Replying to LO27866 --
A good day to all Learners
I am new here, having discovered the forum with a Google search on
"strategic management" that delivered some 1997 posts from a thread
started by Winfried Dressler.
Looking at the more recent posts, the topic of a serious alternative
to the LO attracted my attention and perhaps this post could be seen
as an extension of that discussion.
Although interested in and doing some conceptual work in the field of
management for some 20 years, I can by no means be considered a
"responsible person" in this field as I have never really published or
did anything of public note. However, a discovery I stumbled across
early on - a formal and generalised definition of the role of the
manager - has provided me with a somewhat off-beat perspective that
has bearing on the question of whether one can seriously disagree with
the principles of LO as encapsulated in all Five Disciplines which, as
At de Lange pointed out (LO27864), form a whole philosophy - one
cannot isolate only the Fifth Discipline as the key to 'it all'.
My problem with what I have read here so far - and which does not mean
I disagree with LO or its principles - is a lack, a deficiency, rather
than something that appears wrong or incorrect. That lack is
"purpose".
LO has much to say - and so does some of the alternative management
systems - about how the people in an organisation should go about
'doing' things, including learning; what the attributes of their
actions are or should be and the methods to be used. It says nothing
about "where the organisation is going". About "purpose".
Of course, "purpose" is the subject of strategic planning or
management and the fact that the Google search only picked out a
single 1997 thread from this very voluminous LO archive says that
strategic management - 'where the organisation wants to be' and thus
what the overriding role of management ought to be - is not a regular
topic at all.
If I may use a rather simple and crude analogy - this is like defense
analysts arguing over what kinds of weapon systems to build while they
have no idea who the enemy might be, of what his particular
circumstances and capabilities are. It is a focus on the 'how' or
'what', not on the 'why', on 'purpose'.
My serendipitous discovery 20 years ago was something that defines
"purpose" - for any manager in any kind of organisation. Without
really searching out what is being written on management, it has come
to my attention that various authors have touched on this subject in a
not unrelated manner, but to the best of my knowledge no-one has so
far achieved the comprehensive breakthrough that has enabled me to
develop a very pragmatic system of management based on that discovery.
And, by the way, it is not an alternative to LO, but an adjunct, or,
more properly, it lays a conceptual foundation for the organisation
that would make something like LO a preferred way of working.
It is not my intention to play a guessing game, and so I give the
basics of what I am working on in highly abbreviated form. If there is
interest, more can follow.
The key to the breakthrough was the question of "purpose", namely
"Why does any organisation, or a unique part of one, exist? The only
possible answer is that the environment within which any particular
"organisational system" functions finds it useful. When the
environment no longer has a reason to interact with a system, it
atrophies and disappear.
And to make sure that the WHOLE environment is considered for this
answer, I distinguish three main interfaces to the environment: Input
(mainly materials, services, data), Resource ( mainly labour and
funds) and Output (mainly materials, goods, services and/or data).
If valid, it follows that the only proper evaluation of system
performance is by the people of the environment. In principle,
therefore, for any organisational system, one can ask every single
person who interacts with that system to rate his/her satisfaction
with the system performance on a scale of 1 to 10. The average of all
the ratings is called a measure of the "worth" of the system for its
total environment ("worth" not 'value', to get away from purely
financial implications).
Defining the "head" of the system - who in the case of say a
departmental secretary is the secretary him/herself, as the 'head' of
a one-person system - as the "manager" of that system or function, one
can now say that the overriding objective of the manager is to
increase the worth of the system.
This is too early to belabour the practical and philosophical
implications of this definition, except for the following: improving
the worth of the system calls for the manager to be aware of all
factors that the people of the environment - across all three
interfaces! - take into regard when evaluating the performance of the
system, each from his or her own perspective. Some thought soon shows
that all the factors, across all three interfaces, can be grouped in
just three classes: Tangible factors (those that relate to the primary
reason for the interaction initiated from the environment); Intangible
factors (human related factors that remain memory bound after the
interaction and directly or indirectly influence the rating) and
thirdly, cost factors (including opportunity and non-financial costs).
Once the specific factors for a given situation have been identified,
the manager can decide which factors can be best improved, and the
effect of negative factors reduced, to result in a higher rating for
the system. This applies to the organisation as a whole or to any
unique part of one.
This is an open ended objective that in a dynamic environment, with a
dynamic system and all manner of constraints can never be fully
satisfied. It is also a win-win objective that applies universally and
thus can be considered to be a normative definition of management.
Let me leave it at this - for the time being - to see what comments
follow.
Thank you for providing IMHO a suitable forum to air this for the
first time.
Kind regards all
Daan Joubert
Apologies for a long post
--Daan Joubert Roodepoort South Africa daanj@kingsley.co.za
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