After management by wandering around, it’s time for something real

MANAGEMENT speak can be mind-numbing with its ever-changing fads, but now there’s a new idea.

140620 DEAL Businessman Standing on Steps Outside Talking Through a Megaphone, Large Group of Business People Listening and Applauding pic ; thinkstock Picture: Captioned As

ONE of the things we need to focus on going forward working in this space is to make sure we drill down with some granularity so that we all touch base and incentivise our people. Once we have done that, we can call it out and take it offline.

Yes, that’s really how people in our biggest companies, including you, really talk. Every industry has its own cash language. Every company in your industry has its own language and every department or division in your company has its own language. But not only is that not the language we all talk but it stops the flow of ideas, stops innovation in its tracks and actually creates a barrier to communication.

Of course, the problem gets worse when your executives try to use your internal language to communicate externally. Why do Clive Palmer supporters love him? Because he talks their language. Why do politicians and business leaders find it harder to “get their message across”? Because they talk a different language. Even inside companies, employees know what is quaintly called internal communications are actually expensive executive entertainment. Please don’t get someone independent to ask your “people” what they really think of your emails, letters or blogs. Who says the emperor has no clothes? What your “most important resources” really do is sit back with barely disguised cynicism and contempt and wait for their “leaders” to enthusiastically come out with the latest management fad, rallying call or other narcissistic message from the fuhrer’s bunker.

Who remembers Six Sigma, Total Quality Management Management by Objectives, Management by Wandering Around, Quality Circles and Benchmarking? And how many management consultants can forget the dollars dropping into their pockets when they introduced a form of Work Out, Theory Z or the greatest destroyer of shareholder value invented since we first stood up: matrix management? Well, we can all remember them, along with hula hoops, pet rocks, the Atkins diet and bottled water.

When he was dean of the Australian Graduate School of Management, the much-maligned Fred Hilmer used to do a presentation based on serious research that boiled down successful business to being able to walk and chew gum - driving revenue up while driving costs down. Naturally, in banking they have a name for this - the jaws. You want the jaws - the sales line and the cost lines — to become increasingly wider.

Today things are a bit harder. In a connected world, we need to find ways to co-operate rather than being separate. Despite the myths, innovation is not a eureka moment. As Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein found, it is building on someone else’s ideas. This is what the academics call cumulative cultural evolution. Or how hula hoops morphed into pet rocks and pet rocks morphed into the iPhone.

The latest version of hula hoops and TQM is authenticity. Now we have to know which plantation our coffee comes from, whether our eggs come from liberated hens, if the workers that make our runners are paid enough and what sort of struggles our politicians had as kids? We hate fakes. But do we really? My kids love Disneyland and Harry Potter World. They know it’s fake but it’s real fake - which is more than can be said for most of our politicians and business leaders.

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