Both Matt and Johnnie Moore (are they related one asks?) pick up on Bain’s 2007 Management Tools Survey. The front page is really scary - you see a row of chisels (reproduced here) which adds a whole new dimension to the idea of does your face fit (see the title to this blog entry). I also share Johnnie’s concern that the word tool is being misused here, when many are methods. A pet hate here by the way; people keep saying methodology when they mean method. Methodology is a systems of methods, or the study of methods. Either way pedantry aside, to the survey, some observations:
- Matt makes the point that KM is rising in adoption, despite poor satisfaction and is working better in smaller organisations. He argues that there are issues on scalability of KM and I was reminded of my own earlier post on natural numbers.
- Balanced score card and benchmarking seem to be undergoing a decline in satisfaction but its very slight and I may just be seeing what I would like to see! The same is true for mission statements - all products of systems dynamics
- BPR and Six Stigma are increasing in adoption but declining in satisfaction, definitely a message to take on board there about the usefulness of linear engineering approaches to organic systems after the initial Hawthorn Effect is over.
- Customer ethnography is starting to take off along with corporate anthropology. I find this encouraging by worrying. In my experience most of the people selling themselves as Corporate Ethnographers or Corporate Anthropologists have just read a text book or two and are jumping on a bandwagon without proper training. There are some honorable exceptions but its a real worry for me. I use ethnographers and anthropologists and am fairly well read in those fields, but I would never claim the title or purport to offer those services other than in partnership with the genuine article.
- Blogs have also entered the field and are showing high satisfaction in early days. There are of course issues (read last weeks Dilbert series on corporate blogging for one of them, they start here) and I am not sure a lot of executives are yet giving blogs the freedom, or the personalisation that they need to operate properly. The first Bain recommendation is classic by the way: Establish the blog's focus and mission. I do love the big consultancy firms, they provide so many examples of pattern entrainment. The rest of the advice is not bad however.
- Scenario planning is increasing in adoption while declining in satisfaction. That’s good news for those of us developing alternatives! I think the reason for this is that uncertainty is on the increase and the only tools around at the moment are scenarios. That encourages me to get our offerings out on this earlier rather than later.
Comments (5)
Hi Dave,
Don't forget me!! :) I blogged my thoughts on the Bain survey about 4 weeks before Matt and Johnny - http://lauchlanmackinnon.blogspot.com/2007/04/soft-management-skills-acheive-hard.html - and well before the HBR discussion leader post.
The main points I make from the survey are that 'soft' skills such as managing culture are being emphasised, and that there may be good reasons for KM being adopted more but at the same time companies are less satisfied with it.
Regards
Lauchlan Mackinnon
Posted by Lauchlan Mackinnon | April 30, 2007 10:46 PM
Posted on April 30, 2007 22:46
With regards to the BPR result I think you need to exercise caution - I don't think they really defined closely what BPR is, so it probably includes a lot of process work generally. It may be declining in satisfaction because everyone is doing it, so the work they do does not necessarily put them ahead of the competition in the way it might have previously.
Regards
Lauchlan Mackinnon
Posted by Lauchlan Mackinnon | April 30, 2007 10:49 PM
Posted on April 30, 2007 22:49
Sorry Lauchlan, I must have been scanning through the RSS feed to quickly that day and missed it. I agree on caution, and have an intense dislike of this type of survey (having had to fill in too many when I was in IBM). I don't trust the results (hence my reference to salt) but they can stimualte conversation
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May 1, 2007 2:01 AM
Posted on May 1, 2007 02:01
Thanks for adding the point at the end re: big consulting firms' surveys ... just another one of their annual marketing brochures, slightly different format.
It goes along with the solutions-models-templates-best practices-just install-this pyramid business model, and if more clients knew just how off-handedly such surveys are almost always completed they might ask better questions or demand more value (caveat: as you have mentioned more than once, including in your course, there are areas of work activity that lend themselves to proscribed methods and repeated / repeatable tactics - in such cases templates, models and best practices are highly useful).
Yes, they stimulate conversation ... would that such conversations eventually come to be nourished or accompanied by more examples and evidence from other sources (which by and large were not so easily available or discoverable a half-decade ago).
Re: Lachlan's point, I'd argue that more often than not BPR is seen as preferable to and / or easier to justify than substantive culture change initiatives, which in turn speaks to management philosophy mismatches when it comes to variability-driven knowledge-intensive work.
Posted by Jon Husband | May 1, 2007 5:19 AM
Posted on May 1, 2007 05:19
These things do stimulate conversation - which is what we see here in this blog, right?
When I saw these "tools", I remembered Terry Pratchett's retrophrenology in "men at arms" (explicit hint: a good metaphor about cause and effect), looked it up again, and found that the last sentence makes another point that I had not remembered, and which fits very well in this context:
I quote from http://www.npdemers.net/inspire/terry-pratchett-quotes/
[Retrophrenology] works like this. Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone’s character, aptitude and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore—according to the kind of logical thinking that characterizes Ankh-Morpork—it should be possible to mould someone’s character by giving them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that’s the main thing.
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May 1, 2007 7:10 PM
Posted on May 1, 2007 19:10