
It is unusual enough to award a Peace Prize for an anti-poverty initiative but that is only half the story. Nowadays there is a thriving “international development community” of caring, selfless people in charities and pressure groups. In 2005, they got together in London for Live8, which led the world's wealthiest nations to double their aid budgets. Yet beneath the surface you find disarray. Such charities publicly champion aid; yet privately admit that merely handing cash to governments that are frequently corrupt is a wretched failure. Better “governance” is their latest cry. Any attempt to cut money to bad governments ties them in moral knots.
The very different approach of Yunus’s Grameen Bank is not something dreamt up by a remote Western aid agency but is a tried and tested business solution that grew up from the grassroots. Almost every management text celebrates the role of visionary leaders. However, if I were you, I would start with the dreams of the people.
Kind regards
Geoffrey
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