Managing Value in Organisations

New Learning, Management, and Business Models

Donal Carroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138271258
• eBook ISBN: 9781317101284
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The song of organisational change goes: 'Ready or not, here I come. You can't hide...' But is change collapsonomics - everything - or have some things not changed? Managing Value in Organisations argues that traditional business thinking has produced low trust with high cost in increased disengagement: the 100 year old management model still accrues organisational debt, the business model privileges producers, and the learning model pretends individual learning produces collective learning. All are now barriers to development. Working with five organisations, Donal Carroll reinvents the management model to multiply trust, the business model for more complex customer value, and learning model for significant collective learning. He provides evidence that together, these get organisations to their next stage of development faster. In a climate of perceived increasing uncertainty and 'more for less' it invites organisations to move from default models and choose their models to 'live on purpose'. This applied business research has many new ideas: value creating research method, three new models, 'techniques' for organisations to self-assess and construct their next stage, as well as 'fecund argument, productive interference, organisational orphans' and 'facing down Facebook '. It invites readers on a risky narrative, testing one idea in five organisations, over one year through two journeys - the organisations' and writer's. A different business book, it seeks to capture the 'poetry and plumbing' excitement of management innovation. Managers at every level, coaches, consultants, business scholars, researchers, anyone seeking sustainable improvement, or who thinks the impossible can't be reached will find something here.

Part I The Background

1 Introduction: What This Book is About and Who it is For

DOI: 10.4324/9781315593685-1

This is a learning journey over one year, an experiment in how to engage organisational effort, thinking and value for faster, sustained development.

What ‘Can’t Be Done’

Finbar went to Limerick determined to tackle the epidemic of people living on the streets, many alcohol-dependent. He had no money, and agencies who could have helped didn’t because the ‘victims’ used alcohol. Through his networks, he quickly found a large empty building, got some beds from a local hospital and opened a hostel. That is why today people say ‘there is no street homelessness in Limerick’.

During the Thatcher period, there were many community activists like Finbar. If you meet them today their business card says just one word: ‘Organiser’. They would rather say that than ‘manager’ but it means manager too.

This work is for managers: to get excited about a purpose and new ideas, and get on the road with them.

Trusting the Sense-makers

This work uses ideas from a range of sources, for instance the history of small businesses, the increasing use of technology and social media, and other issues. The sources are what I call ‘sense-makers’. These provide good ideas from reliable, enquiring minds which I trust so don’t need to embark on a long trail of ‘primary sources’ all over again. They include those who write regularly, a demanding means of performance, those who provide surprise and insight to build and use an enquiring readership, like John Naughton and Simon Caulkin. Others are used more indirectly such as Seth Godin, Tara Brabazon, Martin Parker, Studs Terkel, John Berger and Edward Said. Intellectually, as Shelley says in his A Defence of Poetry, they provide ‘the influence which is moved not, but moves’. At a time when public thinking about management and other key areas seems little more than an uncritical acceptance of an agenda set by market forces, these writers construct something more just. Or to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, they ensure that if you don’t know what you want you won’t grow to like just what you get.

On Not Being Academically Safe

This work is not an academic analysis of management, learning and business. Rather it is a putting together of some old and new theories in fresh ways, to experiment with a new approach to find better ways of acting. It won’t exhaustively re-examine issues like shareholder value, management, education or learning organisations, but will use a particular view of them to construct new approaches to tackle common and anticipated business problems. The arguments I make with these ideas and all their imperfections then become part of the history of management thinking: grist to the mill, to address problems which should be addressed, using perhaps what shouldn’t even be considered.

How to Read This Book

As one manager said, the best metaphor for ‘your models’ in this work, is career coaching for organisations.

Tweeting the Work

1 5 1 2 Testing one idea in five organisations over one year through two journeys.

What is This Book About and Who is it For?

How fast does your world change? Nowadays, when somebody says something can’t be done, they are likely to be interrupted by someone who is already doing it.

Here are some striking examples of ‘what can’t be done’:

• For years the streets of Sao Paulo, South America’s biggest city, were awash with advertising, so much so that the continent’s biggest consumer market was a vortex of chaotic visual debris. Towards the end of 2006, the mayor came up with a solution – all outdoor advertising would be removed within six months. The campaign to combat pollution … would start with its most conspicuous form – visual pollution. Advertising companies argued that the ban would damage everything – freedom of speech, jobs, their sector, even the image of the city. Nonetheless, in early 2007, Lei Cidade Limpa (The Clean City Law) came into operation. The effect: the end of outdoor advertising, forcing advertising companies to find more innovative ways to operate and be more effective, including an exploding digital market.¹
• ‘Mobile phones will soon be able to diagnose sexually transmitted diseases … people can put … saliva into a computer chip the size of a USB chip, plug it into their phone and receive a diagnosis within minutes.’²
• Traveleyes: setup by a blind entrepreneur, this organisation matches non-sighted travellers with sighted ones who act as their ‘eyes’ on trips.³
• An electric car plugged into a lamp post – which city? Shenzen Huashi Future Parking trialled in Beijing in 2011 and coming to a city near you very soon.⁴

¹ The Financial Times, 7 September 2010. ² ‘New test will diagnose sexual diseases via phones’ The Guardian, 6 November 2010. ³ Graham Snowdon, ‘Taking care of business’ The Guardian, Work 4 December 2010. ⁴ ‘The 50 best inventions of 2010’ Time Magazine, 22 November 2010, p.55.

