The New Management Model - Unleash Creativity, not Control

October 25th, 2007

I haven’t read anything of this author, yet. But the promise of his latest work is very good.

Gary Hamel has apparently written other best selling books on new management styles, but I don’t read a lot of those.

Some quotes in his upcoming work The future of management captured my interest however, because it resonates very much with what we propose with the innvire concept.

His key message to leaders is to shift from a culture of control to one that embraces personal creativity, posturing that this is the only path to future innovation, growth and prosperity.

Some choice quotes: “You can buy obedience and diligence and even intellect almost anywhere in the world for next to nothing.”

“We’re going to have to get people to bring to work their initiative, their creativity, their passion, and those are human capabilities that cannot be commanded. Those are gifts that people either choose to bring to work or not.”

“The existing management model was built to drive alignment, enforcement and control. What management tried to do over the last 100 years was to regularise the irregular, to drive the variety out of processes…we happen to live in a world today where it’s irregular people with irregular ideas who create all the new economic value and the wealth.”

“Organisations are less human than the people who work there. [people are inherently creative and innovative] but somehow when we get to work that adaptability, that innovation literally gets bleached out of people between 9 and 5.”

“The ability to aggregate human capability via the web, that’s not going to go away.”

This is exactly the stuff we are fighting against with the innvire product. We want to bring creativity, adaptivity and innitiative back to the work floor. We want to help managers give employability a new meaning, by facilitating knowledge workers in their information transformation work. Exchanging ideas, explaining concepts by sketching, stoking each other again.

Let me know if you read the book, what did you learn from it? Should I read it? What do you do to bring creativity back to the workplace?

via researchtalk

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