The other support comes from Julian Birkinshaw’s study of management innovation. Birkinshaw is a colleague of Gary Hamel at LBS and you can see a similar perspective in his work.
In particular, in his book, ‘Reinventing Management’, Julian writes about the need to have a management model as well as a business model. We’ll come back to the elements of the management model at a later date, but for now I just want to focus on the need for a separate management model.
Alongside the business model which deals with questions like who does the firm make money (sources of revenue), the management asks about things like how it focuses people on the right things (defining objectives.) And all these questions actually relate quite closely to the organisation slue chain we’ve been looking at.
So is Julian’s management model the same as the ‘organisation model I’ve been writing about. Well, yes, it is. And although I like ‘Reinventing Management’ a lot, it does itself no favourites by trying to draw a distinction between management and leadership which is different to how everyone else understands these two terms and the differences between them.
The book is supposedly about management – about how companies implement their plans. It’s therefore intended to avoid ‘more alluring themes’ such as leadership, change and strategy. However, I don’t think this it does. This becomes particularly clear during the review of IBM’s Values Jam – if there’s anything more focused on leadership than this, I don’t know what it is!
The actual distinction he’s making isn’t between management and leadership, it’s between internal and external, or the organisation and the business. To me, Julian’s management model isn’t a model of management vs leadership, it’s a model of the organisation vs the business.
But I also don’t think a model is a useful place to start a management reinvention. The model is simply a set of aligned activities – you still need something to align these activities upon. As I’ve argued already, this thing should be the outcomes you’re trying to create, so we’re now back at the organisation value chain.
In particular, in his book, ‘Reinventing Management’, Julian writes about the need to have a management model as well as a business model. We’ll come back to the elements of the management model at a later date, but for now I just want to focus on the need for a separate management model.
Alongside the business model which deals with questions like who does the firm make money (sources of revenue), the management asks about things like how it focuses people on the right things (defining objectives.) And all these questions actually relate quite closely to the organisation slue chain we’ve been looking at.
So is Julian’s management model the same as the ‘organisation model I’ve been writing about. Well, yes, it is. And although I like ‘Reinventing Management’ a lot, it does itself no favourites by trying to draw a distinction between management and leadership which is different to how everyone else understands these two terms and the differences between them.
The book is supposedly about management – about how companies implement their plans. It’s therefore intended to avoid ‘more alluring themes’ such as leadership, change and strategy. However, I don’t think this it does. This becomes particularly clear during the review of IBM’s Values Jam – if there’s anything more focused on leadership than this, I don’t know what it is!
The actual distinction he’s making isn’t between management and leadership, it’s between internal and external, or the organisation and the business. To me, Julian’s management model isn’t a model of management vs leadership, it’s a model of the organisation vs the business.
But I also don’t think a model is a useful place to start a management reinvention. The model is simply a set of aligned activities – you still need something to align these activities upon. As I’ve argued already, this thing should be the outcomes you’re trying to create, so we’re now back at the organisation value chain.
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