The notion that there is a need for a new management paradigm is a recurring theme, well documented in Beyond the Hype.
Here's a map of the conjectured causes and symptoms driving the need for transformation. Most are restating the obvious. I've looked at this picture from the Stoos Network site for some time. I've come to the conclusion there is a fundamental flaw in the process.
I know it says DRAFT, but these RCA (Root Cause Analysis) appear to be disconnected from the reality of business management:
- Public firms need to focus on shareholder value, otherwise there will be no shareholders, and there will be no firm for the shareholders to invest in. This is a fundamental principle of market economics. To suggest this is the starting point for improvement is not only uninformed it is foolish for the leaders and stockholders.
- I'd like to see the evidence that the C-Suite is incented to maintain the status quo in the publicly traded firm. Senior managers must react to changing market forces or they will not be senior managers of public firms for long. These responses may not be the right responses, but maintaining the status quo needs actual examples in some statistically significant numbers to claim this is a root cause.
- Mechanistic thinking may be present in some firms. I've worked in some.
- Unsuitable leadership model - seen this as well and worked there as well.
- Leadership skill missing in today's managers - yep common. If these skills weren't missing our services would not be needed. And since they are in large quantities, it appears leadership is still missing.
By the way, this notion of anecdotal experiences as being the source root cause analysis is troubling to me as a process improvement performance. When a group is attempting to syndicate their suggestions to others, it is best to have a clearly defined paradigm, domain, and context in that domain identified before hand, so those submitting ideas have a place to park those ideas. Otherwise, it's just a list of anecdotes - fine for cocktail parties, but it's STOOS trying the Change the World?
This seems common in the agile community for some reason. Maybe because they didn't take the High School statistics class, I don't know. But when a group of formed to change the world, it might be useful to understand the notion of sampling, inference, causality, and correlation. Especially when RCA is being mentioned, to have a look at how 6sigma and RCA is used in practice.
In the end - the far right - the statement shareholders and workers and customers are ALL doing poorly - is one of those blather statements that presents no valid evidence for how many, in what industries, of what size, in what nations, for how long, and what are the consequences? Again a possible failure of the public school system ;>)
