The real challenge

The critical problem managers face has always been to extend the range and scope of their organisation’s performance and competence. This would either allow them to expand the kinds of work it can usefully do or do what they do right now more efficiently or effectively. In the current management environment, this problem has been intensified by the demand to improve management systems dynamically, to make them self-optimising and self-improving, and even to make them generate massive and qualitative improvements capable of raising organisations to the world class level.

The radical nature of this expectation stands in stark contrast to the real nature of management systems many contemporary managers are obliged to use. Some of the more common problems managers routinely face are:

• Being asked to achieve vague, unstable or conflicting business goals, often decided without adequate analysis or assessment.
• Translating disparate, fragmented and often obsolete management processes into efficient and effective assignments.
• Making do with less than optimal technical resources, including untrained personnel, unsupported tools and incompatible techniques.
• Being blinded by a combination of, on the one hand, inadequate management information-gathering and decision-making processes and, on the other, an unmanageable mass of irrelevant data and obstructive administrative controls.
• Complying with policies, standards and procedures that add little or no value to their assignments and are of debatable value to their organisations.

The causes of these problems are many and varied, and not all have to do with management systems as such. There is little a manager can do about fast-changing business environments and the regular irruption of massive new technical factors (the millennium, the Euro, electronic commerce, smart cards, identity management, electronic document, record and email management, and so on), and some of the less attractive features of the working environment such as a pervasive short-termism, disruptive cultural and political factors and the routine replacement of action and substance by glossy reports and corporate rhetoric.

Nevertheless, all organisations harbour a huge and largely untapped potential for improving their management systems, and not only managers but the organisations they work for would benefit immensely if only more attention was directed to these opportunities. For example, it is now well established that most organisations suffer from anything between 10% and 30% on waste and rework. Imagine what that means:

• Sometime between Thursday and Friday lunchtime every week, everyone stops doing anything useful and starts pouring money down the drain instead.
• If an averagely profitable company with 25% waste and rework could reduce that figure to 15%, the money they saved would double their profit – without doing anything else!
• Every year, a company with a billion dollar turnover spends between $100,0000,000 and $300,0000,000 on doing nothing.
• With $100,0000,000 extra to spend each year, your company could [enter preferred management fantasy here].

Again, this is not a solely managerial issue and managers cannot solve it on their own, but few managers would have any trouble identifying examples of poor practice and poor systems. For example, most managers could probably identify places where the following kinds of problems simply waste their time:

• Altogether too much time is spent fire-fighting problems that should never have arisen in the first place, or for which a routine solution should already be available.
• Many management systems are incapable of providing managers with the information and decisions they need to do their work properly. This often includes an effective gap between individual assignments and the organisation’s overall goals. So an inordinate amount of effort is wasted scrambling for hard data and taking ill-informed risks.
• Management systems commonly assume that all assignments are essentially the same, prescribing boiler-plate ‘solutions’ that force all work through a uniform mass production routine. Such systems actively disable managers from handling unique problems or business-critical opportunities effectively. Elementary control structures designed to adapt generic systems to individual assignments such as ‘quality plans’ are a start, but managers still find themselves bending the rules in order to get the results they need.
• Few systems provide the methods, tools and techniques needed to effectively coordinate multiple assignments into a viable programme of interconnected assignments – and increasingly important demand on contemporary management.
• Although most organisations have a nominal strategy, even the most sophisticated, for whom multi-year, multi-functional, multi-national programmes are the norm, are often incapable of industry leadership, be it at the level of values, products, processes, technology or systems. As a result their strategies are prone to vagueness, instability and even flat self-contradiction

I should emphasise that I do not take a utopian view of management: there really are times when sacrificing a manager’s time and abilities is the least evil. But all too often even perfectly routine activities are brought to a halt by an arbitrary decision, false information, the lack of the right tool, an untrained staff member or bureaucratic ossification.