Managing Without Management: A Post-Management Manifesto for Business Simplicity [Hardcover]

An excellent book, which although I have had since about 1996, only just got round to reading to the end. It really describes the reasons for many of the trials and tribulations we are now going through in 2011. I can understand this book won't be popular in some circles, especially middle management. Many of us have worked in corporations where the purpose of many of these managers is to do nothing but maintain their own power. Koch and Godden point out that corporations can't afford this expensive management culture any more.

The modern corporation will be the leaders who set direction and culture and the doers. Management will disappear. As an invention of the industrial revolution to control the uneducated, we don't need them - the doers are now highly educated and capable of directing themselves far better than managers who lack skills in everything but playing politics. The other factor that puts these managers out of business is IT. Communication is now instant - it does not have to be done and controlled by managers for their own good.

It makes one wonder why there are so many business and management degrees these days, frankly for people who don't want to do anything, but think they will be the managers of the future. Forget it - get skilled. Once skilled, then you can be leaders of the new generation. Management techniques just will not cut it. No wonder this book attracted one very bad review!

While I can see that in terms of employee numbers, corporations have shrunk, one thing that concerns me is the corporations that in the 'get rid of management' mantra, actually interpret this to reduce the numbers of the doers and thus engage in union bashing with the old us vs. them mentality. Yes the corporation must be agile to change quickly, but it must keep and train its 'doing' workforce, and these are the people that need to take care of the remaining management functions. If there is to be a corporate culture, there must be loyalty in both directions. The workers should be listened to. One can think of the recent example of Qantas, where the CEO, who is really a middle manager takes a huge pay rise, while denying real workers a small rise. This surely is the dying thrashing around of middle management that Koch and Godden talk about.

Another interesting 2011 phenomenon that the book hints at is the Occupy movement, since the book says that the rich will get richer and the poor poorer and this needs to be addressed. Koch and Godden are optimistic that after a period of unrest that new and more productive jobs will appear. I will be optimistic as well, as long as we get rid of the management vs the workers 'us vs them' mentality. Of course we will get rid of this if this kind of power-broking management disappears. True leaders will work with their workforce, not oppose them.

Since this is a slightly old book some of their comments on technology companies are somewhat wrong. Microsoft is a case in point. It really is an old corporation having inherited that mantle from IBM. Apple would be the shining example now. All through the book one can read Apple. Did Steve Jobs read this book and apply it, or was he just a natural? Apple has a quality culture and makes employees at all levels feel valued, especially programmers. Koch and Godden also fall into the IBM trap of saying IBM had excellent technology. They might have had some excellent and reliable hardware, but overall their systems like the 360 were way behind what was happening at Burroughs with Bob Barton's B5000. While Burroughs/Unisys became lazy with poor middle management, Barton went on to teach people such as Alan Kay and Ed Catmull who influenced Apple in its 'think different' approach. Now excellence in technology is paying off. Microsoft has been lazy, but Apple has taken up the design challenge and is now reaping the rewards of loyal customers and staff. Apple is an exemplar of the kind of corporation Koch and Godden are talking about.

That is one of the central tenets of the book, that the customer is the centre of a corporation's universe, not managers. Thus it is respect all around, not the contempt that is the basis of the continual battle between middle management and everyone else.

I found this book rhetorical and in some areas misleading. While I can sympathise with the authors' attempts in trying to make sense of the management problem that afflicts industry and government, their resort to claiming that all problems will be fixed through the application of six change forces is pure technique drivel.

To be fair the concepts in the book are now becoming old (1997 reprint) but this does not distance it from deserved criticism. The last thing that the world needs is a dialectic that is predicated upon the Cult of the Leader(Leader Power) and a reverence to the ability of Information Technology to provide a managerial communications fix. Their concentration upon investor power is correct but for the wrong reasons.

Investors are not good at judging customer value and their influence in redirecting customer-centric corporate direction through a compliant CEO has to be viewed with scepticism. Do not misunderstand me, I am not a managerial apologist.

In concurrence with the authors I also believe that bureaucratic managerialism is inefficient and needs reduction. However the methods by which I would achieve this goal is not as socially disruptive as those endorsed by the authors i.e through rampant dismissals. I can understand why the authors state: ' We do not have the abswers' (p.215) to the unemployment dilemma.

The authors focus upon the Customer and upon Simpliicity are some of this book's redeeming features, until the authors start espousing the merits of outsourcing and the tired neo-conservative polemic that privatisation is a better economic model than public ownership. Outsourcing is only advantageous when core-competencies are not lost. The book's tenet revolves around the non-managerialism so would it not make sense to outsource management. Nowhere in the book is this stated.

The latter privatisation/public ownership debate only has currency because we have been and still are existing in a flawed Neoclassical economic milieu that, by historical circumstances, has ruled Western Society since the time of Adam Smith. It is a philosophy that professes a primacy of the individual over community.

Perhaps it is time to review this economic underpinning and start questioning the Neoclassical Economic ceteris paribus assumptions (see page 211) inherent in Neoclassical static economic models, especially in these times when Sustainability issues (ISO900, ISO 14001, etc.) have become paramount.

This latter exercise I think should provide the authors with a better avenue along which to proceed. I am convinced that the Chapter 3 heading is prophetic. I do not believe that this book is sufficiently detailed to provide the world with a blueprint that promises a 'Revolution that has not Happened.

I don't know whether this book should be called Witch Doctors Part 2 (see Micklethwait's and Wooldridge's book) or vice versa theirs should be called Managing Without 2. Anyway, this book goes further than fingering management consultants as witches, and questions whether boards of directors in command and control organisations are to blame. Perhaps, they buy complex management consultancy to keep themselves occupied, intellectually or worse to make themselves an indispensable fixture as all else changes. How many top people rush into downsize everyone else than themselves? I think that the UK House of Parliament makes an excellent example of an organisation which will protest that it's willing to change anything apart from its top members' privileges. Why on earth does a country the size of the UK need to be governed by 650 + politicians in an era of interactive information? You don't need to be a modern day Guy Fawkes to join our witch doctors club which questions which management consultants and company boards are passionately, relentlessly, creatively worth their meal ticket? Join us to try to sort out the good, the bad and the ugly in the games that turn of the century company leaders - and their court jesters - play with their people and their consistent, boundaryless right to learn... ...............................................................................
Chris Macrae, editor of Brand Chartering Handbook & MELNET www.brad.ac.uk/branding/
E-mail me at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk

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