A summary of the talk delivered by Prof S Ramachander, Strategic Consultant at the talk on “Leading Edge Ideas From Manager at Work” held on 27th June 2007 at Chennai.

It has become customary to say that we live in times of great change, indeed accelerating change and therefore we need new ideas and frameworks of thinking for the manager of today. Why is this so now? Is this just a fashionable piece of hype that every generation indulges in or does it have a basis in reality?

Let us look at the facts: For five decades in India, since Independence till around the late 1990’s one could truthfully say that we escaped facing the fury of management in action in full. Much of what the early management graduates were taught about competition and strategic responses to it were really so much theory. This was actually a source of frustration in those days. Now the tasks facing us are different. The worldwide game and the rules have changed, partly due to the unpredictable forces affecting the worldwide economy. It is also in part due to the mega-trends such as the environment crisis, fundamentalism, terrorism and epidemics of unprecedented proportions.

Complexity View of management:
Another significant change that has not been much noticed by the average Indian manager is that in the recent decades formal physical sciences have begun to acknowledge the truth about complexity, non-linearity and randomness. This essentially cuts at the root of the degree of certainty and predictability which we had hitherto assumed in management. In other words, the phrase ‘management science’ is beginning to be seen as more of a metaphor rather than literal truth. Once considered the answer to all our prayers, in the early days of the computer and quantitative analysis, Operations Research is no longer the ultimate remedy. Not even the USA sees itself a fountainhead of managerial wisdom, as it once used to in the immediate post-war years.

What is the manager expected to manage?
Before we go any further though, let us ask this tough question. When the chips are down, when all the jargon is trimmed off, what remains to distinguish the effective manager from the ordinary one is how well she manages relationships, which are the only animate elements of our work. All the rest is inanimate: money, technology, equipment. What is inanimate can be traded, exchanged. Therefore, only the animate can truly make a difference in a competitive world!
As the provocative new work of some profound thinkers such as Nassim Taleb has shown, anything that moves by its own volition can not be predicted. It always contains within it an element of surprise, free will and uncertainty. It is time therefore that we as managers gave up our pretences of omniscience! We had better recognise that what is special about managing is not that another branch of science but more like a craft; it is neither art nor science entirely, an intensely human activity, interactive and personal, and deals with perceptions all the time. There are severe limits to how much you can programme it. The activities are non-linear, that is to say not always proceeding from fact to conclusion to action; and sometimes heuristic, trial-and-error and sometimes cyclical. For one thing, the cause-effect connections aren’t always obvious. You can never know enough to decide and therefore you must guess – there is nothing shameful about it. It is always easier to build a logical case after the event and by hindsight!

What do we actually manage?
If we followed the argument so far, then it must be obvious that all that we can manage are essentially relationships — both within and outside the organisation. On the inside, the task is clearly to attract, motivate, retain talented people and make them produce results in collaboration, not in competition. On the outside, relationships imply all the associates – how to understand them, attract them, delight them, persuade them to stay with you and work closely with you – and create value for both. This applies to suppliers, dealers, associates, service providers.

Some counter-intuitive ideas:

1. And if one considers the matter deeply, one can see that these two sets of relationships are not mirror images – they are the same. However, we are used to thinking of one as the responsibility of the top management and the HR department and the other as that of the sales and supply chain managers. One could even speculate whether perhaps the two are not unrelated? Maybe if one manages the inside well (i.e. have productive, motivated and well-adjusted employees) one can do better at customer and other associate relationships too! Certainly this is true of customer-facing, service businesses.

2. One of the difficulties in managers giving the level of importance to this people-oriented view is that our thinking process is largely influenced by the training in accounting and engineering – yet the truth is otherwise. Business and life in organisations are in fact much better understood as similar to biology. Things grow and evolve as they do in a garden or forest and the end result is not always obvious. As the famous butterfly effect has shown, small changes in the initial conditions can bring about big effects in the outputs of a system. Let me explain. In a mass-production factory, you would expect all units of a product to be identical and utterly replaceable. One can do the job of another. However, in natural systems (more close to human organisations) systems are self-similar, not identical. One leaf is similar to another but not exactly the same. The whole not made up of parts, but comprising branches and limbs. The hologram is the name given in science to a system in which the whole and the individual element carry similar capabilities — a good example used often as a way of explaining this is the way the human brain functions.

3. Another important development that we must recognize as managers is the distinction between single and double loop learning. Single loop applies where the learning is of the “If this happens, then you must do such-and-such” variety. Rules are formulated typically in administration and bureaucracies, which function rather like a trip switch or a thermostat. When something goes wrong the system either corrects itself or shuts down. Soon, this kind of decision making is programmed and delegated to a junior, non-managerial level or even to software. On the other hand, double loop learning diagnoses and eliminates root causes if possible and thereby avoid recurrence of the problem. Questions are posed such as: Is the problem a constraint? Is it really necessary? And the why of why it happens in the first place are some of the queries that double-loop learning demands of us.

4. Another common but often overlooked managerial failing is to take the solution or the tool to the issue at hand. One must look more carefully at the problem itself instead. One has to immerse oneself in it. In the process, one could find that the issue might redefine itself, or even disappear or reappear as something else!

5. Everything won’t succeed. Successes are stepping stones to “failures”. There are always far more failures than successes. In a class of 40 there are three rank holders or medallists, and 37 so-called failures. This is so arithmetically so, by definition! Yet, do we teach this to our children? This realism plays no part in our development. As managers, do we appreciate the consequences of this? If we did, you cannot but wonder if we would continue the same way in the world of work.

6. One of the biggest fallouts of the physical science mentality is a fallacy: that only the measurable matters and that what counts is only what can be counted. This engenders the usual mental model: measure, predict, control – therefore manage. On the other hand, we must learn to think in metaphors – and beware of mechanistic thinking.

7. Life isn’t a binary variable. Success v failure, Good v bad, the ideal v useless, theory v practice, and so on. Managers deal with continuous variables, a range of possibilities. This also implies being ever alert to learn new lessons outside our comfort zones; being a learning manager – not a learned manager!

Paradoxes are the stuff of life:
In the case of relationship management, managing systems, an attitude of learning and doing simultaneously is essential. A reflective practitioner is one who thinks as he acts and sees life not as an exercise in continuous problem solving but rather one of dealing with opposites and paradoxes. One has for instance to strike the elusive balance between: competition and collaboration, Certainty and ambiguity, Effectiveness and efficiency, Organisation and structure as well as flexibility and change, Centralised control and creative freedom, local autonomy, Deliberate development and organic growth, Experimentation and reducing risk of failure, Innovation and conformity.

(Based on a talk delivered at the MMA). For a wider treatment of some of these ideas, refer to the author’s recent books Creativity @ Work (Sage, New Delhi, 2006) and Manager at Work (Penguin New Delhi, 2006).