Fall 2002, Vol. 41, No. 1, p.6

 

As events of the past year have made increasingly clear, good management must comprise more than the creation of efficient, effective commercial enterprises, more than the identification and emulation of best practices. At its core, the management conversation should be about the efficacy, sustainability and fundamental fairness of human interaction that underpins not just commercial enterprise, but culture, social policy and emerging global realities.

This issue features several important contributions to that conversation. In an article whose genesis predates the past summer's parade of corporate confessions, Henry Mintzberg, Robert Simons and Kunal Basu identify five aspects of current conventional wisdom that have created a syndrome of selfishness in our corporations and our societies. We have developed, they say, distorted notions of human nature, the purpose of corporations, the definition of prosperity and the essence of leadership — each of which must be challenged. Jeffrey E. Garten makes a complementary argument: CEOs have been too parochial in their obsession with quarterly earnings and shareholder value. But, he says, there is historical precedent and a renewed urgency for a much broader executive agenda that includes leadership in public policy and in the crucial issues of globalization. That kind of vision, according to Stuart L. Hart and Clayton M. Christensen, will require strategies that combine sustainable corporate growth and global social responsibility. Specifically, they assert that companies can simultaneously generate growth and satisfy social and environmental stakeholders by focusing not on developed, saturated economies, but instead on the world's underserved, developing markets — the most fertile ground for disruptive innovation.

Essential to realizing this broad agenda is an expanded approach to systems thinking: people function within organizations, which operate within alliances, which compete within industries that must integrate with societies, governments and cultures. In such an environment, characterized by rapid, roiling structural change, organizations are required to become highly adaptive, says Christopher Meyer. As in nature, he suggests, the appropriate survival response to competitive stress is not stasis, but increased exploration of options. Richard A. D'Aveni demonstrates how dynamic shifting of competitive pressure systems can be mapped in a highly visual way, enabling companies to manage the system in which they operate by making optimal choices of competitors, allies and markets. To create the flexibility and nimbleness required for that kind of adaptive response, many organizations in recent years have decentralized decision making and flattened and fragmented their operational structures. But that, say Sumantra Ghoshal and Lynda Gratton, has led to a deficiency of internal horizontal integration. They offer four critical dimensions — operational, social, emotional and intellectual — along which integration can be restored without depleting the organization's intrapreneurial energy.

Two of the lynchpins of integration, as identified by Ghoshal and Gratton, are standardized technological infrastructure and a shared knowledge base. Indeed, those two factors are the focus — nearly the obsession — of much current management thinking, because together they form the neural network of any integrated system, from the interpersonal to the global. Yet the exploration of both realms is relatively new, and the forces that define and drive them remain opaque. In our lead article, Thomas H. Davenport, Robert J. Thomas and Susan Cantrell identify five key issues that companies wrestle with when trying to manage knowledge work and delineate a framework that begins to untangle "the snarl of conflicting forces that currently impedes performance." Knowledge management is elusive because knowledge itself is not static, say Julian Birkinshaw and Tony Sheehan — it changes in nature throughout its life cycle and so, too, must the management of it. They offer insight into how companies can effectively select and develop the tools to do so. As the symbiotic twin of knowledge, information technology must also be infinitely responsive to life cycles and the continual evolution of strategies and systems. To create an agile infrastructure, say Peter Weill, Mani Subramani and Marianne Broadbent, IT capabilities should be viewed as clusters of services, the optimal combination and configuration of which is dictated by an organization's desired initiatives. The authors' research indicates that managers at top-performing companies are able to correctly identify those initiatives and how they might evolve. Meeting that considerable challenge is, of course, the common goal of all management conversations.

— The Editors

 

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