Four More Key Lessons From The 2008 ‘Moonshots For Management

With the resurgence of the challenge of rethinking management, it would be instructive to learn from the 2008 Moonshots For Management study, a group of 25 management academics and senior executives led by Gary Hamel who set out to "develop a management plan for the next 100 years." My last article outlines five major leadership changes over the next fifteen years that Moonshots didn't notice. Here are four other key points that Moonshots apparently didn't miss, including Peter Drucker's 1954 Basic Education.

1. Lunar shots overlooked how industrial age control works like an autoimmune system.

Moonshots notes, "The current management model is a coherent whole that is not easy to take apart." But Moonshots treated the operational period as if it consisted of 25 separate "missions".

The Moonshots group recognized that existing management processes have intrinsic resistance to change: “Management processes often contain hidden biases that favor continuity over change…While continuity is important, these subtle ingrained preferences for the status quo need to be brought to light,” researched He. and eradicate if necessary. .

What the Moonshots team failed to find is that the innate resistance to change in each individual process and the processes that drive artificial aging worked together as a complex adaptive system, much like the autoimmune system in the human body. As a result, when change occurred in one area, such as innovation, other industrial age management processes (budgeting, strategy, human resources, risk management, etc.) combined to prevent this change.

Therefore, the management of the industrial age is not amenable to partial changes. What is needed is a way to change a flexible and complex adaptive system.

2. Moonshots eliminate the need for new integrated and flexible adaptive systems

Not realizing that industrial age governance is a complex and stable adaptive system, Moonshots did not show that they needed a new complex adaptive system to replace it, including different mindsets, values and assumptions to change it. . In other words, Moonshot didn't show they knew what they were looking for.

Instead, Moonshots proposed a group of 25 unrelated "missions", each of which could have potential as a component of a complex new adaptive system. There were no significant positive changes. Since the Moonshots group failed to present a coherent vision for a new complex adaptive system, their individual proposals for change came to nothing.

3. The Moonshots team skipped the Flex Composite tuning system that was already on the way.

Moonshots rejected on principle the idea that the solution to the management problem of the industrial age could lie in modern management practices. The Moonshots group writes: “Too often, scientists have been content with describing best practices rather than further research. Professionals are more likely to ask, "Has anyone else done this?" and stimulate the organizational skills of a person.

Looking for "radical new ways of mobilizing and organizing human potential" outside of current practice, they left open the possibility of experimenting and applying radical new ways of managing. Thus, Moonshots overlooked the extraordinary experiments that companies like Apple, Amazon and Google are doing with great success, with their strong customer focus and decentralized innovation model. These companies were not yet the most valuable in the world. It will take another five years. But these companies grew very quickly. What Moonshots didn't realize was that if these companies continued to grow, they would soon become the most valuable companies on the planet.

4. Moonshots missed the basic ideas of modern management

Moonshots didn't just embellish ideas that companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have been successfully implementing for more than a decade. Nor do they realize that these companies' approach did not come from some obscure management theorist. The ideas were articulated in the writings of the father of modern management, Peter Drucker, in his 1954 book The Practice of Management . In this book, Drucker outlined similar principles that Apple, Amazon, and Google are now using with great success.

“There is only one correct definition of a business goal: creating customers.” (page 37)

Marketing is the whole business viewed from the consumer's point of view. Therefore, care and responsibility for marketing should permeate all areas of the company. (page 38)

· "In a business organization, innovation extends ... to all parts of the company, to all functions, to all activities." (page 40)

· “Business management should always be businesslike. It cannot be bureaucratic, administrative or even political. (page 47)

“The soul of an organization is created from above.” (page 158)

“Management cannot create leaders. He can only create conditions in which potential leadership qualities are realized (p. 159)

“Head office employees are a serious nuisance to operations managers.” (p. 242)

Moonshots wrote in its report of those "whose jaws dropped like the flames of greed" and pointed out the need for "new minds, free from old beliefs ... that can help us break free from the shackles of lifestyle." loaded.” This, they say, will require the search for new principles in fields as diverse as anthropology, biology, design, political science, urban planning and theology.

But the real solution to management problems is much closer to home. The lie turns out to be not so much in distancing from "old beliefs" or "hunting for new territories", but in the revival of the fundamental ideas of management theory put forward by Peter Drucker in 1954.

Moonshots was not interested in what Peter Drucker, the Einstein of modern management, wrote in black and white.

Rather, Moonshots wrote about those "who clenched their jaws before the flames of greed" and needed "new thoughts, free from old beliefs."

But the challenge for Moonshot's group was not so much to abandon the "old beliefs" as to return to the basic principles of management proposed by his father, Peter Drucker, in 1954 and somehow lost since then. and implemented vigorously in 2008 by what will soon become the most valuable companies on the planet.

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