MIT Sloan Management Review

INTELLIGENCE
[STRATEGY]
Rethinking Management
In a new book, Julian Birkinshaw urges businesspeople to give more
thought to management models.

Most executives spend a reasonable amount of time thinking about the business model for their organization. But how much time do they spend considering the company’s management model?

Probably not enough, according to Julian Birkinshaw, a professor of strategic and international management at London Business School. In Birkinshaw’s most recent book, Reinventing Management: Making Smart Choices for Tapping Your Company’s Potential (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), he argues that businesspeople should think more explicitly about the management choices they make when running a company. That’s a topic Birkinshaw also explored in a Winter 2009 article in MI T Sloan Management Review that he coauthored with Jules Goddard, a fellow of the Centre for Management Development at London Business School.

MIT Sloan Management Review senior editor Martha E. Mangelsdorf spoke with Birkinshaw about his new book. Here are a few excerpts from that interview, edited for clarity.

In Reinventing Management, you broach the idea that management has been corrupted over the last 100 years. Can you say a little bit more about that?

“Corrupted” is a strong word, and it’s deliberately a bit provocative. I don’t actually mean managers have become corrupt and been sent to jail — although as we know a few of them have! I mean “corrupted” as in the word has become tainted in use.

When you use the word “management,” a lot of people immediately think of terms like narrow-minded, controlling, budgeting and planning. Somehow we’ve managed to denigrate management to the extent that it’s no longer actually deemed to be a subject that we should think about or aspire to. No kid today ever grows up thinking, “I want to be a manager.” So we’ve got a problem in that the word has lost its sense of vitality.

I think that the corruption of management as a word is partly the result of a 100-year period of trying to make sense of the big, industrial, hierarchical, bureaucratic company. All of the words we use around management now are essentially words about how you manage dehumanized, standardized machines that pump out millions and millions of identical products. My point is that is a model of management, not the model of management. There are lots of different styles in management and different styles of organizations — some of which work far better now, perhaps, than the old industrial one.

In other words, you’re saying that we now associate the word
“management” with the industrial corporation — because
that model of management became so dominant for a while.
At the very least, we have to say to ourselves, “Is that traditional
model of management one that is appropriate in this knowledge
era?” And the answer is — up to a point, it is, but frankly, the tradi-
tional industrial management model doesn’t work when you start
stretching and pushing it. So I think we definitely have to say, “Look,
there’s a sea change going on in terms of the objectives of compa-
nies. Let’s revisit the question of management.”
The other reason I’m very interested in rethinking and reinvent-
ing management is that we’re in a bit of a crisis of confidence right
now. The book’s got a few of the statistics about the fact that busi-
ness executives are less trusted than
lawyers and even bankers — and
only marginally more trusted than
secondhand car salesmen.

We have to say to ourselves, “Is that traditional model of management one that is appropriate in this knowledge era?”

One of the things I like about your book — and it also brings to mind the article you coauthored for MIT Sloan Management Review in 2009 on a similar topic — is that you take the view that there is no “one size fits all” approach to management, and that what’s important is thinking about the different levers that you can operate.

My view is that we shouldn’t just throw out our traditional models of management, but nor should we assume that everything is going to stay the same as it’s ever been. What we should be doing is taking a much harder look at the often subconscious choices we’ve made about how we manage. We should tailor our management model to the particular needs and circumstances we face.