Gary Hamel, the Director of the London School of Business and author of the book The Future of Management, spoke on the topic: “Manage Differently NOW.” There was a ton of material from Gary’s session, but it all related to what he sees as the most important question for us to consider as leaders:
“Are you changing as fast as the world around you? Are you in the vanguard or the back guard?”
Gary emphasized that in order to move to the vanguard, we need to move away from being crisis-driven and move toward being opportunity-driven.
You can read more detail about three of Gary’s ideas for making this change below. Suffice it to say, his insights really challenge the prevailing way of approaching organizational management. A lot of his ideas echo thoughts that I encountered in the book, The Starfish and the Spider.
To do that, he suggested us to do the following:
- Conquer denial. This involves moving from moving from dismissal of the problems to confrontation of the problems. We have to face the facts and listen to the renegades or dissidents at the periphery of the organization who are innovators.
- Generate more new thinking/strategic options. This means we have to have a willingness to experiment and take risks. It also means we must change the process for generating ideas to be more participatory and involving a much broader group of people
- Move away from a top-down organizational leadership. Because the diversity needed for leadership rarely exists in one person, we need to provide organizational structure for our organizations that is less hierarchical and involves more people. This means that the leader today is more focused on mobilizing, connecting, and supporting others.
Where does your church or organization sit on the continuum between the vanguard and the back-guard of responding to our changing world?
Discover more from Matthew Erickson
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Matthew Erickson 
interestingly enough… though gary mentioned wikipedia as a bottom up example… even they are having a hard time staying away from the entrapment of power
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/wikipedias-on-the-wane-study-20090807-ec98.html
In “The Starfish and the Spider”, Wikipedia is mentioned in this way, as are CraigsList and a few others. At the same time, the authors of that book sort of hold out judgment on where this will all go.
It does seem like the midway point of the article you linked highlights the fact that Wikipedia would have a surge of activity near the beginning that could potentially wane as new materials to add is harder to find. On the other hand, work with people (e.g., ministry) should never come to a ‘completion’ point, right?
It does seem, however, that any organization will struggle with some people becoming the power holders or gate keepers after a reasonable amount of time in existence.