The Essential Manager

How to Thrive in the Global Information Jungle

James W. Cortada

• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Pr
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781119002772
• eBook ISBN: 9781119004936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This book discusses the evolution of management as a profession over the past two decades and how it continues to evolve. It goes on to describe the new style of management and makes recommendations for what today's and tomorrow's managers must know and how to work.

• Offers ways to think about your role as a manager in order to optimize your effectiveness toward uncertain and turbulent changes
• Discusses current realities in which management currently operates
• Provides a historical background of managerial practices and how they've evolved in the present workplace

Chapter 1
Emergence of a New Managerial Style

. . . a time of turbulence is also one of great opportunity for those who can understand, accept, and exploit the new realities. It is above all a time for leadership.

Peter F. Drucker¹

Mexican cement manufacturer CEMEX and European toy manufacturer LEGO use social media tools to invite product and service innovations from employees, of course, but also from customers. In the case of LEGO, management pays royalties to ideas turned into products. IBM managers have employees who report directly to them scattered across the world, no longer down the hall, and so expect their workers to take charge of their own time and get things done without constant managerial intervention. Traffic managers in London, Singapore, and Stockholm use massive quantities of data that are collected automatically by sensors to model optimized ways to improve traffic flows, in some instances, several times a day. Marketing managers at Ford Motor Company, Canadian retail bank, TD Bank, and now many insurance companies host online communities of customers who tell them how products and services are performing, even how to make a better hamburger (Red Robin Restaurants), and expect employees to train and mentor each other. Increasingly, the power and work of “management” has diffused further to employees and especially to customers far beyond what had begun as a trend in the 1990s. When looked at as a whole, we see that a new style of management has emerged.

Something strange has been going on quietly, unseen, hardly recognized. Stand on a busy street in any city in the world—and I really mean any city—and one can notice that almost everyone over the age of 12 and under the age of 35 or so, and many clearly over that age, are either plugged into some device (such as an Apple iPod) or radio, are carrying in one hand a mobile phone, or are texting on their “smart” phone. Look for the phenomenon; it is there. Go back in time just 10–15 years and you would have seen a few people with headsets listening to music. Walk into a conference room at any major corporation—and I really mean any large or mid-sized company or government agency—and you will notice the same behavior of people clutching mobile phones if they are under the age of 35 and doing a quick check for messages or peeking at Facebook. Other colleagues walk into the room with iPads that they skim during the meeting, rarely devoting 100% of their attention to what is happening, while those over the age of 50–55 will drag in their ancient laptops or one of those thin ones from Apple and quickly sit down and start working on e-mail. Only the host of the meeting will drop her two or three pieces of hardware on the table and quickly move to a Powerpoint presentation that will provide structure to the meeting. Fifteen years earlier, similar type of meeting would have been conducted with Powerpoint, and everyone might have had a laptop open, doing e-mail of course, but probably without access to wireless Internet, and the manager chairing the meeting would undoubtedly have been a man.

Incrementally, the signs of change were all around us—from the physical appearance of mobile phones and tablet computers to women attaining senior positions. All these changes in work practices happened incrementally, one tiny step at a time slowly over time, so almost hidden. These are tips of icebergs, however, because far more changed in the practice of management. Success in a managerial profession has long depended on understanding the craft of leadership and management, mastering the technical skills and knowledge of such work, and for the most successful, the art of success. This book is about how these three things are followed today, suggesting how they will be done during the professional lives of all those individuals clutching mobile phones, routinely dividing their attention between the Powerpoint presentations and the wealth of interesting contents pouring into their digital devices off of social media sites. In fact, many of these individuals work for organizations that are becoming social media sites themselves; these include municipalities that provide services online to consumers in every major city of the world, and in future to consumers in most towns and villages too, and companies that sell digital content, transfer information from organizations to people for free or fee, or operate almost virtually.

A personal story. In the 1980s, when I first entered the ranks of management at IBM, a secretary worked for me, I had an office, and had access to e-mail on a heavy terminal on my desk. After several promotions, gone was the secretary (I then shared an “administrative assistant” who was a man), gone too was my physical office (although I could borrow an empty one anywhere in the world), while I had a laptop connected to IBM’s e-mail system, the Internet on a dialup line, and increasingly to large databases of business records and consulting materials. Fast forward to the early 2000s, and yet through two more promotions (defined as fancier titles, stock options, and bigger salaries), my manager lived in Amsterdam, I in Madison, Wisconsin; gone was the administrative assistant, although I could lean on one to help me if needed who worked in Boston, Massachusetts, while her backup was in Amsterdam; and my staff was scattered all over the world. In the 1980s, I physically saw my manager every day; in the 1990s probably once in a month; while in the 2000s once in a year and only because we felt we should, but did not know really why anymore. I moved from being told how to do my job, and getting appraised on both the way I worked and the results obtained, to results obtained. Over a period of years, I incrementally had to evolve from a person able to operate in a hierarchical organization taking and giving orders for the most mundane activities to weaving networks of alliances and teams that functioned on their own as self-directed individuals and clusters of people willing to collaborate as long as it made sense to them. No managerial revolution was there at IBM—IBM was far too conservative for that—rather we underwent a continuous process of many evolutions, just as our customers did in all industries around the world, often at roughly the same time and pace.

