Remember that classic New Yorker cartoon with Rover sitting in front of a computer? The caption read, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” Well, on the web, no one knows you’re a senior vice president either. That’s why every leader is going to have to learn how to get things done in a world where authority is the reciprocal of followership.
When we launched the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation last year, we aimed to enlist the most progressive practitioners and thinkers in the collective effort of reinventing what we call “the technology of human accomplishment.” We believed that people from all over the world in every realm of endeavor were launching initiatives and experimenting with radical practices to advance the cause of making all organizations more resilient, inventive, inspiring, and accountable.
Everybody hates it, but so much of life is ruled by it: bureaucracy. It's time to bust up the ideology of control that has infiltrated every aspect of organizational life.
Some fifteen years ago, in the early days of starting up Fast Company magazine, co-founder Alan Webber, shared one of his rules of thumb with me: "a good question beats a good answer." That pithy wisdom sunk in and took hold immediately. In the course of hundreds of reporting journeys and thousands...
We announced the winners of the Management 2.0 Challenge (the first of three legs of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation ) here last week. Those seven entries offer compelling evidence that the undergirding principles, social structures, and social technologies of the Web not only...
We know that if we want to close the gap between the status quo and our big dream of creating companies that are fundamentally fit for the future (and fit for human beings), we need to enlist the ideas and energies of the most progressive thinkers and radical doers from every realm of endeavor.
For all of the fervor around innovation, far too many organizations are hostile places for new ideas (not to mention the people that harbor them). All too often, new ideas are cooked up in a hothouse environment—the executive inner sanctum, an invitation-only innovation offsite, a limited-access “war room”—and not shared widely until they’ve been sanctioned from on high. When they are offered up by some hardy soul in the trenches, they generally have just one place to go: up the chain of command. In other words, they get the hot lights of judgment before they get a chance to breathe.
When Larry Huston faced the challenge of revving Procter & Gamble's innovation engine to contribute to $5 billion in annual topline growth, he opened up the ranks of the company's vaunted R&D operation to some 1.8 million scientists and researchers around the globe .
We have a big dream here at the MIX: to create organizations that are fundamentally fit for the future—and genuinely fit for human beings. As much as "modern management" has delivered to the world, we believe it is time to radically rethink how we mobilize people and resources to productive ends. And we believe that's not an undertaking for any one individual or organization--it's everybody's problem.
One of our goals here at the MIX is to discover and celebrate the ideas and initiative of in-the-trenches management innovators—wherever they come from. While it's always energizing to watch those ideas and stories pop up on the site, it's especially rewarding to encounter these dedicated change...
