Managing Leadership^®

Thanks for responding as you’d promised to my earlier comment. I do appreciate your viewpoint, and I do appreciate you creating the opportunity for dialog on this.

Once again, I agree with you that there are issues with the ‘purchasing process’ for these ‘fads’, and a sense that they are quick solutions without clarity on what’s needed.

I’m afraid I still have to sound like a broken record in saying that often it’s the senior management who bring these things in as something to ‘do’ to the organization.

Now, I can’t speak to the whole list of ‘fads’ you named, but some of them I’ve worked with very successfully for over two decades and I know they aren’t fads. And, instead of just looking at where they don’t work (which is a lot of the time), I find I often learn more by taking an appreciative approach and looking at where they do work, both from my own experience within organizations catalyzing change and as a consultant supporting it.

Where they work is s where the leadership realized that this is more than a fad. In order for such initiatives to work, it requires an investment of time and a significant cultural change in the organization. These leaders also realize that, by far, the greatest influence on the corporate culture is the leadership, particularly the senior leadership. And they a) invest the time to look in the mirror, both personally and corporately, and b) start the changes on both these levels that shift the organization to where it needs to go. As Ghandi said, ‘be the change you want to be in the world.’ That takes time, and it takes courage, and very few people are ready to go there.

Where I’ve most often seen these come across as ‘fads’ and ‘flavors of the month’ is where these initiatives are delegated to the organization, instead of being internalized from the top down.

Yes, some consultants who think they can become experts from reading a book are to blame for some failures. Yes, the people who bring these in have responsibility in some cases. But my experience has shown that the greatest cause of failure of approaches that do work is from a lack of investment in time and exploration of personal leadership by the management themselves.

Hello Ravi,

Yes, I agree that senior management (and boards, although they are often composed of the same people) are the key culprits, here. I also agree that many management ideas, while undoubtedly subjected to treatment as fads are in fact deserving of better.

The question of senior management’s influence on culture is a complex one. I am not convinced that it emanates from senior management – although, its potential for being a positive or negative influence on the corporation is strongly affected by senior management behavior.

So, you have given me yet more writing assignments. I need to clarify the intent of this post, which was to place the core problem with fads in the customer, but then also to address the problem of where in the customer organization it is really located. But I think your comment also suggests that we take another look at corporate culture and its antecedents here. At least two more posts, then.

Thanks again, Ravi – for your insightful observations, your work, and your own writing!

It is nice to see someone else thinking the same as myself. I have often been heard to say there has been nothing new in management since Socrates. Yet, I also believe the modern day management guru is a valuable asset. While, I myself, prefer the earlier lessons of Druker and Handy, I respect the different perspectives various academics and gurus brings to management.

What I regret most from their self promotion, is how they generate the belief that implementing the latest management fad is the ‘silver bullet’ to success. Far from it. While I believe much management is common sense backed up by effective communication I also know human beings to be capable of turning relatively simple things into something complex and undoable. Take playing golf for example!

The real issue with management fads is that our attempts to implement them detracts us from the daily tasks of leadership and management. In our efforts to achieve higher goals we forget to practice the basics. In doing so we perpetrate countless atrocities upon the people in our organisations and when the inevitable ‘failure’ occurs we blame the management fad and, just as often, the consultant retained to help us.

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Hello John,

I agree that modern observers of management do a service by developing perspectives or insight that can promote helpful thinking by practicing managers, I have not, however, found them to reliable providers of the concrete “facts” or “phenomena” that many of them presume they have uncovered; Drucker and Handy are excellent exceptions – I would add Mary Parker Follett, who I think was the greatest thinker in this field of all. There are other insightful modern observers, but none of the breadth of ability of these three.

In particular, the persistent marketing by these modern day management “scientists” of whatever they imagine that to be as a “silver bullet,” as you put it, is especially discouraging.

Your description of good management as “common sense backed up by effective communication” is as strong a definition as I’ve seen – as is your depiction of thoughtless implementation of fads, at the cost of good management, as “atrocities.”

Much blame does belong to those who encourage us to believe in quick fixes and silver bullets – but, as you point out, there is no escaping our culpability in this game. We encourage these academic and consultancy providers to produce a smoke screen from which we can grandly emerge if things work out, or behind which we can hide if they don’t.

Thanks for stopping by with this!