Synopsis
Guide des révolutions parallèles dans la technologie, les organisations et le leadership, ce livre pratique mais stimulant présente une mine de preuves pour montrer que les deux thèmes récurrents de la démocratie et de l'entreprise transforment nos institutions. Les organisations sont en train de changer des groupes d'unités entrepreneuriales travaillant ensemble pour former des « marchés intérieurs », tandis que cette diversité est intégrée dans une « communauté d'entreprise » qui unit les intérêts des investisseurs, des travailleurs, des clients, des partenaires commerciaux et du public. Même les concurrents féroces coopèrent.
o « Au service des entreprises » font des clients des partenaires de travail dans la création de valeur
o « Entrepreneurs du savoir » forment des équipes d'entreprises internes autogérées
o Les « marchés intérieurs » et la « communauté d'entreprise » exploitent les forces extérieures pour favoriser le changement continu
o Le pouvoir du « leadership intérieur » réunit les travailleurs libérés, les clients critiques et les partenaires commerciaux temporaires
o La « croissance intelligente » offre un avantage stratégique respectueux de l'environnement
Des exemples illustratifs, des données d'enquête, des tendances, des anecdotes et des exercices offrent des informations originales sur l'utilisation des nouveaux principes de gestion. En outre, des mini-études de cas de MCI, Saturn, The Body Shop, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Southwest Airlines, Home Depot, IKEA, Wal-Mart et d'autres grandes entreprises illustrent vivement comment les gestionnaires créatifs conçoivent et dirigent les organisations dans une ère de concurrence mondiale, de changement constant et de responsabilisation des personnes. L'auteur analyse également des problèmes critiques, tels que le vieux conflit lancinant entre le profit et la société, pour fournir aux gestionnaires un guide complet et stimulant sur la direction de leur métier.
Halal affirme que la transition vers une nouvelle gestion est presque inévitable car elle n'est pas motivée par l'altruisme ou même un bon leadership, mais par l'avancée incessante de la révolution de l'information. Seules les petites équipes entrepreneuriales opérant de la base vers le haut peuvent maîtriser la complexité explosive d'aujourd'hui, et obtenir le soutien des parties prenantes est désormais essentiel car une économie basée sur la connaissance a fait de la coopération un avantage concurrentiel. Plutôt que de s'occuper de solutions rapides, The New Management montre la voie vers des solutions plus fondamentales aux changements massifs auxquels toutes les institutions seront confrontées à la transition vers une société de la connaissance qui débute dans le 21e siècle.
Extrait
From Capitalism to
Democratic Enterprise
Minding the Economic Imperatives of Knowledge
IN LATE 1997, Bernard Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom, a small, obscure firm in Mississippi, announced that he was buying MCI for $42 billion of his company’s stock. It was the largest takeover in history. How could this unknown man, a former gym teacher, emerge from nowhere with no capital to seize control of the second largest telecommunications company in America and gain immediate dominance over the global communications market?
Ebbers forged this empire with little more than a keen understanding of how a jumble of diverse companies could be integrated to deliver a complete stream of communication services around the world—a task that eluded AT&T, MCI, and foreign telecom giants.1 Because he grasped the underlying insight needed to create this system, all else followed.
Countless other examples show that today knowledge is the most powerful force on earth, primarily responsible for the collapse of communism, the restructuring of economies, and the unification of the world. After decades of glib talk about the Information Age, companies are becoming “learning organizations,” developing their “intellectual assets,” and hiring “chief knowledge officers” because we now see that knowledge is the source of all productivity, innovation, and competitive advantage. It is suddenly blindingly clear that knowledge is a boundless source of infinite power that promises to flood the world with creative progress. Bill Gates told a group of CEOs that information technology will “fulfill their wildest dreams.”2
THE CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN CAPITAL AND KNOWLEDGE
The problem, however, is that this vast divide between a limited past and a boundless future has left business adrift in confusion—the flavor-of-the-month management fad syndrome—because we lack what economists call a workable “theory of the firm” for a knowledge-based economy. The “Old Management” of the Industrial Age is dying because it was based on capital-driven economics, and we now know that enterprise is no longer powered primarily by capital. Former Shell executive Arie De Geus says, “The critical resource is now people and the knowledge they possess.”3 This means that most corporate practices of today no longer make sense for the world we are entering.
Corporations comprise economic systems that are as large as entire nations, yet ironically our most admired companies remain committed to roughly the same type of centrally controlled hierarchy that failed in the Soviet economy. We have seen a few marginal changes, but the bulk of useful knowledge lies unused among employees at the bottom of the firm and scattered outside its walls among customers, suppliers, and other groups—while most decisions are made by executives at the top.
