The evening’s theme was “rediscovering entrepreneurial management”.

Peter Drucker observed: “We know that theories, values, and all the artefacts of human minds and human hands do age and rigidify, becoming obsolete, becoming ‘afflictions’”.
This is also true for management. Traditional management is becoming an “affliction” for many organisations. It buries their innate “entrepreneurial competence” (Drucker) under layers of bureaucracy.

The interactive panel, moderated by Lukas Michel, Associate Drucker Society Europe, discussed the changes needed if established organisations are to become more entrepreneurial again. Panel members were Tammy Erickson, Executive Fellow at London Business School, Vlatka Hlupic, Professor of Management at University of Westminster, Hermann Arnold, co-founder of Haufe-umantis AG, a Swiss software company and pioneer of democratic, self-organising organisations, and Hans Martin Graf, a senior executive at Credit Suisse.

Five themes for more entrepreneurial organisations were discussed.

Five themes for more entrepreneurial organisations

Remove barriers

Hermann’s initial proposition was that we’d be surprised by how much entrepreneurship already exists – if only we let people be more entrepreneurial.

Hans Martin noted that being entrepreneurial requires taking personal risks. Organisations therefore have to create an environment where people feel safe to take those risks.

This is essential today, as Tammy added, because “you need people to do their best but most often can’t exactly tell them what to do.”

Peter Drucker would certainly agree. He was the first to observe that knowledge workers are most productive when they choose their own work, their own contributions.

Review the contribution of leadership

What is a leader’s contribution? First, it’s important for leaders to ask themselves that question. An organisation which democratically elects its leaders, like Haufe-umantis AG, might help aspiring leaders humbly reflect on this before they are in the role.

Successful leaders will see themselves as architects of their companies, not as being in charge and calling the shots day to day. For Tammy this means a leader must do four things.

1. Create capacity for collaboration. Not force people to collaborate but create organisations where it is easy to do.
2. Constantly “disrupt” the organisation. Ensure it is exposed to a continuous flow of new ideas.
3. Ask great questions. Questions that trigger thoughts, ideas, learning.
4. Lead with meaning. Ensure an organisation’s purpose is crystal clear and kept in focus.

Ask questions

From Tammy’s four points, asking questions is what many of us struggle most with. First, education systems prepare us for the exact opposite: giving answers. Second, it takes courage and humility to ask questions to which you don’t have the answer.

However, asking great questions is something all of us can learn, if we choose.

Build 21st century organisations and share leadership

Building on the theme, Tammy shared her idea of the best leader: “one that’s focused on the most important question the organisation is facing”.

The industrial age had its own set of questions for leaders, centred around “how can we make a lot of stuff, cheaply and with unskilled labour?”. The answers helped shape traditional management, still widely practised today.

Now organisations face a different set of questions, centred around “how can we get people to come up with good ideas?”. Organisations and management need to be built on a different logic.

One element of this logic is shared leadership. Hermann noted that so much is being asked of leaders, that we’d better think about how we can share leadership in teams.

That’s at the heart of what Vlatka calls the “management shift”, which aims to achieve much higher participation, and collaboration. In such organisations, decision making becomes widely distributed and even strategy development a collaborative task.

Champion discipline and meaning

Letting people choose their work (or even their leaders) may sound like a great recipe for chaos.

Yet process and discipline are still needed. The question is: what process to solve which problems? Even self-organising systems need rules by which they operate. Self-organising systems also need control. But it’s more likely to be personal control than a form of top-down control.

A key ingredient for functioning self-control is a strong purpose. It serves as a compass to help navigate the myriad of decisions that are needed to move us towards our goals.

Are we even trying?

For those of us already involved in shaping the future of work, these are not revelations. Yet if these ideas are widely accepted, why don’t we see more of that in practice?

One explanation is that this kind of change is hard and takes time. True, but perhaps an even bigger challenge may be ahead of us.

What if we are not even trying?

Zeno Staub, SMG board member and CEO of Bank Vontobel, in a Druckerian remark during his welcome message, observed that for the two most important social functions, parenting and management, there is no formal training. And many even question the need for management training in the first place.

So how likely is it that someone who does not believe management can or should be learned will buy into the need for changing management?

Ok, but other managers will understand, so this should be easy for them to buy into, surely?

Not so, if audience questions and comments are any guide. Many were appreciative and thoughtful, but many also revealed that the magnitude of change required is not fully understood, that we’re mainly talking cosmetics.

Not seeing the need is a major barrier to change. Maybe also an excuse, because who can invest in long term change when you’re under pressure to deliver next quarter’s numbers?

So perhaps we’re not trying on a large enough scale.

It’s not just business leaders. This includes consultants and academics who speak and write about the need for change. If we don’t reach the hearts and minds of more business leaders and can’t help them overcome the barriers, then we fail them.

