Management isn’t just about control and organisation. It’s about coping. About muddling through. And it’s not just about managing others. It’s about managing ourselves.
To manage means not only to handle, to control, but to cope. It’s not only about hierarchical order and symbolic violence.
Perhaps we should stop thinking in terms of problems and solutions. We can’t solve our problems with the same kinds of thinking we used to create them – that’s what Einstein said. Problem / solution thinking is itself part of the problem. We have to leave behind mainstream management consciousness.
There are three hundred thousand students on management and administration programmes. Far more than any other subject area.
Traditional, hierarchical structures are giving way to distributed practices, apparently. Organised nodally.
It’s not about maximum growth, competitiveness and productivity anymore. It’s not only a matter efficacy, cost-effectiveness and instrumentality.
Care about others – that’s the thing. Collective stewardship. Frameworks of cooperation. Common horizons! The collaborative commons! Global solidarity! It’s all part of the new managerial toolkit.
This is not your dad’s Organisational Management. It’s not about some massive global authority to control everything and everyone, oh no.
It’s about building a heterotopia. Clearing a common ground on which to rebuild society.
Solidarity is the watchworld. Not suppressing or deny differences, but valuing each contribution to the whole.
It’s not all about Weberian bureaucracy anymore. It’s not about repressing personal idiosyncrasies. About eliminating beliefs, predilections, affections, mannerisms, eccentricities. It’s not about smooth and unswerving goal pursuit. It’s not about uniformity. About instrumentally rational performance.
The model of manager as gardener. Inviting, not structuring. Letting grow, not motivating. Inspiring, not planning. Caring, not controlling.
Management Kairos. Seizing the right moment.
Reading: Organization is an attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human action, to channel it towards certain ends, to give it a particular shape, through generalizing and institutionalizing particular meanings and rules. At the same time, organization is a pattern that is constituted, shaped, emerging from change.
Velocity management. Speeding up operations to the level of instantaneity. Perfect coordination – that’s the clue. It’ll allow decision making at lightning speed.
Work in Progress 