This yawning gap between promise and reality is merely a hint of the enormity of the upheaval that lies ahead. The entire social order is being uprooted by the move from a capital-centered past to a knowledge-centered future—even while we remain confused about what to do, where this is going, and what it all means. Without a theory of the firm based on the logic of knowledge, today’s struggle for survival will remain an endless exercise in bewildering change and management fads.
A NEW FOUNDATION BUILT ON AMERICAN IDEALS
I want to suggest that a well-established foundation for a “New Management” of the Knowledge Age is readily available if we would simply look in the right place. America’s heritage of democracy and free enterprise could serve us exceedingly well in this new frontier. Unfortunately, we tend to relegate these ideals to political elections and competition between firms. But if managers could extend the liberating power of democracy and markets inside business corporations, government agencies, and other social institutions that govern the daily flow of ordinary life, their widespread use would have a profound impact.
This is not some hopelessly utopian quest because, as I intend to illustrate, trends are moving rapidly in this direction.
To survive a world of constant change, massive diversity, and intense competition, leading corporations are dissolving their rigid hierarchies into fluid collections of self-managed units that use local knowledge to carve out successful market niches. As I will show later, this bottom-up approach should in time bring the power of enterprise to fruition as organizations melt into a churning sea of “internal markets” offering all of the creative dynamism of external markets—call it “the flowering of enterprise.”
The move to democracy is equally apparent in the way creative managers now work closely with tough competitors, empowered employees, and discriminating clients. After a long history of conflict, collaborative working relations have become one of the most powerful forces in business because companies have come to the hard realization that the mutual sharing of knowledge with other parties is beneficial. Some companies, such as GM Saturn, are uniting their stakeholders into complete “corporate communities”—think of it as “the extension of democracy.”
If managers could take a fresh look at these rich but misunderstood trends from the perspective of our traditions, the emerging pattern could guide our way ahead with confidence. As this book will demonstrate, the power of democracy and enterprise promises to transform institutions for a new era.
Why should we be surprised? This is the philosophy that gave birth to the United States and that has brought down dictatorship after dictatorship. Free markets and democratic governance are the twin pillars supporting modern civilization. They are proven methods that we have found most useful because they involve us all in making decisions that govern our society.
THE COMING PARALLEL REVOLUTIONS
This book describes leading-edge concepts and practices derived from my continuing study of the successful experiences of progressive companies. It’s a strategic plan, a guidebook, designed to help us figure out where we are going.
Follow me through the many examples, surveys, forecasts, and mini–case studies I’ve organized in the following chapters and you’ll learn about three parallel revolutions that make up this transition to knowledge-based organizations. The figure on the facing page sketches out the flow of revolutionary advances along three major paths:
1. the Information Revolution that is driving this transition
2. the resulting transformation of business, government, and other institutions
3. the creative new forms of leadership emerging to handle all this change
Note that these trends follow a rising exponential curve that is characteristic of all change today—the typical “J curve” depicted on the cover of this book. Whether it is the number of computers in use, strategic alliances, or new ventures, the trendline is curving sharply upward.
THE TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION:
JUST THE BEGINNING OF UNSTOPPABLE CHANGE
Thus far we have seen only the first rumblings of the information technology (IT) explosion that is yet to come. The simple changes are over and the most innovative, wrenching innovations lie ahead. I conduct a forecast of technological advances every two years, and the latest study detailed the arrival of eighty-five revolutionary breakthroughs.4 This wave of technological change is poised to crash over society during the next few decades as the rising power of IT feeds back to improve itself. Technology is basically knowledge, and the widespread use of IT is now driving our understanding of technical knowledge at ever faster rates. Here’s a rough timetable of three major breakthroughs:
2003 +/− 2 years. Interactive multimedia should be used by people everywhere to work, shop, study, and conduct all other activities electronically over life-sized wall monitors. Electronic commerce is expected to reach $12 billion by the year 2000 alone.
2009 +/− 3 years. Smart machines, robots, and software should be able to interact with people, learn and reprogram themselves, and translate languages. Bill Gates said, “The future lies in computers that talk, listen, see, and learn.”
PARALLEL REVOLUTIONS IN TECHNOLOGY, ORGANIZATION, AND LEADERSHIP
image
2014 +/− 4 years. Optical computers and storage devices (as depicted in the Superman movies) should be available to process limitless information in any form. Andrew Grove, CEO of Intel, said, “Computer power will be practically free and almost infinite.”
In short, this is just the beginning of historic changes that seem destined to alter all aspects of life. The IT of today—PCs, the Internet, cellular phones—will look primitive in a decade or so. The U.S. stock market has advanced roughly 1000 percent between 1985 and 1998 because Americans sense the economy is entering an era of almost limitless progress.
