Management 2.0? That’ll Be the Day

In his book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel suggests that organizations today face a new set of business challenges that the existing management model does not match. The drone worker of yesterday is giving way to the engaged and vocal employee of today who expects a company culture that replicates the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 — in other words Management 2.0

A CIO becomes aware that a member of staff has “gone around him” to get the information he needs from someone in another department the staffer located after some creative e-networking. As it happened, the source didn’t have the full story but the information sounded reasonable enough to the IT staffer, who happily acted on it with unfortunate results. The CIO’s reaction: “It was not only dumb but disloyal. If [the staffer] had only gone through his manager none of this would have happened.”

Another CIO tells the story of how 160 or so business analysts around the company took it upon themselves to create an online forum where they could find and get to know one another, share ideas and source help with problems from peers. No one asked permission. They just did it. The CIO’s reaction, “I was a little surprised to learn about it. But I think it’s interesting. We’re letting it continue and we’ll see what happens.”

There’s a lot of this sort of thing around as managers battle to continue managing in a Web 2.0 world, says New York-based Cognetics Corporation president Anne Pauker Kreitzberg. Managers have a general sense of what Web 2.0 tools are — especially when it comes to applications they’re familiar with like YouTube, Facebook, or Linkedin. But they still struggle to understand these technologies, discover their real business value, address the risks and figure out how to best use them.

“Only those companies that have been very early adopters — many of them in the tech business — have come to the realization that a critical success factor is having a culture that supports Web 2.0,” says Kreitzberg, who is in the process of building a community Web site for “folks interested in this topic”.

“To my mind, that’s the conclusion Gary Hamel, Andrew McAfee — in his Enterprise 2.0 work — and others are talking about.”

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

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