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As every year, the international management community will meet in Vienna at the Drucker Forum in November to debate the urgent issues of our time. This time, however, the event feels more like a bracket round Drucker Forum topics of recent years – “ecosystems”, “leadership” and “the human dimension”, for example.
All of them can be grouped under the common label of the “Next Management”. A management “next” has long been a necessity, if not a “beyond” that may be more appropriate for multi-disruption – more on that later. In any case, whether continuing linearly or disruptively shaken, management as we know it is creaking under pressure from drivers including technology (AI), new business logics (platform economy, ecosystems) or from a VUCA world that is becoming brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible – BANI. This is the “why?” of change.
What needs to change?
In these conditions, what exactly needs to change, and how? In fact, the “what” and “how” is summed up in Richard Straub’s article on “THE NEXT MANAGEMENT”. His answer to the question “what” in management needs to change is – “everything”. Here’s a reminder of Straub’s seven key propositions for the future:
To make “everything” more specific, we can conveniently map the topics of the last 10 Drucker Forums on to the classic 7-S model proposed by McKinsey consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in In Search of Excellence. To jog your memory, this consists of three hard Ss (Strategy, Structure, Systems) and four soft Ss (Shared Values, Style, Skill, Staff). For each S we need a detailed understanding of “Next”, as outlined by Richard.
For the details, the 7-S represents an old structure for the new “What?” and “How?”.
Looking at the last decade’s Forums, we can see that each 7-S has been well covered in discussions in at least one of them:
- Structure/Systems: Large organizations with the old efficiency logic are beginning to resemble co-creative ecosystems for a new excellence (Power of Ecosystems, 2019).
- Style: “Classic” top-down management is being replaced by leadership (Leadership Everywhere, 2020). Employees are becoming more autonomous, collaborative and entrepreneurial (Entrepreneurial Society, 2016).
- Shared Values: We are at a fork in the road, with neo-Taylorism and technological alienation “on speed” to one side and a new humanization (2015, 2021) on the other. Charles Handy proclaimed a human revolution in 2017 (Growth & Inclusive Prosperity), which is still largely awaiting implementation (by us?).
- Strategy: The old dehumanizing economic logic of efficiency and scale will be replaced by a new, innovation orientation; unsustainable greed will give way to broad long-term value creation (Performance that Matters, 2022, Creative Resilience, 2023).
- Skill/Staff: Many skills are losing relevance to analytical AI; managing the human dimension and the human imperative (2018, 2021) are becoming relatively more important in the skill shift towards a new customer focus and innovation orientation as a newly weighted human competence.
2024 will draw together the individual topics of the past decade. It will begin to paint the big picture of Next Management and that of 2010’s “the Next Society”. This brings us full circle. 10 years of the Drucker Forum also confirm the salience of Straub’s seven propositions. The Next Management promises to be a strongly positive development.
P(AI)ns and g(AI)ns of change
But the transformation will not be painless, since change won’t be “linear” and many elements will be disrupted. AI will bring us not only fascinating neural chips and text and image generators, but also the p(AI)ns and g(AI)ns of organizational change.
HR leaders in particular will be called on to step up to deal with them. These pAIns and gAIns were therefore discussed at the Drucker Forum CHRO roundtable in March this year. If AI-empowered employees cause traditional management to lose status, not every manager will be pleased – just as not every employee will automatically become more autonomous, co-creative or entrepreneurial. The skill shift likewise has its threatening side for those who remain outside it. These are just a few examples of the pain that HR people will face in the oncoming “Great Transformation”. Of course, they will be offset by important opportunities to reemphasize the human. But these do not fall from the sky – they will also require human-centered support. If the understanding of data and AI / AI becomes more important and a better understanding of the transformation of markets and customers more relevant, HR itself must change, too. Just “doing things with people” is not enough.
From “Next” to “Beyond” management
But is “Next” really the last word, considering some of the disruptive changes that lie ahead, and that Richard Straub has already mentioned? Or should we be thinking “Beyond” management as we now know it, to envisage companies that are even more radically customer- and ecosystem-oriented, agile and digital than we want them to be now?
But where do we find customers, ecosystems and agility in the “Next-S model”?
Nowhere, at least the highest conceptual level of the 7 S.
Beyond the ‘Next Management’ model, companies could move to a new ‘Beyond Management’ model and radically abandon the patterns of old management practice.
- WHY/WHY US: (Stakeholder) Purposes beyond Profit
- FOR WHOM: (Job to be done) Personas beyond Customers
- WITH WHOM: (Ecosystem) Partners beyond the Company
- WHAT: (Value) Propositions beyond Customer needs
- HOW: (Co-creation) Practices beyond Work Division (and old Management)
- WHERE: (Co-creation) Platforms beyond linear Processes
- WHEN: (Next/Beyond) Prototypes beyond Perfection
In the end, this is just strategic design re-thinking for the big new picture of an economy of co-creative ecosystems based on intelligent platforms, where everyone is both customer and partner in the ecosystem’ and fluid structures eliminate old rigidity in space and time. But that will happen at another time. Perhaps beginning on November 14 and 15 in Vienna.
About the author:
Dr Winfried Felser is an entrepreneur, future designer and author. As a management consultant and co-founder and deputy head of a Fraunhofer application centre, he has worked on transformation through the network economy and digitalisation. Today, he is the initiator and managing director of NetSkill Solutions GmbH.