The Busting Bureaucracy Hackathon

Management and Leadership ... Closing the Great Divide. Just about everyone I've ever worked with has the word "manager" on their business card or in their job description. Then after a while they are all put through a "Leadership Program" and it confuses the tripe out of them.... a so-called different mindset and skill base. It's made even worse when they read those lists of Manager VS Leader that regularly appear in the business social media. You know, they go from the benign "a manager does things right; the leader does the right thing" to the outright disparaging "the manager is a copy; the leader is an original" to "The manager relies on control; the leader inspires trust." The reality is that all those people with "manager" on their business card do whatever it takes, either unwittingly or unconsciously, to get the job done with their team of people... they don't stop and ask "do I need to be a manager? or do I need to be a leader?" It's time to reposition or eradicate the role or the title ... is it "managership" or "leadment" or something totally different?

The problem this hack/solution addresses is one enabling the dismantling of old, decaying, or rigid bureaucratic infrastructure that stifle creative communities of passion to allow for new forms that enable CoP rather than asphyxiate them. Ask your self this one question: If we are really all about inventing new ways of managing, but still organize our operations in the same way (Board, C-Suite, mid-level, rank-and-file, etc), how can we expect the action of managing look any different? What we need is not just frame breaking solutions, but we need to realized the architecture used to build a solid foundation may need to be disassembled, perhaps reduced, some portions reused, and others recycled into a new form. Effectively, in order continuously enable communities of passion, we need to the equivalent of an architectural tear down and rebuild, being careful to retain the DNA of the operation (or not), to craft an agile operation that is comfortable with periodic bouts of chaos in order to reinvent itself for a new era. http://www.managementexchange.com/hack/reduce-reuse-recycle-bureaucratic-tear-down-assembling-infrastructure-anew-0

Collective and collaborative strategic direction setting. Project based organizations led by project leaders. Forget managing other people totally. Replace it with leading the way, guiding and coaching people towards same goals.

The Work Islands of the Future The current organization is brittle with the make-up of employees varying from administrative and strategic. The problem the this variation is the asymmetry of alignment to strategic goals. A function with 80% strategic employees has difficulty aligning with an function who has 10% strategic employees. (See Exhibit A - http://imgur.com/qsXfQVx) The CIO is often left holding the bag. The bag being the nearly impossible mandate from above to integrate unaligned functions. The emergence of the Generalist (The B-School Type) provides an opportunity for organizations to reimagine themselves. StatisticBrain.com estimates that over 150,000 MBA students are produced each year. ) While the employment rate for MBAs has increased from it's 2008 low of 86%, this number is still only crossing the 90% barrier as of 2012. Wage variability is even more staggering as some grads make 140k+ per year and some securing less than 40k per year, according to StatisticBrain.com. The growth of information produced by humanity has been astounding to say the least. In 2010, Eric Schimdt said that, "we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003." That is around 5 exabytes per day. You can only imagine how that has proliferated during the past 3.5 years. Many CIO's still feel that there job is limited to firefighting and operations. My firm Info-Tech, annually surveys it's members, and only 8% feel that innovation is a priority. These two tensions point to a gloomy current state, but a bright future state. Organizations who can build a foundation for their generalists will be the organizations who innovate and prosper in the 21st and 22nd century. See Exhibit B - http://imgur.com/urEpeOj Organizations will build large shared services divisions that all administrative employees work in and the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) will manage the implementation and maintenance of technology, not selection of what technology. The CAO will also be ensure efficiency is maintained at the administrative level. This frees up the strategic employees and the C-Suite to re-organize to meet the evolving needs of the business. C-Suite titles will be assigned based on key business projects and processes, while terminable once the project is complete or process is re-engineered/obliterated. Resources can shift from one project/process to another based on demand, resulting in agility never previously seen at any past organization. Note that this model does not spell the end of the specialist, but merely embraces the emergence of the generalist. Also it does not mean that the centralized model of management is over, just reallocated into the shared services department where it can be utilized most effectively. I firmly believe an organization can build a competitive advantage on this model while simultaneously pushing down labour costs as we will be forgoing the hunt of the all elusive unicorn -- the member of your staff that is simply unreplaceable.