Tony Manning - Whats Wrong With Management and How to Get It Right: The must-do strategy practices that make the difference between winning and losing in business

Published by Penguin Books

an imprint of Penguin Random House South Africa (Pty) Ltd

Reg. No. 1953/000441/07

The Estuaries No. 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century Avenue, Century City, 7441

PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

www.penguinbooks.co.za

First published 2015

Publication Penguin Random House 2015

Text and figures Tony Manning 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.

PUBLISHER: Marlene Fryer

MANAGING EDITOR: Robert Plummer

EDITOR: Alison Lowry

PROOFREADER: Genevieve Adams

COVER DESIGNER: Sean Robertson

TEXT DESIGNER: Ryan Africa

TYPESETTER: Monique van den Berg

INDEXER: Sanet le Roux

ISBN 978 1 77022 899 3 (print)

ISBN 978 1 77022 900 6 (ePub)

ISBN 978 1 77022 901 3 (PDF)

For Calum.
Your curiosity about how the world works, and your ability to find the words for concepts, are a wonder and a delight. And youre only four. So watch out, world!

Great news! Theres less to making a business competitive than you might think. We know what works what brings results. And since most firms dont do it, do only some of it, or do it badly, the way is open for you to gain the advantage you want more easily than you might think.

Of course, understanding the world around you is more important than ever and more difficult. Constant change is normal. Growing complexity entangles every decision, and a bewildering array of factors and actors tilt outcomes one way or another. Circumstances, timing, and luck matter enormously. But when it comes to what managers can and must do to gain and sustain an edge, everything hinges on just eight critical strategy practices which I will come to in .

These practices give you the best possible chance of coping with whatever the world throws at you, of exploiting emerging opportunities, and of out-innovating your competitors.

They are what the winners do that puts them ahead in the race for customers and profits.

They are the critical core.

Together they comprise a strategy system in which each of them is a source of competitive strength.

This system frames strategic conversation, focuses attention on what really matters, and helps managers combat what is undoubtedly the most prevalent and pernicious destroyer of value what I call the tyranny of tools.

Over the past century or so, the management advice industry whose purpose, youd think, is to help managers improve their performance has churned out more theories, methods, models, frameworks, concepts, and questionnaires than any executive can ever use., And they keep coming. Yet efforts to push forward the boundaries of management thought and practice have been largely futile.

In only the past decade, astonishing progress has been made in science, medicine, computing, advanced materials, energy, agriculture, and countless other fields. Genomic mapping, 3D printing, wearable technology, driverless cars, and mobile computing have arrived with astonishing speed, and their impact on how we live and work will be mind-boggling. Meanwhile, many astonishingly fundamental questions about management remain unanswered.

So here we are, in a time of unprecedented challenges, when so much is expected of managers and the pressures on them are so great, when so many smart people have so much to say on the topic of management, still grappling with how to define competitive advantage. Still unclear about what strategy is, why we need it, and how best to do it. Still quibbling about the difference between strategy and tactics, and worrying that our strategic conversations are too operational.

Here we are, questioning the importance of leadership, Hooked on visions, missions, and values, but up in the air about what they mean, why we might need them, or what effect, if any, they might have on business results. Hoping against hope that someone can tell us how to design our organizations for best results. Desperate to know how to get the best performance from people, accelerate innovation, and execute our plans. Yet at the same time overwhelmed by opinion that often is based on no more than cursory observation, uninformed speculation, or pure guesswork in fact, is no more than a figment of someones imagination.

Some of the tools we have are clearly valuable. Most, however, add nothing to what you need, and if truth be told, are worth more to the experts who produce them than to the firms that fall for them. But theres so much hype that its hard to know which to go for and which to ignore. And its a fair bet that like most managers youll try too many and inadvertently throw sand in the gears of your business.

Organizations are complex systems, and never in a perfect state. Theyre always in tension between stability and chaos, repetition and renewal. Its easier to screw them up than make them hum, and managers are at the mercy of many factors they cannot control. Learning how to apply any new tools, how they fit and interact, and how theyll pan out always takes longer than anyone imagines, and every intervention has unanticipated consequences, good or bad.

But theres more to worry about.

As managers strive for growth in conditions that are more testing by the day, its essential that they bring as much stability as possible to their organizations. But its equally essential that they also keep their teams on edge, constantly alert, challenging the status quo, reinventing every aspect of what they do and how they do it, and exploring possibilities that may be fraught with risk. As managers grapple with the complexities of their business amid a hail of surprises, they have to keep questioning their own assumptions, rethinking the best way forward, adjusting their plans, shifting the deck chairs. All this is deeply unsettling to everyone, and its full impact on business performance may only be evident long after the event.

Its perplexing, then, that managers so zealously amplify this disruption and turbocharge their troubles. That they waste as much time, effort, and money as they do complicating their lives, making work more difficult than it need be, and shoving the results they want further and further out into the future.

The first and ongoing task of a leader a strategist is to frame the way they and others see the world. To craft and conduct a strategic conversation that makes sense of todays realities and shines a light on tomorrows possibilities. To inspire a common purpose among disparate stakeholders who see things from their own perspectives, coloured by their own assumptions, experiences, values, and interests. And to define, drive, and facilitate the actions that will lead to a desired future.

Management ideas are key to this process. Theyre at once a language and a lens. More than just a basis for discussing and doing, they also affect seeing and being. So they have a profound impact on what gets attention in an organization; what gets talked about and how; the way that strategy is thought about, created, and executed; and where resources are applied. All of which makes them far too important to be toyed with.

The aim of strategy must be to deal with a clearly defined challenge either a problem or an opportunity. Similarly, management ideas should only be adopted for a specific purpose. So they should be carefully evaluated and chosen, well understood, and sparingly used.