Maybe striking these days… but not that unusual.

Success is an Iceberg

What do these things tell us? Even in a climate of apparently intensifying uncertainty and mandatory austerity-wear, anything is still possible –if somebody believes in it first! Value creation, a central concern of this book, begins with somebody imagining the initial ideas which informed these businesses into existence.

The examples here are ‘successful’ ideas, ones that worked. ‘Success’ looks easy. It hides the scar tissue of its preparation, the flimsiness it can be based on, the ideas that didn’t work, the scorching risk for its proposers – not just financial – and the self-inflicted silences which can be exited only through new actions. Not to mention the time it takes to get there: ‘successful’ entrepreneurs need to remember Jarvis Cocker’s (of Pulp) comment, ‘It took us 12 years to become an overnight success.’

‘Success’ has some flaky characteristics. It is invariably applied in retrospect, and has anything but a linear pathway: commonly ‘success’ claims intention where there is chance and improvisation, and causal lines where there is obliquity. This gives the illusion of control, which can blind us to the organic complexity of things. ‘Organic’ because problems do not simply repeat themselves, they emerge like a Stonehenge of drunks. Whether they live or die, are tackled or disappear, depends entirely on how they are framed by their owners. Crucially, ‘success’ involves the success–owner’s response to all these uncertainties, including the very notion itself.

The examples above might provide promising practice for business builders and entrepreneurs. With hindsight, those involved no doubt knew what they were doing. But did they really? Given that the route to success is by definition uncertain, with considerable U-turns and re-routings, what were they doing when they didn’t seem to know what they were doing? The builders of organisational ‘success’ described here had immense commitment and direction, knew where they were going, and their planning was more than matched with improvisation and, particularly at the initial stage, risk.

A highly successful college vice principal I had the good fortune to work for used to say that plans are tombstones, planning is being able to drive past the cemetery. What plan survives its first impact with the enemy (its market)? So these people knew all right. But they knew more than ‘knowing’ and knew ‘knowing’ is not enough. Man plans, God laughs. What they had was something else, which was crucial: they were able to increase their rate of learning when it most mattered – this is not so much what they learned but how they could hurry it into action when they needed to – for instance when significant change occurred in their strategic environment.⁵

⁵ Explored more fully in Chapter 6, The Learning Model, p.91.

Franklin Roosevelt, described by John Kay as the ‘most successful US president’, understood very well that goals and actions must be constantly revised in order to achieve high-level objectives (overall purpose) and success, even though this term was not used. He described his approach as ‘bold, persistent experimentation’. Try something – ‘if it fails, admit it frankly and try another…’ That tiny phrase ‘admit it frankly’ in many organisations can be a major barrier to success. What FDR achieved was through pragmatic improvisation in the face of unpredictable circumstances and gravely open-ended problems…⁶

⁶ John Kay (2010) Obliquity: Why Our Goals are Best Achieved Indirectly London, Profile Books.

So readers may not leave this work ‘knowing’ in an utterly straightforward way. In this they will be in good company. As Henry Mintzberg said in a recent work, ‘I don’t want you to leave this knowing … but, as I do, imagining, reflecting, questioning…’⁷ But I hope readers will be excited too by the examples, particularly if they want to build a business and in the process develop sufficiently agile hands to grasp the slippery goal of ‘success’.

⁷ Henry Mintzberg (2009) Managing Harlow, FT/Prentice Hall, p.16.

There is that word again – the logical aim of all organisations – isn’t it?

Organisational Journey and Personal Journey: The Same Fuel?

As suggested here, success is a complex brew. With participant organisations it emerges as the journey of the work develops and is linked to the relationship between participant organisations and their respective founders – all of whom are still there. How separable are organisations and their founders? What do they bring? Does having ‘successful’ people inevitably mean successful organisations – created in their image? Does that make them dependent? How can they be independent, sufficiently agile to counter continually changing circumstances? Do successful leaders have – or need – a secret learning source to counter their natural influence?

Or, on the other hand, can those who do not consider themselves successful, or where it does not seem important, lead or build successful organisations? How relevant is success at all? Though success can be claimed, it is unlikely to result from a breathy perusal of a Richard Branson primer. Is it more accurately captured in Peter Jones’s comment⁸ that ‘enterprise’ is not ‘the mechanics of setting up a business but a state of mind, a confidence that you have the knowledge and the right mindset to be successful?’

⁸ So-called enterprise programmes like ‘Dragons Den’ (the title gives the purpose away) hide as much as they reveal with the mandatory dependence on the ‘dragon’ leader, usually the source of growth capital, and the casual dumping of otherwise promising ideas they don’t like. More positively, there is the occasional good sense of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Preface
• PART I THE BACKGROUND
• PART II THE OLD AND NEW APPROACHES
• PART III THE APPLICATION
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index