The world is being run by twenty-something’s.
Strict ly speaking, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it would seem that in
a few years time it might well be true. Giant businesses are being built by
people who cannot buy a beer in Delhi. A bunch of kids are dreaming up ideas,
hir ing people much older than them, negotiating tough deals with a bunch of
cutthroat investors, and generally re-imaging the world as we know it. Their
parents presumably approve.
Apart
from making older people look ridiculous, the emergence of this new breed of
leaders also dramatically challenges the idea that doing certain kind of jobs
requires qualifications, the relevant experience and a host of qualities that
are deemed absolutely essential by management consultants (delegating effectively,
getting hands dirty, being good listeners, leading from the front, re-inventing
oneself frequently and so on). These young people not quite out of college seem
to rush into everything and find it remarkably easy to do all the things that
we have been told are very difficult.
And
they are not the only ones who pose this question of us. The idea that only
people with the proper education, requisite experience and formal training can
over time become capable of handling ever more complex tasks is something that gets
challenged in different ways all around us. Politicians, for instance, run
ministries without having a clue about the subject that they are final arbiters
of. There is no formal training that they undergo, and although they might not
be the finest advertisements for a lack of qualification, as we have seen in
the recent having highly qualified leaders, does not necessarily translate into
meaningful action. Young scions of
business families are routinely parachuted into top management where they get
to lord over professionals who not only have eye-popping qualifications but
have spent weeks sitting in various training programmes painstakingly
`developing competencies' and working on their team building and leadership
skills. By and large, this model works just fine, for if it didn't the market
would have ensured that only professionals ran companies.
Could
it be that the idea of competence is in part a device used to determine who
gets to leadership positions when there are no other means available to figure
this out?
Or is that the idea that management is a standalone discipline that can be
taught is by itself a somewhat dodgy proposition, constructed as a way of
establishing a certain kind of order?
Reading popular management texts, business self-help books or even the
newspaper supplements that peddle what passes for strategic wisdom seems to
confirm that management science consists largely of wrapping some stag geringly
self-evident cliches in waves of self-important language. Among the top 20
business bestsellers on Amazon currently include titles like Rising Strong (by
the author of Daring Greatly), The Rich Employee, Strengths Finder 2.0,
Platform: Get Noticed In A Noisy World, 10-Minute Declutter, Get What's Yours,
Getting to Yes and that old faithful, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. At
the considerable risk of judging books by their titles, it would seem that
these texts seem to represent a discipline that is less about science and more
about assorted shortcuts to get successful, without having to tax the intellect
mightily .
The
management myth arrogates to itself great complexity which re quires strategic
vision and other such lofty skills while simultaneously valorizing concepts
that even half wits would find rudimentary . This is why organizations go to
great lengths to hire really smart people and then go to even greater lengths
to ensure that this smartness is rarely put to use. The truth might well be
that there is nothing that requires deep intellect in managing
organizations--it does require sophisticated life skills, which does not need
any great formal training. But without the air of self-importance, the suits,
the salaries that bear no relationship to reality, the PowerPoint presentations
and the technical language, maintaining an orderly and stable system would be
difficult. Perhaps something fundamental has changed. As new ideas become the
dominant source of energy in any ecosystem, the power of the management myth
begins to subside. In a world where settled structures based on size, history
and power are the dominant forces, being qualified is of great value.One has to
fit into a complex framework that already exists, and that is not easy .A
stable system needs order, and a predictable set of processes. But a world
founded on ideas is fundamentally a more unstable one. What matters here is the
power of the idea--ecosystems follow ideas and capabilities develop in the gap
that exists between an idea and its execution, or can be bought off the market.
The
opening up of the digital space, which is many ways is a completely new
universe that needs to be colonized, has thrown up a new set of pioneers who
are known more by their ideas than by their antecedents. These are creators,
not managers, concerned more with building new ways of imagining the world
rather than with efficiently distributing scarce resources over competing
priorities. That they are as young as they are is no accident, for the
freshness of perspective they bring needs them to be free of the stifling order
embedded within the very idea of organizations. They will, in time, develop
their own cliches and find their own mental prisons, but for now, it is time to
acknowledge the coming of a new order.
Source | Times of India | 7 September 2015
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