Beyond Management Workplace_5

Toolsaretheemptyheartofmanagement 103 stuff you’re dealing with, so summaries, agenda items, and bullet points aren’t enough. If feelings, relationships, interests, and values aren’t on the table and you aren’t dealing with them, you aren’t getting to what is at the heart of the work of organizing. Then there is no way of aligning for action and, when people aren’t aligned, they are just going through the motions. This is when work gets done badly, if at all.9 Work that relies on presentations, agendas, and executive summaries, along with spreadsheets, databases, and reporting structures, is two dimen-sional. Without talk, in which people engage one another around what they mean, think, and feel, there is nothing behind the tools. In this way, tool-oriented practices are a bit like those cardboard cutouts of a film’s characters that you sometimes see in the foyer of a movie theatre. They are intended to trick you into thinking that the real characters are stand-ing there. Of course, they don’t. Those fakes are easy to spot because they are two dimensional and lifeless. With management tools it’s a bit harder. Unless you stop and think about what is missing, you could—as people constantly do—mistake tools for the real thing. But, tools actually keep us from focusing on what really matters: on the ideas, perspectives, atti-tudes,relationships,andvaluesofthepeoplebehindthem,usingthem.I’m going to use Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as a case in point, to explain why. Thegeniethatturnedugly BPR became big business for management consultants during the 1990s, even though controversy swirled around it from the beginning.10 Its cham-pions claim BPR brought great success to some organizations,11 while equally vocal detractors say that in many cases the impact was little short of disastrous. Tom Davenport is one of the architects of reengineering. In 1995, when this movement wasn’t very old, he made a point of express-ing his misgivings about the direction it had taken.12 Lamenting that BPR never realized its potential for improving management processes, he com-plained, even then, that management viewed BPR very narrowly, using it primarily to justify layoffs (i.e. “downsizing”). “Once out of the bottle,” he says, “the reengineering genie quickly turned ugly.”13 BPR never had a chance to deliver on its promises. It was always des-tined to become another tool because this is what happens to all ideas once they fall into the hands of executives or consultants with a man-agement mindset.14 In the early 1990s managements were looking for yet another way to boost their bottom-line performance. The stated goals of 104 BeyondManagement business may vary. At times it is “maximizing shareholder value,” while at other times it is ensuring that earnings beat the quarterly estimates of Wall Street’s pundits.15 Both objectives tell the same story. A few decades ago corporate management became utterly obsessed with the bottom line, to the point where little else mattered or matters. BPR became the latest in a line of tools for increasing profits, this time by downsizing: replacing peo-ple, especially middle managers, with information technologies, in order to slash costs.16 BPRatJetPropulsionLabs Looking for a study of BPR that I could use to show why strategic ini-tiatives fail, I was fortunate to find an excellent one. In the 1990s, top management at Jet Propulsion Labs in California (JPL) implemented two “change management” initiatives: total quality management (TQM), fol-lowed by reengineering (i.e. BPR). In-depth, retrospective accounts of management strategies are rare but, based on a close study of documents and correspondence plus interviews with some of the protagonists in the drama that unfolded at JPL, Peter Westwick has written a detailed and highly illuminating account of what happened there. It provides just the perspectives I need, because the interviews and his access to memos allow us to go inside work and see the effects of BPR, not from the top, but from and in practice.17 We get a good sense of the turmoil that accompanied these efforts, the wide gulf between the expectations of senior managers about what each initiative would accomplish (framed by the view from the top) and what actually happened as a result of their efforts(people’spractices),andoftheambiguousandcontradictoryconse-quences of reengineering. Understanding the reasons for the gulf between expectations and results explains why, inevitably, genies that seem benev-olent to “ideas people” turn ugly in the implementation, when translated into management practices. BPR came to mean many things as consultant writers and managers all jumped onto the bandwagonand, as was certainlytrue at JPL, people came to different conclusions about these management initiatives, even holding contradictory views about what they meant and what they would accom-plish. A successor of sorts to TQM, BPR was supposed to incorporate many of the goals of that movement, including a shift from a hierarchical to a participative organization, where employees or workers “owned” their work (i.e. the processes) and had a voice in how things were done. As far as I know no one used the term “social network,” which seems misplaced Toolsaretheemptyheartofmanagement 105 alongside an expression like “process reengineering,” but, if BPR had ful-filled some of its architects’ dreams, reengineered organizations might look a lot like highly client-oriented teams in a network. Even in JPL’s technical environment there was talk of “enabling” and “nurturing” and an emphasis on satisfying the customer.18 Sounding like Jeff describing a team’s relationship with their client (see pp. 34–5), Ed Stone, JPL’s direc-tor through the 1990s, used to say “when you do your own job you’re actually doing it for somebody else.”19 Ideaslike“participation,”“client-centeredness,”and“owningthework” (which I take to mean being responsible and accountable for what you do) all have to do with how knowledge workers work together and with their clients, not forgetting their relationships with one another. In other words, these ideas have to do with how they organize their work and how they, themselves, are organized. Now, as a consultant to JPL seems to have realized, going from hierar-chy to