THE ORGANIZATIONAL REVOLUTION:
MANAGEMENT FROM THE BOTTOM-UP AND THE OUTSIDE-IN
The heart of this book shows how the two principles of enterprise and democracy form a theory of the firm based on the laws of knowledge—The New Management. Two heretical applications follow from this philosophical foundation:
· Internal Markets. Complexity is best managed not through planning and control—but by permitting widespread entrepreneurial freedom at the bottom of organizations.
· Corporate Community. Economic strength flows not out of power and firmness—but out of the collaborative exchange of knowledge among the community of corporate stakeholders.
Top-Down Control Destroys the Bulk of Corporate Wealth
During the 1990s, the decade of Capitalism Triumphant, we have constantly heard about the evils of central planning and authoritarian control, but anybody in business will tell you that the prevailing corporate system remains a centrally managed hierarchy adorned with a few gentle touches and good intentions. Despite fervent claims about empowerment, networking, teamwork, and other hot management concepts, this has also been a decade of harsh downsizing, top-down change, and extravagant executive pay.
For instance, IBM’s Louis Gerstner may have pulled Big Blue back from the brink but only by reinforcing fierce discipline and hierarchical control. IBM managers described their new boss this way: “His blunt style sent tremors through the organization.” In 1997, the value of IBM’s individual divisions totalled $115 billion while the parent company was valued at $65 billion; the missing $50 billion was consumed by corporate bureaucracy. IBM’s managers claim the software division alone wastes $200 million each year getting headquarter’s approval for its 10,000 software projects.5
Meanwhile the shock therapy approach to restructuring has become a way of life in America—even though this method is now notorious for creating meager economic gains, overburdened staffs, badly served clients, and alienated employees. In 1998, for example, GE’s John Welch was planning to close plants, sell divisions, cut wages, and lay off thousands.
This top-down approach may work in the short term, but like paint over rotted timbers, it masks the underlying weakness and invites catastrophes, such as we’ve seen in the decline of AT&T, Sears, GM, and many other former corporate giants. Top-down management is not going to withstand the massive changes looming ahead as relentless hypercompetition drives open a frontier of new products, markets, and industries that nobody really understands. Andrew Grove of Intel put it best: “The Internet is like a tidal wave, and we are in kayaks.”6
Downsizing, for instance, seems to make sense from a capital-centered view, but the knowledge held by employees comprises 70 percent of all corporate assets!7 To put it more sharply, the economic value of employee knowledge exceeds by far all of the financial assets, capital investment, patents, and other resources of most firms. Firing people is akin to throwing the bulk of corporate wealth out the window.
Downsizing can be best understood as a palliative, ritualistic practice, akin to bloodletting in primitive medicine, that reveals a far more serious organizational illness. Corporations shed workers repeatedly because they suffer from a chronic inability to create growth in a confusing new economic frontier. Instead, they downsize. It is like a bad habit, providing temporary relief by reducing labor costs while actually draining energy as companies lose skilled workers, creative ideas, loyalty, and other vital assets.
Internal Markets Release Knowledge from the Bottom
The solution is a fundamentally different approach that harnesses the creative talents lying dormant in average people. While Fortune 500 dinosaurs downsized by laying off three million employees during the 1990s, smaller firms and new ventures upsized by creating 21 million new jobs. This salient fact shows that the key to vitalizing organizations is to bring the liberating power of small enterprise inside of big business.
In short, we need to shift the locus of power from top to bottom, to think of management in terms of enterprise rather than hierarchy. I know this sounds revolutionary, but this is a revolution as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution. We tend to hear the Information half of the phrase Information Revolution but ignore the Revolution half. The idea that Communism might yield to markets seemed preposterous a few years ago, but it did happen. Now similar change is needed in big corporations—“Corporate Perestroika.” Robert Shapiro, CEO of Monsanto, put it this way, “We have to figure out how to organize employees without intrusive systems of control. People give more if they control themselves.”8
The following chapters offer hundreds of examples describing the clever forms of internal enterprise being used to solve problems directly, creatively, and quickly. Pay-for-performance plans are being expanded to form small, self-managed units that are held accountable for results but free to choose their workers, leaders, strategies, work methods, and generally “run their own business.” Line and support units are being converted into profit centers that buy and sell from each other and from outside the company, converting former monopolies into competitive business units. MCI, Xerox, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Siemens, Lufthansa, and other companies have developed fully decentralized bottom-up structures that form complete “internal market economies.”9 ABB’s 4,500 independent profit centers stand out as a model.
It only takes a little imagination to extend these trends to the point where the logic of free markets governs corporations rather than the logic of hierarchy. Internal markets have profound implications for business because they shift the source of knowledge, initiative, and control from top to bottom, thereby providing the same benefits as external markets: better decisions through price information, customer focus, accountability for economic results, and as much entrepreneurial freedom as possible.
Yes, markets are messy, but they are also bursting with creative energy—roughly like the Internet, our b...
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