Last year, answering my question “Am I an expert or a (people) manager”, my coach told me: “Tomorrow’s managers don’t command and control, they connect and enable. And you’re surprisingly early and young understanding this”. Well, i trusted her, waiting for this glorious day to come… ;o)
3 very interesting articles put this back up. And reflections around the first chapter of DiCoDE – the book also connects these ideas… Charlene Li, through her book, focusses on Open Leadership (which is a good, if not the best way to transform companies). She then talks about Leadership 2.0 as a useful tool over Enterprise 2.0. In this interview, she highlights how difficult it will be for traditional managers to embrace the new way of managing: inspiring, enabling, connecting, trusting and getting back to the roots: relationships. With customers, but also partners and employees.
Aaron Levie (CEO of Box.net) highlights, in this Techcrunch column, how traditional (I use the term industrial in DiCoDE – the book) companies are swirling in a complexity spiral. And how difficult it is to offer simple (I use convenient) solutions to customers, but also employees (and why not partners?). We’re stuck in a complexity world, where we need all features to please clients, where we need to build on existing solutions to please managers, where it’s easy to just not choose… And crafting simplicity is so difficult… in yesterday’s organization model! That’s why we need to create new models, based on today’s world, based on today’s customers, based on today’s employees…
Last article is also a column from an entrepreneur: David Barrett, CEO and founder of Expensify. It’s more about products, enterprises’ contribution to the market. In the same logic, he highlights how easy it is to make a product that sucks and how the quality is left behind focussing on quantity. But this industrial world is crumbling now. And, as I said, technology enables easy development of the 80% quality product. Let’s use our brain (‘s 2 hemispheres) to go beyond this point.
“Until now, nobody got fired for having done what everybody else does”. This was the industrial era mindset. Trying to compete on another market or cutting more costs to have a cheaper price. Not anymore… And that’s because the consumer is not only re-empowered, but also looking for convenience. A lot of shared ideas with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals in their book ReWork (added to my references straight away;o)
This column made me think of how old (mindset) companies try and fail to compete with new (mindset) ones. How Apple, Google, Facebook and most start-up are rising, and how Microsoft seems to have re-invented themselves to be up for the challenge
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