Videos Centered on the Topic

¶ … videos centered on the topic of radical remedies to management design flaws, by Professor Eric Abrahamson, . Points that I agreed and disagreed on will be noted. Conclusions that can be drawn from these videos will be discussed, along with any other topics that struck accord with the topic of the future of leadership and management.

Professor Eric Abrahamson, of Columbia Business School, overviewed his radical remedy to management design flaws as a theory that organizations need more of less. Abrahamson makes some interesting points about organizations needing to move away from increased organization, increased systems, increased processes and procedures. I agree that these mechanisms often lead not to the empowering of employees, but to increased bureaucracy that hinders the daily operations of the organization. In fact, empowering employees can reduce stress levels and increase productivity (Siedl, 2009). He also speaks of the need for less change. At first, when he began this second prong of his ideas, I disagreed. In today's hypercompetitive world, organizations have to change to meet rapidly advancing threats and to take advantage of limited opportunities. However, Abrahamson further clarifies his idea of less change as having periods of rapid and greater change followed by periods of stability, which is a much more agreeable idea. I especially agree with giving only general directions and tolerating a certain amount of messiness and chaos from capable employees, empowering them to find the best way to accomplish tasks. Of course, in certain instances, more specific directions may be needed; however, these employees should still have the ability to try new methods to discover even better methods. As I'm unsure of the Professor's previous background, I would also like to know if his first-hand knowledge extends beyond the world of academia, and has tried this chaos management theory in a real world organization. Like many ideas, it may look good on paper, but real world application may be more difficult than it first appears.

Joanna Barsh

Joanna Barsh, of McKinsey & Company, feels that the greatest flaw in management is an invisible flaw, which is why it is so often ignored. This flaw is management's inability and/or unwillingness to channel emotion to help their employees create and innovate. Barsh insists that organizations suppress emotion through bureaucracy and that this suppressed emotion comes out in negative ways. She uses Avon as an example of a company that effectively uses emotion to drive their business, and that particular emotion is love. The love the independent representatives feel for the company, the love the CEO and top management uses when communicating with their organizational members, and the love consumers feel for the company all are reasons for Avon's success. Although I agree that emotions can be powerful motivators both internally in the organization and when marketing to customers (Momeni, 2009), I would argue with Barsh's statement that companies suppress emotion through bureaucracy. Instead, I would suggest that any emotion suppressing comes, in the workplace, from what is socially acceptable as a means of cultural custom.

James Surowiecki

James Surowiecki, of the New Yorker, surmises that the biggest flaw in business today is that too much power is centralized with the CEO. He believes that the role of leader, manager and decider should not be all in the hands of one person. Although some people are better at leading and some people are better at managing, no individual person is better at decision making than the collective knowledge available within an entire organization. Organizations need to, therefore, do a better job at harvesting this collecting knowledge their employees have and using it in a way that facilitates decision making. A more radical solution, Surowiecki, feels is to place actual decision making in the hands of a group of the top management, thereby outsourcing decision making away from the CEO and into the organization. I agree that this type of involvement would give employees a greater sense of voice in the organization, and would help the buy-in aspect of decisions. I also agree that if performed effectively, it would improve decision making. This decentralization of decision making would also help counter what Bruhn (2009) notes as an ethical challenge for organizations -- when there is a gray area between right and wrong. My two concerns would be how efficiently this collective knowledge could be harvested and aggregated for use and to ensure that those in the lower echelons of the organizational chart have knowledge the CEO does not, the reverse is true as well and needs to be taken into consideration.

Conclusion and Thoughts

Each video covered a different issue with current business management. The primary conclusion that can be drawn from these three very different perspectives is that bureaucracy is a bad thing for an organization. Each of the three speakers' solutions were centered on countering the negative influence of bureaucracy. Abrahamson favored messiness and chaos. Barsh felt bureaucracy stifled emotions that could be better used than suppressed. Surowiecki surmised that bureaucracy led to the traditional key decision maker, the CEO, not having all the information he needed to make the best decisions possible.