participation is a huge leap and would have meant a management-paradigm shift, with the emphasis falling on new organizing practices. (Perhaps this is what Tom Davenport meant by “improving management processes.”) But, the managers and consultants responsible for bringing the new ideas to fruition weren’t prepared for this sort of paradigm shift: they never are. Both groups are myopic. They don’t see organizing, only the organization. So they did with the ideas what their counterparts always do: tried to squeeze them into conventional management practices and make sure they fit. What was the point of reengineering? “Practices” translate into “tools” in management-speak: obviously the point was to use tools—some old ones, like org charts together with some new ones, such as process-maps—to restructure, downsize, and improve bottom-line performance, cutting costs to increase profits. This is when the genie turned ugly. BPRthroughamanagementlens Imagine yourself as a corporate vice president for strategy. BPR experts have advised that you’ll be more efficient and more profitable with less hierarchy. You stare at your org chart, wondering what you can do to “flat-ten the organization.” What options do you have? The top and bottom are accounted for. Top management has to run the show and, at the bottom, workers have to do the work. But, you should almost certainly get rid of the “fat,” in the belly of the organization. Those layers of middle manage-ment, whose main function is oversight, add to your overheads but don’t 106 BeyondManagement contribute to the bottom line. If you do this you’ll have technology on your side too. A panoply of IT tools that move information around will allow you, safely, to bypass middle management; or so the IT consultants have told you. As long as you can feed data all the way up, which is what their tools do, you can fire lots of people and, using your “dashboard” to monitor the data, you’ll be able keep a close eye on what is happening below. Doesn’t having a dashboard tell you that you are in the driving seat? Just like technicians in a power-generating plant, who watch dials and gauges to see that everything is working normally, you’ll have the knowledge you need at the top to stay in control. All you need to do now is to reengineer yourprocessessothereisnomiddle,warningthosewhoareleftthatunless they “do more with less” they’ll go the same way. Whatisaprocess? BPR experts say you should be paying much more attention to processes, but you haven’t heard of “processes” before. What do they mean? It didn’t take long for people who were invested in the idea that “practices = tools” to figure out that “processes” meant “process mapping,” which meant “flowcharts.” Here is Peter Westwick’s perspective:20 Reengineering replaced the standard hierarchical organization chart with multiple flowcharts. Flowcharts, of course, were not new to JPL, since systems engineering also relied on them; any historian working on large technical systems in the United States after 1960 will recog-nize the flowcharts of PERT and similar techniques of computerized systems management. But reengineering raised flowcharting to an art form and new level of abstraction (in addition to its new status as a verb)...These new flowcharts traced the generalized transformation of information and resources as the inputs and outputs of each process. An important part of the work at JPL is spacecraft design. It is highly inno-vative and extraordinarily creative work, and the Labs is, without doubt, a knowledge organization. Yet, with process reengineering as the goal, consultants and managers took this imaginative and ingenious knowledge-work, which benefits from tough peer reviews of new designs, to be something resembling factory-work and treated it this way. They erro-neously equated the interpersonal connections, in which people negotiate meaning together to share knowledge and come up with new ideas—the “magic of organizing” to use Jeff’s expression—with physical production of the type where activity A is followed by B which is followed by C in Toolsaretheemptyheartofmanagement 107 predetermined sequence, as inputs are mechanically transformed into out-puts. Why did they make the mistake of substituting flowcharts for social networking and process maps for the talk that comprises the work of orga-nizing? The answer is a management paradigm that can’t see beyond tools. The view from the top doesn’t and cannot differentiate between process-maps and social interaction, which is in a different universe. So, ideas for organizing, which at heart are what BPR was all about, were ren-dered sterile as all energy was turned toward creating tools to improve the organization and the bottom line. Laydownthosetools Unpacking the failures of reengineering is like holding up a mirror and seeing all management practices reflected in it. Reengineering qualifies as a “reorg”; management-speak for “reorganization.” Reorgs come in all shapes and sizes: from efforts to reengineer the whole organization, like BPR; to introducing a new technology, like an Enterprise Resource Plan-ning system that is going to require substantial changes in the way people work; or, remembering an earlier case, redefining jobs to get better results and secure more funding. Spokespersons announcing corporate reorgs, which usually involve lay-offs, say these are both necessary and desirable to “strengthen the bottom line” or to “build a secure foundation for future growth.” Seldom do the business media either question these premises or report in detail on the results of reorgs, but they do add platitudes like “new management, showing that it means business, is aggressively cutting costs.” Is there a conspiracy of silence surrounding reengineering and other types of reorg? Why do the experts—consultants—not say how difficult it is to “manage change,” how small the chances of success are when management tries to move the organization in a particular direction, or what internal turmoil is likelytoresultandhowpeople’slives,includingtheirworklives,aregoing tobeaffectedasaresultoftrying?Thefactisthatmanagementmyopiaisa serious, widespread malady and the tool-oriented mindset behind strategic initiatives that fail isn’t limited to corporate businesses. 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