While evolutions are often nearly invisible, if they are continuous, they ultimately accumulate into enough changes that will seem revolutionary in hindsight. The revolutions are obvious to see unfold, such as the introduction of the smart phone or a change in a government regulation, but the evolutions come at us quietly, slowly, incrementally, and so are not so evident. This book describes some of these evolutions, demonstrates how to spot them, and suggests answers to the most basic question, “So, now what do I do?”

How This Book and Chapters Are Organized and Why

The fundamental purpose of this book is to help you to know the happenings around you as a manager, or as an aspiring one. The reason to do this comes from the fact that managers are today not as broadly aware of their circumstances as they need to be. Their education is often too narrow, they normally know just what they need to in order to perform their current jobs, and they remain too ill-equipped to transform into agile, entrepreneurial leaders, which is what the world of business is demonstrating is required more today than in previous decades. The need for agility and innovation is being forced on managers because the global economy is continuing to integrate, which means you will have more competitors with different business models to contend with and more technological and scientific advances and changes that will force you to work in different ways. You have no choice but to respond to those realities. The help you get is often inadequate or simply wrong. The books that managers read are too often focused on a single issue presented as the next “silver bullet” that will solve all their problems, from long tails to analytics, from “bings” to emulating nineteenth-century generals. So many commentators take an article they published in a business journal and develop it into a book that adds more case studies but not more insight.

Much of that behavior has to be seen for what it normally is: close to near nonsense and it has to stop. Management is a serious business that affects the life and lives of billions of people, the environment of the earth, even perhaps the survival of our species. Management is not an ad hoc or amateur activity. This book respects the growing professionalization of managerial practices, its complexity, and the seriousness with which all workers need to devote to it.

An operating assumption here is that everyone working today has some managerial responsibilities, regardless of title, because that is the way work is routinely done. Like the observer on the sidewalk, things change around us. First, those people clutching their mobile phones are not just embracing technologies—that is not so important—what they are doing is living in a more intensely connected world from which they willingly do not escape as their parents could, and in which they must devote ever less time to any one issue or problem as multiple people crash into their mental spaces. Second, armed with perspectives on what is happening, and all through this book, suggestions are made about how to deal with these changes. But, this is not a cookbook or a highly prescriptive list of “to dos.” There is too much going on for that to work; rather, we have to be agile intellectually and physically able to work in different places, time zones, cultures, and business environments. These forms of flexibility are of considerable value, indeed for many decades. So understanding these and making such capabilities a way of life becomes an important objective. But, much will be offered in the way of telling lessons and actions to build on. We are talking about a style of working in today’s and, more importantly, tomorrow’s business world.

This style of working is not hubris and hype, but this is a serious business because your competitors are coming at you literally from countries you did not think about half a dozen years ago and from industries that did not exist a decade earlier. For example, many competitors to American companies in consumer goods in the 1960s and 1970s operated out of Japan; in the 1980s and 1990s, increasingly out of China and Eastern Europe; and in the early 2000s from the Philippines and Thailand. In case of software business, competitors were from India and China. But today, Vietnam and Indonesia have become the major contributors of consumer goods. That coming and going of international competitors will continue, forcing us to understand who they are and their values. In turn, then, we will need to craft new ways of doing business and of finding customers even in those countries.

To succeed, managers need to be aware of more issues and changes that are underway. They need to think more creatively, not just look at more data (but they need to do that too). They will need to experiment more with business models, terms and conditions, new technologies, and different products and services delivered in innovative ways. They will need to engage with new types of organizations too. The good news is, however, that there is much help on the way, from computer software for modeling situations and options with mountains of data and information, and a large body of managerial practices which business school professors have now spent several generations codifying in convenient ways. The bad news is we are now applying these assistive tools and insights in the ongoing development of our managers insufficiently. But let us be realistic.

A manager still needs the core skills that have evolved into the set of practices widely deployed over the past half century: process management expertise, strong project management practices, reliance on data and spreadsheets, being facile with mobile computing, and an ability to network within their organizations and with clients and industry colleagues in rather fluid circumstances. Their MBA degree would have taught them the basic “facts” of their profession—a good start to be sure—but it was only a start in their education on teaming, corporate politics, use of social media in marketing and product development, life in a supply chain, managing personnel witho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Emergence of a New Managerial Style
• Chapter 2: When Management Confronts Information Ecosystems
• Chapter 3: How  Technologies Affect the Work of Industries
• Chapter 4: New Organizations
• Chapter 5: Emerging Economic and Business Realities
• Chapter 6: The Way Forward
• For Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement