(2022-12-07) Denning Crafting A Manifesto For Management In The Digital Age

Steve Denning: Crafting A Manifesto For Management In The Digital Age. What used to work, doesn’t any more. The complexity and the pace of change of the digital age are so different from the industrial-era that generally accepted management practices are now obsolete. A new set of management principles and processes are guiding the actions of the most successful firms in the world today. They are summarized in a Manifesto for Management in the Digital Age (Figure 1) and represent a guide to a prosperous future.

I write many articles, but every now and then, one strikes a chord in many readers. Suddenly, many people want to read it, support it, comment on it, or point out its obvious shortcomings and flaws. Such is the case with my article last Sunday, “Why Agile Needs To Take Over Management Itself: Let’s Concede The Battle Over The Label “Agile” And Win The War Of Reinventing Management” ((2022-12-04) Denning Why Agile Needs To Take Over Management Itself)

Reading the comments reveals the many different reasons readers responded so strongly. Here are some of the main ones.

Truth-telling: My 2018 book, The Age of Agile, had promised an age of agile enterprises, but no such age has materialized.

The article recognized that Agile at its best was brilliant in software development and the world has learned much by analogy for management in general. At its best, it involved both mindsets and the heart. At the same time, Agile at its worst created the commercialized practices of the Agile industry, a great deal of “Agile in name only”, Agile “sweatshops”, Agile “feature factories”, simplistic Agile frameworks and processes, Agile faction fights, and arrangements that aimed at producing “twice the work in half the time.” These processes and practices were often the antithesis of everything that the Agile Manifesto stood for. As John Alger wrote, “Something somewhere has gone terribly wrong.” (dark agile)

the more serious problems came from outside software. Even when Agile teams themselves performed brilliantly, general management processes were often operating on a different dynamic with different goals. It was almost inevitable that general management would systematically undermine even good Agile implementations.

If management itself had been steadily evolving for the better over decades, then one could have hoped, as I once did, that general management would in due course recognize, learn from, and adopt what was valuable in Agile principles and practices. This hope was encouraged by the fact that software and digital technology are becoming steadily more central to the functioning of the entire economy. Yet, the opposite has mostly been the case. Reviews at the recent Drucker Forum here and here and here showed how little management has advanced as a discipline. Management practices that have long been known to be harmful are still rampant.

Some comments on Sunday’s article drew attention to the importance of clear language in describing the way forward. As Jonas Van Poucke commented, approving the phrasing, “Instead of this…. do that.” His conclusion: “Wow! This reads like a new agile manifesto!”

Principles Of A Manifesto For Management In The Digital Age
In doing this, we would need to recognize that some aspects of management may not need to change. Commodities may be one such area. And some firms like Apple and Amazon, which are clearly very adept at Agile-like practices in some parts of their work, run their factors and their warehouses with mainly industrial-era management, along with a high degree of automation and digitization.

With this caveat, the principles of a manifesto for general management in the digital age might look like these:

• Instead of giving primacy to the maximizing shareholder value, the goal of the firm is to create value for customers (customer value), along with a business model that generates profits as a result.
• Instead of bureaucracy where individuals report to bosses, the firm mostly deploys self-organizing team-based arrangements
• Instead of starting from what the firm can produce that might be sold to customers, firms work backwards from what customers need and then figure out how that might be delivered in a sustainable way.
• Instead of limiting themselves to what the firm itself can provide, the firm often mobilizes other firms to help meet user needs.
• Instead of the steep hierarchies of authority of industrial era-firms, digital firms tend to be organized in horizontal networks of competence.

Processes Of A Manifesto For Management
To support these principles, the firm may need to embrace processes that are the opposite of industrial-era management.

• Instead of leadership being limited to the top of the organization, leadership now occurs at every level.
• Instead of strategy limited to protecting the existing business, strategy is dynamic, interactive, and value-creating;
• Instead of innovation limited to marginal improvements to existing products, Innovation enhances existing businesses and creates new businesses;
• Instead of sales and marketing that are making the numbers, they are now about making a difference for customers and users;
• Instead of HR that operates as an agent of control, HR is about attracting and enabling talent;
• Instead of a focus outputs and efficiencies, operations is about exceeding expected outcomes at lower cost.
• Instead of budgeting being a battle for resources among the silos, budgeting is driven by strategy.