The Harvard Business Review/McKinsey
M-Prize for Management Innovation

The MIX has joined forces with Harvard Business Review and McKinsey & Company to launch our most comprehensive contest ever, dedicated to reinventing management for the 21st century: The Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation.

Do you want to play a role in improving the technology of human accomplishment? Do you want to make a difference when it comes to the important challenge of making organizations of all kinds genuinely fit for the future—and fit for human beings? Would you like to get recognized for it? The HBR/McKinsey M-Prize will unfold over the course of a year and include three separate phases designed to surface the best practices and thinking around leveraging technology, reinventing strategy, and rethinking organizations.

The Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge:
Creating Inspired, Open, and Free Organizations

For too long, the ruling ideology of too many organizations has been bureaucratic control. So much of organizational life goes against the grain of human nature—advancing compliance and conformance over individual expression and discretion, top-down command over passion-driven performance, tight control over autonomy and flexibility.

It’s time to turn organizations upside-down and inside-out.

The Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge seeks to advance progress on making organizations genuinely fit for human beings—more inspiring, open, and free. Specifically, we’re looking for Stories and Hacks that offer up the most progressive practices and disruptive ideas around:

• Making organizations more inspiring and engaging: What does it mean to build an organization in which everyone is aligned by a deeply-felt sense of purpose—and in which management assumptions and practices inspire and unleash imagination, initiative, and energy from every quarter?
• Developing an outside-in orientation: What does it take to eliminate the gaps between “sense” and “respond,” to inject the voice of the customer and other relevant stakeholders into every decision, and to make the insights and observations of every individual—from edge to edge—matter?
• Managing without managers: How do we reduce the performance drag of top-heavy management structures, replace “manager-management” with a more agile self- or peer-management, and replace rigid hierarchy with a vibrant social system?

The Management 2.0 Challenge

We recently announced the winners of the first leg of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize, the Management 2.0 Challenge. We received more than 140 impressive entries that inspire, instruct, and shine a light on how the principles and tools of the Web can be unleashed to overcome the design limits of Management 1.0--and help to create Management 2.0.

You can learn more about the challenge and read all of the entries here.

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Other Featured Challenges

Human Capital M-Prize on Leadership

Traditional hierarchies put decision-making authority in the hands of a few individuals at the top. By contrast, in web-based and volunteer organizations, people influence decisions in proportion to the value they bring to the community. The Human Capital M-Prize for Leadership seeks ideas and examples of new types of leadership development models that help create organizations where every leader is someone others are genuinely eager to follow.

Deadline: December 9, 2011