In her closing remarks, Angelica Kohlman, Chair of the Global Peter Drucker Forum Advisory Board, said: “25 years ago Europe had recovered from WW II and seemed to be on its way to greater success. At that time my car was German, my watch was Swiss and my mobile phone was Finnish. Today, all my kids want is a mobile from Silicon Valley, a watch from Silicon Valley and a car from Silicon Valley! What happened?”

It seems we’ve been sleeping in Europe.

If we want a prosperous future for ourselves, our children and our societies, we first need to wake up.

About the author:

Raymond Hofmann (www.raymondhofmann.com) is an independent advisor and management designer. He is also an Associate of the Peter Drucker Society Europe and co-organiser of the Swiss launch event.

When I stumbled upon Devin Fidler’s recent HBR blog post “Here’s How Managers can be replaced by software” (https://hbr.org/2015/04/heres-how-managers-can-be-replaced-by-software), a loud voice in my head said: “What a nonsense. Here’s one more clueless author contributing to the mass-confusion about the nature and purpose of management.”

I was already turning the page in my Flipboard when something made me go back and actually read the article. And sure enough, what the article celebrates as the iCEO is not much more than an (admittedly clever) algorithm capable of breaking down a relatively simple task (writing a research report) into a well-coordinated series of micro-tasks (data gathering, writing, editing, lay outing and more) which the iCEO then automatically routes to freelance workers via platforms such as oDesk. Add a little bit of automated workflow and voilà, here’s your research report, the production of which has been entirely “managed” by software.

All well, except that this is not management. At best, it is micro-management: the manager knows all the answers (what are the discrete steps required to produce the report) and tells people what to do (assigning micro-tasks and controlling their execution).

The iCEO isolates the mechanical aspects of the task and completely ignores all human elements. What else is software to do? In the real world, of course, there is always a human element, even in relatively simple tasks such as writing a report.

Here’s a few human questions relating to this simple example: would the people working on one of the discrete, iCEO-commissioned tasks be able to do a better job if they actually knew what they were contributing to? What if they knew who else is working on the job and had a chance to interact with them? What if someone along the way had a clever idea which would require changes to the production process? What if the quality of one of the intermediate deliverables did not meet expectations? And of course: people taking jobs on platforms such as oDesk expect feedback in the form of ratings and short comments on the quality of their work. It’s a way to build a reputation and attract more work. Would they work for the iCEO again in the future if such feedback were missing, inaccurate or generic?

Nonetheless I was intrigued by the possibilities and did some more research. I learned that Devin Fidler works for the Institute for the Future (http://www.iftf.org/home) and a few years ago gave this really interesting presentation on “Realigning the Human Organisation” (https://vimeo.com/53985771). In the presentation, he talks about coordination problems and how humans invented the classical hierarchical organisation as a social technology to solve such problems. And about how inadequate this technology is in our modern organisations.

On a side note, one of the very aspects that make hierarchical organisations inadequate for our times is that they are prone to create and reward micro-managers. Micro-managers tend to drive the best talent mad and out of the organisation. I don’t see how replacing them with software is solving that problem – unless people somehow are more tolerant of being micro-managed by a machine instead of a fellow human being. Which I consider unlikely.

Nevertheless, the point that traditional organisations are hopelessly inadequate for today’s word remains valid and my respect for Devin Fidler’s work grew by the minute. My thoughts moved from judgement (“this is nonsense”) to inquiry (“how might this kind of work help create better management?”).

Then I remembered Dov Seidman’s wonderful talk at last year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum, during which he reflected on one of Peter Drucker’s many important observations: that we need to distinguish between doing the next thing right and doing the next right thing. Dov made it very clear that only humans (as opposed to machines or processes) could do that and that we need to make this distinction meaningful again in our organisations. Leadership then becomes a moral business, since the question of “what is the right thing to do” is a moral one.

Richard Straub was hitting a similar note in his thoughtful blog post “The Human Difference” (http://www.druckerforum.org/blog/?p=802):

There are ample signs around us of the limits of rational logic and algorithmic determinism—and always, of the precious, unique capacities of human beings. Howard Gardner has shown that the analytical intelligence is just one in seven. What is most important happens where there is no replicable logic or algorithm. Rather, it occurs where human judgment, intuition, creativity, empathy and values are consciously brought into play. It is the domain of entrepreneurial thinking and innovation, of strategy setting, of collaboration and trust—qualities that cannot be replaced by whatever Singularity-seeking AI-creature the engineers in Silicon Valley might come up with.

So of course, management “as the technology of human accomplishment” (Gary Hamel) cannot be replaced by software. But we will certainly be able to replace many of the mechanical, non-value added tasks related to management – and with it the legions of micro-managers haunting workplaces and tainting the reputation of management all over the planet. By doing so, we help clarifying what the value-added, human essence of management actually is. Or more broadly speaking: help us understand what truly makes us human.

Once again, Peter Drucker was right when in 1967 (!) he said: “We are becoming aware that the major questions regarding technology are not technological, but human questions.”

About the author:

Raymond Hofmann is an independent consultant and coach, dedicated to help senior management design and run better, more human organisations.