History moves in a spiral; one returns to the preceding position, but on a higher level, and by a corkscrew-like path.
We are again entering an era in which emphasis will be on entrepreneurship. However, it will not be an entrepreneurship of a century ago, that is, the ability of a single man to organize a business he himself could run, control, embrace. It will rather be the ability to create and direct an organization for the new. We need men and women who can build a new structure of entrepreneurship on the managerial foundations laid these last eighty years. History, it has often been observed, moves in a spiral; one returns to the preceding position, or to the preceding problem, but on a higher level, and by a corkscrew-like path. In this fashion we are going to return to entrepreneurship on a path that led out from a lower level, that of the single entrepreneur, to the manager, and now back, though upward, to entrepreneurship again. The businessperson will have to acquire a number of new abilities, all of them entrepreneurial in nature, but all of them to be exercised in and through a managerial organization.
In turbulent times, the first task of management is to make sure of the institution’s capacity to survive a blow.
In turbulent times, the first task of management is to make sure of the institution’s capacity for survival, to make sure of its structural strengths, of its capacity to survive a blow, to adapt to sudden change, and to avail itself of new opportunities. Turbulence, by definition, is irregular, nonlinear, erratic. But its underlying causes can be analyzed, predicted, managed.
What management should—and can—manage is the single most important new reality underlying a great deal of the turbulence around: the sea-change in population structure and population dynamics, and especially the shift in population structure and population dynamics in the developed countries of the West and Japan. These shifts are already changing the modes of economic integration throughout the world. They are likely to lead to a new “transnational confederation” based on production sharing and market control, replacing in many areas the old “multinational corporation” based on financial control. They are creating new consumer markets and realigning existing old consumer markets. They are drastically changing the labor force to the point where there will only be “labor forces,” each with different expectations and different characteristics. They will force us to abandon altogether the concept of “fixed retirement age.” And they will create a new demand on management—as well as a new opportunity—to make organized plans for redundancy.
If this change is relevant and meaningful, what opportunities does it offer?
Now as to what the work of the social ecologist is: First of all, it means looking at society and community by asking these questions: “What changes have already happened that do not fit ‘what everybody knows’?” “What are the ‘paradigm changes’?” “Is there any evidence that this is a change and not a fad?” And, finally, one then asks: “If this change is relevant and meaningful, what opportunities does it offer?”
A simple example is the emergence of knowledge as a key resource. The event that alerted me to the fact that something was happening was the passage of the GI Bill of Rights in the United States after the Second World War. This law gave every returning war veteran the right to attend college, with the government paying the bill. It was a totally unprecedented development. These considerations led me tot he question: “What impact does this have on expectations, on values, on social structure, on employment, and so on?” And once this question was asked—I first asked it in the late 1940s—it became clear that knowledge as a productive resource had attained a position in society as never before in human history. We were clearly on the threshold of a major change. Ten years later, by the mid-1950s, one could confidently talk of a “knowledge society,” of “knowledge work” as the new center of the economy, and of the “knowledge worker” as the new, ascendant workforce.
Now is the time to start middle-management weight control. One means is attrition. As a job becomes vacant through retirement, death, or resignation, don’t automatically fill it. Leave jobs open for six or eight months and see what happens; unless there is an overwhelming clamor for filling the job, then abolish it. The few companies that have tried this report that about half the “vacancies” disappeared after six months. A second way to reduce middle-management bulk is to substitute job-enlargement for promotion. The one and only way to provide satisfaction and achievement for young managers and executives—and for the even younger people working under them—is to make jobs bigger, more challenging, more demanding, and more autonomous, while increasingly using lateral transfers to different assignments, rather than promotions, as a reward for outstanding performance.
Forty years ago we built into the performance review of managerial people the question, “Are they ready for promotion?” Now we need to replace that question with “Are they ready for a bigger, more demanding challenge and for the addition of new responsibilities to their existing job?”
“Public Relations” has acquired a connotation of ballyhoo, propaganda, and whitewashing.
To the general public, “public relations” means publicity—essentially an extension of advertising from advertising a product to advertising its producer. But, the emphasis should be on acquainting the broad public with the problems of the enterprise rather than on convincing it of the company’s virtues and achievements. This leads to the realization that to reach the public with its problems, the enterprise must understand the public’s problems first.
Every major decision of a great corporation affects the public somehow, as workers, consumers, citizens; hence the public will react consciously or subconsciously to every move the company makes. On this reaction depends, however, the effectiveness of the company’s decision—simply another way of saying that any corporation lives in society. Hence the effectiveness of the executive’s decision depends not only on his understanding the problems of his business but also on his understanding the public attitude toward his problems. Hence the program of public relations is to give both central-office and divisional executives a knowledge of public attitudes and beliefs, and an understanding of the reasons behind them.
Unless staff people have proved themselves in operations, they will lack credibility among operating people and will be dismissed as “theoreticians.”
Rules for staff people are just as important as rules for staff work. Don’t ever put anyone into a staff job unless he or she has successfully held a number of operating jobs, preferably in more than one functional area. For if staff people lack operating experience, they will be arrogant about operations, which always look so simple to the “planner.” But today, in government even more than in business, we put young people fresh out of business or law school into fairly senior staff jobs as analysts or planners or staff counsel. Their arrogance and their rejection by the operating organization practically guarantee that they will be totally unproductive.
With rare exceptions, staff work should not be a person’s “career” but only be a part of his or her career. After five to seven years on a staff job, people ought to go back into operating work and not return to a staff assignment for five years or so. Otherwise, they will soon become behind-the-scene wire pullers, “gray eminences,” “kingmakers,” “brilliant mischief-makers.”
Staff work is not done to advance knowledge; its only justification is the improvement of the performance of operating people and of the entire organization.
First, staff should concentrate on tasks of major importance that will continue for many years. A task of major importance that will not last forever—for example, the reorganization of a company’s management—is better handled as a one-time assignment. Staff work should be limited to a few tasks of high priority. Proliferation of staff services deprives them of effectiveness. Worse, it destroys the effectiveness of the people who produce results, the operating people. Unless the number of staff tasks is closely controlled, staff will gobble up more and more of operating people’s scarcest resource: time.
Effective staff work requires specific goals and objectives, clear targets, and deadlines. “We expect to cut absenteeism in half within three years” or “Two years from now we expect to understand the segmentation of our markets sufficiently to reduce the number of product lines by at least one third.” Objectives like these make for productive staff work. Vague goals such as “getting a handle on employee behavior” or “a study of customer motivation” do not. Every three years or so, it is important to sit down with every staff unit and ask, “What have you contributed these last three years that makes a real difference to this company?”
To improve communications, work not on the utterer but the recipient.
It is the recipient who communicates. Unless there is someone who hears, there is no communication. There is only noise. One can perceive only what one is capable of perceiving. One can communicate only in the recipients’ language or in their terms. And the terms have to be experience-based. We perceive, as a rule, what we expect to perceive. We see largely what we expect to see, and we hear largely what we expect to hear. The unexpected is usually not received at all. Communication always makes demands. It always demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals to motivation. If it goes against her aspirations, her values, her motivations, it is likely not to be received at all or, at best, to be resisted.
Where communication is perception, information is logic. As such, information is purely formal and has no meaning. Information is always encoded. To be received, let alone to be used, the code must be known and understood by the recipient. This requires prior agreement, that is, some communication.
