New Management theories factories put wrappers to everything and then call it new. And they are losing the essence. They are ripe for a Reformation of their own. Otherwise they risk being exposed as just so many overpaid peddlers of dead-without-essence ideas.
AFTER CAS 2014 in Barcelona (an event promoted by Agile Spain) everything else has been remained decadence. That edition had a spectacular closure with Pedro Serrahima a Manager Director of Pepehone (a telecommunications company) at that time, and Cristobal Colón a Founder and CEO of La Fageda (a yogurt factory). No one remained indifferent. They were talking about how to maintain simplicity can be difficult in a world where people buy and sell complex things. They came up with amazing example: Imagine that you want a chocolate candy. Even when you have a lot of alternatives, and every of them are equally good, you may be tempted to buy a luxury one. Why? Perhaps because its brand is powerful or maybe because it has a nice chocolate wrapper. Products sometimes come with complex things that make us forgot about the essence and we are ready to pay for them.
Something similar made me think about it this week. I was in a nice session with Japanese colleagues from NTT company, and we were talking about Agile, Management 3.0 and Lean Change management. Japanese people have Agile in their roots; indeed, they were the first who used it. Starting with Lean (the father of the Agile) and then they put the first seed through the paper wrote by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka “The new development Game” in Harvard Business Review at 1986. From here they started a revolution.
At some point of the session we realised that everything «new» that we were talking about agile was already invented many years ago. It is the chocolate candy named Kaizen but with new complex wrapper. Sometimes with mumbo-jombo words that make it more attractive to buy and sell. But sometimes with the loss of their real essence.
Management theories nowadays are organised around things that were invented many years ago: decentralization, flat-organizations, continuous improvement, cross-functional teams, and so on. Just read the Takeuchi and Nonaka Paper from 1986 and draw your own conclusion. Now, make it more complex and put it on a new wrapper. Ready to sell. No matter the essence.
People often associate complexity with deeper meaning, when often after precious time has been lost, it is realised that simplicity is the key to everything.
Calling for Reformation
New Management theories factories put wrappers to everything and then call it new. And they are losing the essence. They are ripe for a Reformation of their own. Otherwise they risk being exposed as just so many overpaid peddlers of dead-without-essence ideas.
How many wrappers are you going to put in your work today?
