Better Management Could Spur a New Era of Economic Growth
Among economists, business leaders, and others, the debate continues over what George Mason University’s Tyler Cowen calls “The Great Stagnation” of the U.S. economy — and what interventions might return it to growth. Cowen points to the fact that wage levels in America have plateaued. He argues more broadly that all the “low-hanging fruit” produced by some non-repeatable breakthroughs (including fundamental technological triumphs) has been plucked. Going forward, we’ll have to work harder for any gains in productivity and prosperity, and they will come slower.
An impassioned counterargument comes from Erik Brynolfsson and Andy McAfee of MIT, who reject the premise that technology’s big leaps are all behind us. The pace of innovation is still fast, they say, and we can still expect plenty of technological breakthroughs capable of producing extremely high returns.
It’s a lively debate, but here’s the perspective that isn’t being voiced: There’s more to progress than technological innovation. Breakthroughs can also result from innovations in management.
Past work by another economist, Paul Romer, helps make the point. He explains that the history of progress is a history of two types of innovation: Inventions of new technologies, and introductions of new laws and social norms. We can make new tools, and we can make new rules. The two don’t always march in lockstep. In a period of time where one type of innovation flags, the other type can sometimes forge ahead.
Managers, of course, are among the great rule inventors and implementers of the world. So we think some rallying is in order. Our sense is that the structures, processes, and compensation schemes of most organizations today are quashing more motivation and constraining more capability than they are promoting. (Note, for example the findings by recent surveys that very few employees are engaged in their work, and even fewer passionate about it.) What if managers changed their approaches and got that set of rules right? Could they unlock all the energy being held in check? Could we collectively innovate in the practice of management so much that we ushered in a new era of growth – something we might call the Great Transformation?
We are not the first to point out to economists that management makes a difference. Thirty years ago, in a period of hand-wringing over America’s economic competitiveness, Bob Hayes and Bill Abernathy published a clarion call of an article in HBR: “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline.”Looking around, they saw pundits blaming economic macro forces for America’s decline relative to Japan. Hayes and Abernathy laid the blame instead at management’s doorstep – citing in particular the short-termism that had infected the managerial community and caused them to underinvest in long-term innovation projects.
More recently, Clayton Christensen has outlined how managers’ acquired habits in allocating capital are putting capitalism itself at risk. Noting the difference between empowering and merely productivity-enhancing innovations, he shows how a pressure for short-term payoffs will always drive investment toward the latter, which tend to increase the efficiency of current operations. Unless at least some of the capital freed up by doing that is used to generate the truly “empowering” innovations – the ones that form the foundations of new businesses or even whole new industries – firms will not experience organic growth and society will not gain new jobs. (Christensen’s work is strong reminder that the most fundamental social responsibility of corporations and their managers is innovation, because it fuels not only their own future competitiveness, but the prosperity of the world.)
Both Christensen’s and Hayes and Abernathy’s indictments of management have a silver lining: even as they decry its current tendencies, they validate how much management matters to the course of history. If managers have the power to drive an economy into a ditch, they also have the power to drive it forward.
What new rules should managers be promoting? Clearly, investing in empowering innovations could be made more the norm, supported by revised approaches to everything from entry-level hiring to CEO compensation. We would also argue for a different managerial mindset toward productivity and the best use of technology – specifically to adopt what Peter Drucker called a human centered view of them. Cowen is right when he describes today’s technologies as displacers of human work, but that is not the only possibility. Managers could instead ask: How can we use these tools to add power to the arm (and the brain) of the worker? How could they enable people to take on challenges they couldn’t before? The greatest problems of the world – such as ensuring abundant fresh water supplies, energy, health care, and schooling – will not be solved by placing human work in opposition to machines. They will require everyone’s best thinking combined with the staggering capabilities of digital technology.
Drucker’s early insistence that the corporation is a social institution, which can harness the capacity and potential of its people only when it respects them, becomes increasingly valid every year as more of the work of the global economy becomes knowledge work. It is undoubtedly why his ideas have held up so well. We heard an echo of them again in recent conversation with Marc Merrill, president and cofounder of Riot Games. The job of managers in his organization, he says, is to eliminate obstacles and provide tools to their teams – the people on whose knowledge and collaborative energy the company depends.
That the leader of such a technology-driven company would be so thoughtful about the human system he needs to activate makes us all the more hopeful for a Great Transformation in management, and the resumption of strong economic growth. Technology has wreaked its transformations for centuries, as Cowen recounts. Management, by contrast, is still a very new discipline, still capable of making enormous leaps forward. In the practice of management, most of the low-hanging fruit remains to be plucked.
Myriad actors will shape the future, and among them, the people who lead enterprises can be pivotal. As Drucker wrote in The Ecological Vision: “Management and managers are the central resource, the generic, distinctive, the constitutive organ of society … and the very survival of society is dependent on the performance, the competence, the earnestness and the values of their managers.” That’s a heavy responsibility, but at the same time a cause for optimism. Our economy has hit a plateau, but we are not at the mercy of technology to produce a breakthrough. We can manage.
