[...]... “the father of modern management turns his back on the profession he helped to establish, warning that management has run its course He now says that management practices are counterproductive, meaning they do the opposite of what you want Intended to make organizations more efficient and more profitable, this is an admission that they are actually disorganizing What should we make of this dramatic... left unsaid) that organizations consist of two separate sets of activities management and work—and then concentrate on management alone Work and workers hardly feature Managers (“above”) plan, budget, schedule, and coordinate activities; and workers (“below”) follow those plans and schedules Managers need data and tools to solve problems This data comes up, from below, in reports, databases, and the... As satire often depends on highlighting one character’s distress (e.g Dilbert’s) at another’s attitudes or actions (his pointy-haired boss), or on exposing awkward and sometimes disastrous relationships, there’s no mistaking that work life is social and, as such, is complicated.1 It is also impossible to overlook the fact that organizations are punctuated by breakdowns, both big and small, or that these... we call management is a morass of rules, regulations, and rigid structures that spring from a command-and-control mentality, coupled with an obsession for measuring and an insatiable appetite for data This is because, as a so-called “science,” management is meant to be empirical and objective, which means that when it comes to making decisions, “hard data” or “facts” are supposed to trump whatever... dissatisfied with management and doubtful about its future Gary Hamel is one; convinced that management has passed its sell-by date yet evidently not ready to toss it all away (he makes a handsome living as a management consultant, so this is probably not surprising) Writing in the Harvard Business Review, an establishment stronghold, he maintains that management, like the combustion engine, is a mature... mature technology that must now be reinvented for a new age.” What is needed is a management revolution no less momentous than the one that spawned modern industry.”7 This probably sounds like the kind of hyperbole we’ve come to expect from management gurus, but Hamel is dead right and, I’m sure, realizes that redoing management from scratch involves a far-reaching agenda that calls for profoundly... perspectives on work Management Teams’ and management s views Clouds make a project Connections make a project Conversations make a project Picturing a social space Parallel universes of management and organizing What we see and don’t see Two pictures of factory-work, ca 1930 Diagram of an organizational network The standard view of what happens in networks Some knowledge workers at work Comparing organizing... describe professionals in the nascent information technology (IT) industry What Drucker saw, and what knowledge workers know instinctively, is that management is all right for organizing factories Factories run with the regular rhythm of machines, but old-style 1 2 Beyond Management factory-work had been solitary, repetitive, mindless, with workers little more than automatons Knowledge-work is an entirely... whatever it is that decision-makers think, feel, believe, and value These trappings of science and weasel-words like “efficiency” (translation: “nothing matters except the bottom line”) are like a protective covering that makes it difficult to see that management is actually about people organizing to get things done with other people There are many who’ll argue that doing things the management way—... especially knowledge-work, in a way that management books don’t The end of the line tell you about and see how people actually do it You’ll also see why, underneath the pseudo-science and impressive language of “scorecards,” “value propositions,” “human capital,” and “data mining,” management is a cause of widespread dissatisfaction at work as well as a source of organizational breakdowns You’ll go further . technical work 93 8 .1 Work practices 10 1 9 .1 The waterfall model 11 5 11 .1 Letting go! 13 9 11 .2 A delicate balance 14 7 12 .1 Three domains of conversation: a framework for organizing 15 5 15 .1 A pyramid-maze. isn’t the real work 10 9 The work of reorganizing 11 0 9 Practices that break the mold with agility and care 11 3 Agile methods and knowledge work 11 3 Problems with the waterfall method 11 5 “Scrum”:. 15 3 Illustrating the framework 15 5 What to do with the framework 15 6 Missing conversations 15 7 Conversations for openness 15 9 Conversations for commitments 16 1 Conversations for accountability 16 2 Accountability