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Humanocracy

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When it comes to project work, casting is everything

By Julian Birkinshaw on May 4, 2011

One of the key tasks of management is coordinating activities--making sure the right people are working on the right projects at the right time. Most companies default to a top-down allocation system: people are put on projects according to availability, favouritism, or sometimes, pure luck. That's reasonably efficient, but the result is some lucky folks get all the exciting projects, some get stuck on a project-from-hell forever, and some never get a chance to prove themselves.

Some companies, such as Eden McCallum , the London-based strategy consultancy, have experimented with a virtual-company model in which they act as the brokers between freelance project staff on one side and clients on the other. It's a clever approach, but it provides no guarantee of work for the freelancers; and it is hard to scale, because it relies on the team in the middle making a high-quality match between freelancer and client.

Another option is often called the "internal market," sitting somewhere between the traditional and the virtual models. On paper, the internal market sounds attractive: it combines the efficiency of the top-down model with the fluidity and sensitivity to employee needs of the virtual model....

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The Future of Management: Is it Deja vu all over again?

By Julian Birkinshaw on April 8, 2011

If you are a regular reader of the MIX, you probably already have a point of view on the future of management. Indeed, the MIX was created to help accelerate the evolution of management, so chances are you have already bought into the argument that we are going through a period of upheaval that will transform the way we work in organizations in the years ahead.

I hope and believe this argument is right. And in future blog posts on this site I will discuss examples of some of the changes in management that are currently underway. But let me develop a contrarian line of argument first, before offering a synthesis.

Here's the problem with all this talk of virtual and networked organizations, and this vision of empowered and engaged employees. We see the massive changes underway in technology and connectivity, and we assume that these changes will drive change in how we work. The trouble is, previous generations went through the same process. In the late 1990s, commentators talked about the emergence of the ICE age, where ICE was an acronym for "the Internet Changes Everything." In the early 1980s, the business world was...

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The M Word

By Julian Birkinshaw on November 15, 2010
When you ask children what they want to be when they are older, how many of them say they want to be a manager? I've certainly never met one who had such aspirations. In part this is because management is a pretty amorphous concept to a ten-year-old. But it's also because we adults aren't exactly singing the praises of the management profession either. For example, in a 2008 Gallup poll on honesty and ethics among workers in 21 different professions, a mere 12 percent of respondents felt business executives had high/very high integrity--an all-time low. With a 37 percent low/very low rating, the executives came in behind lawyers, union leaders, real estate agents, building contractors, and bankers. Moreover, there are no positive role models out there either - the reason why Dilbert is the best-selling business book series of all time, and why Ricky Gervais' sitcom "The Office" was a big hit, is because they ring true. The Pointy-Haired Boss in Dilbert is a self-centered halfwit; David Brent is entirely lacking in self-awareness. If these are the figures that come into people's minds when the word "manager" is used, then we have a serious problem on our hands.

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What is your Management Model?

By Julian Birkinshaw on September 2, 2010

One enduring change in the management lexicon brought about by the dotcom revolution was the term business model —how a firm makes money. The concept had been in existence for decades, but the competition between "old" and "new" economy firms, with very different business models, helped to demonstrate its importance as a way of thinking about the basic choices firms make when it comes to their sources of revenue, their cost structure, and their make-or-buy options.

In the post-dotcom era, firms have continued to experiment with new business models, with some success. But genuinely new business models are hard to come by, and they aren’t as easily defended as they once were. Firms are therefore on the lookout for new forms of competitive advantage—they are looking for sources of distinctiveness that are enduring and hard to copy.

One intriguing possibility, as suggested by many of the company stories described in the MIX, is the idea that a firm’s Management Model can become a source of advantage. In fact, I would suggest that asking, "What is your Management Model?" is almost as important as asking "What is your business model?"

A Management Model is...

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