This post launches a series of perspectives by leading thinkers participating in the Sixth Annual Global Drucker Forum, November 13-14 in Vienna. For more information, see the conference homepage.
RICHARD STRAUB
Richard Straub founded the nonprofit Peter Drucker Society Europe after a 32-year career at IBM. He is on the executive committee of the European Foundation for Management Development, is Secretary General of the European Learning Industry Group, and serves the IBM Global Education practice in a strategic advisory role.
JULIA KIRBY
Julia Kirby is an editor at large for HBR, and coauthor (with Christopher Meyer) of Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere. Follow her on Twitter @JuliaKirby
2014年10月13日 06:19 AM
經理人短視拖累管理復興
各國政府沒能讓全球經濟增長恢復之前的水平，那麽管理方式復興能否辦成這件事？理查德•斯特勞布(Richard Straub)和茱莉亞•柯比(Julia Kirby)在《哈佛商業評論》(Harvard Business Review)博客上指出，全世界僅13%的雇員投入工作，而兩倍於此的雇員在混日子或仇視工作。兩人呼籲來一場“大轉變”，稱這可能讓世界走上可持續增長的新道路。
我們能否通過變革管理方式實現繁榮？有些人會搖頭，說這是不可能的——經濟之所以走到眼下的困難境地，追根溯源就是因為管理方式的錯誤。與其責怪心懷不滿的員工，不如責怪那些緊抱陳舊管理思想的死腦筋經理人。暫且不談導致了這場危機（其爛攤子至今仍在折磨我們）的糟糕管理決策。有“全球最具影響力管理學思想家”之稱的克萊頓•克裡斯坦森(Clayton Christensen)說，企業之所以青睞於那些能夠削減成本（通常意味著削減工作崗位）的創新，應歸咎於經理人的短視。
另一位學者威廉•萊宗尼克(William Lazonick)則指出，近年來，美國許多大公司在派息和股票回購上的支出超過它們的總利潤，使得它們能夠用在投資和員工上的資金少之又少。倫敦金融城經濟學家安德魯•史密瑟斯(Andrew Smithers)在《走向復蘇之路》(The Road to Recovery)一書中提出，這場衰退不是周期性的，而是結構性的，其誘因是獎金和激勵機制導致的投資資源配置不當。在史密瑟斯看來，廢除誤導經理人投資決策的獎金文化，是當今經濟和社會政策的最重要任務。
如果是這樣，我們需要的管理方式創新將不會來自熱門的新通訊和合作技術（比如大數據、物聯網或社交媒體）。事實上，恰恰相反。在當今的金融化世界里，這些技術更有可能被用於加快削減工作崗位、贏者通吃的趨勢，就像之前的外包和在海外設廠等手段那樣。
如斯特勞布所寫的：“員工的創造力和創新熱情仍然沒有得到釋放……盲目的流程和僵硬的層級制度仍然束縛著他們。事實上，數字技術使得某種泰勒主義在非製造業企業運營中出現。”
正如提及弗雷德里克•溫斯洛•泰勒(Frederick Winslow Taylor)的“科學管理”項目所顯示的，經理人仍然在構建適合20世紀早期的那種以層級制度、標準化和服從為基礎的大規模生產組織，而不是那種靈活、以人為本、讓技術成為員工和客戶的夥伴而非威脅的組織。
多年來，前沿管理學討論、以及一批年輕思想家和實踐家，一直在呼籲類似的管理學創新，但迄今沒有多少改變，至少在老牌大公司里（只用看看未見重整的金融行業就知道了）。如果說有任何改變的話，那就是經理人們稱，他們面臨的短期壓力更大了。
那麽，如果這是個老問題，為何到現在都沒有解決？要打破這種管理方面的僵局，有什麽是必須改變的？答案是，死腦筋經理人。正如史密瑟斯所展示的，將創新萎靡、成本削減、股票回購、裁員和降低與新泰勒主義聯系在一起的，正是管理激勵。使得這一切固化為自我強化的緊密範式的是股東價值：企業的唯一存在目的是實現股東回報的最大化。
這一觀念深深地影響了正式的公司治理規範，我們很難相信，它出現的時間其實並不長（上世紀70、80年代才流行起來），並且是基於一個錯誤的想法。從法律上講，正如大名鼎鼎的法學家林恩•斯托特(Lynn Stout)等人所指出的，股東擁有的是股票，而不是公司，公司是一個單獨的法人，董事只對公司負有受信責任。股東不是企業主，經理人也不是他們的代理人。
盡管這一觀念十分陳腐，但它對企業心態的影響並未因此減弱，特別是在美國。如已故的倫敦商學院(London Business School)學者蘇曼德拉•戈沙爾(Sumantra Ghoshal)所說，問題並不在於我們不知道什麽是好的管理實踐，而在於壞的管理學理論讓我們變得麻木。
因此，是的，我們能夠、也亟須創造一個由管理復興拉動增長的時代。但只有首先了結那些股東至上的死腦筋經理人，管理方式才會真正復興。
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