Chapter 16 How to Become a Management Guru

, but the ones that say "everyone can be a winner if they just try it" are the ones that get the most traction because no one likes to hear bad news.Only those optimistic management concepts that emphasize that people are basically good, smart, etc. can prevail. In the past five years, many management masters have become popular in China, from Peter Drucker to Jack Welch, from Michael Porter to Philip Kotler, and various concepts have also been widely disseminated, from the three-character classic ERP From CRM to Built to Last, Implementation, etc., there are also a few advocates of local management concepts who look like masters... Various commercial media have contributed to the spread of popular management concepts.

People need management gurus and the ideas they create, but if we just accept their ideas without thinking, maybe we can be greatly inspired and improve the level of management, but we may not be able to make the most of these ideas.In order to apply management philosophy to our management practice, we need to ask these questions: How do masters come about?Put another way, how are these ideas created?What ideas are popular or why are we open to them?How can we understand and apply these concepts? Of course I don't, can't, and I'm not qualified to teach you "How to become a management master?" Most readers of this article believe that they are "consumers" of management concepts, so what I want to say is actually how the masters Create and disseminate ideas.Knowing what the masters do helps us to consume more wisely: what to buy and what not to buy, when to be attracted by advertisements and when to reject those rhetoric, how we can implement those ideas in the companies we serve.

After years of dissemination of management concepts, we have already surpassed the stage of worshiping a certain management master or concept, or even copying them all. This is because management is a practical thing, and everyone actually chooses according to their needs.However, in China, there is still a far-reaching myth (Myth) about management concepts that needs to be clarified first. It is that some management concepts are right and some are wrong.For example, many people will claim that bureaucratic organizations are inefficient, and that the strict action design mentioned by Taylor’s scientific management is no longer applicable. In fact, bureaucracy is the basis of most organizational designs today. Mental assumptions (redesigning work tasks to improve work performance) still affect us.

Only by dispelling the myth of right and wrong in our hearts can we see that management concepts are accumulated layer by layer.The ever-emerging management fads that claim to upend previous ideas tend to lead one to the misleading metaphor of one wave washing over a shore, only to be replaced by the next.In fact, management philosophy is not an ocean wave, but something deposited after one wave after another washes away.Only by dispelling this myth can we see the management gurus clearly and learn to apply the ideas they created correctly. There are many types of management masters, which can be roughly divided into four types: academic stars, management practitioners, consultants, and people with news media backgrounds.Marketing master Kotler and strategic master Porter are all academic stars, Welch is an enterprise manager, Tom Peters and Kenichi Ohmae are consultants, there are not many masters who come from news media, and they are advocates of knowledge management. Stewart, the current editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, is a well-known one.

However, no matter what field they come from, as management masters, they basically do three aspects of work: communicate with the company, think and write, and put forward their own ideas in large and small meetings.This is summarized in Thomas Davenport's book "The Most Ideas", which discusses how management ideas work. Here you may wish to interpret them one by one. First of all, management gurus communicate with enterprises, either to conduct research, or to provide consulting services, or to report their stories as media personalities, or to engage in management work in enterprises.A master in the academic world talked about how he perfected his ideas from his interactions with companies, "Telling them ideas, seeing their reactions, and listening to their opinions enables me to choose the most relevant and most likely to succeed. concept. I will not claim to be the original creator of the concept. I am the interpreter and promoter of the concept.” The balanced scorecard is a management technique that has been widely used in recent years. Schneiderman, a middle-level manager of the enterprise, created it. Professor Robert Kaplan of Harvard University discovered it, perfected it, and promoted its dissemination.

Second, management masters think and write, write books, write papers, write articles for magazines and newspapers, etc. This point does not need to be explained too much. We usually understand the ideas of masters through books and newspaper articles. Third, they have to convey information to the outside world by attending various conferences and giving speeches, and now they sometimes have to use a medium that cannot discuss issues in depth, such as television, to promote their ideas.For management gurus, presentations are very important because verbal communication is the way managers do their work. Someone said, "Management is a vocal world, and people teach, help and communicate in person rather than in writing. persuasion to work."

Generally speaking, there is a big difference between academic masters and management practitioners. What academic masters need is to say attractive topics, and those management practitioners who become masters usually use their personal charm to repeat some "common sense" ".In "The Master of Management", the author Hulkinski said, "A reader group will always be interested in opinions that are opposite to their original views. Therefore, the master must first clearly define the topic to be discussed, and then propose a proposition that opposes it. ’” The wisdom of the academic masters lies in their ability and willingness to refute as many preconceptions as possible.The ideas that management practitioners say work because of their personal experience and charisma, "They provide people with a guide to action that would not have such power if provided by others."

Why do some management philosophies catch on and others don't?In a nutshell, popular management concepts must be in line with the times, meet the needs of the time, be noticed by readers, and be stated in a way that can arouse readers' interest, etc.It is particularly interesting that Hukkinsky mentioned that contemporary management concepts need to be understood by most people, not just those managers in high positions. This is because an important function of management concepts is to provide legitimacy for management practices reason.Moreover, sometimes managers directly say that the effect is not good, or that it is not suitable for themselves, and that the master's mouth can achieve better results.

There are areas where management ideas, no matter how brilliant, simply don't catch on.For example, corporate politics, that is, the informal relationships among people within a company, is one of the most critical aspects of any organization, yet it is simply impossible to be addressed by prevailing management theory because the consumption of management ideas pays for itself. There's no way people who don't like it will like it.In fact, as the studies of social network analysis scholars have shown, the informal relationship network in the organization has a decisive influence on almost all decision-making.I once saw this sentence on the cover of a book that was destined to not sell well, and it best explained why similar management concepts will not catch on-warning: do not bring this book to the office.If you bring it to the office, be sure to put it on the desk of a competitor in your company.

Popular management philosophy must be optimistic, although sometimes pessimistic view is correct, but only those that say "just try, everyone can be a winner" will be most accepted, because no one loves Hear the bad news.Only those optimistic management concepts that emphasize that people are basically good and smart can be popular, and those who think that people are cruel and selfish, although they may be reasonable, their proposers are absolutely impossible to become management gurus .Peters's "In Search of Excellence" is often considered the first management philosophy to really catch on, and their overarching message is this: "One doesn't have to learn management from foreign countries. Many of the most successful people were born and bred in the United States." In fact, when the United States faced Japanese competition in the 1980s, the earliest and very in-depth research was done by Pascale and Athos, but they were only hated because their research investigated the failures and mistakes of American management, and praised Japanese-style management, it is recommended that American companies learn from Japanese experience.

In general, a management philosophy is popular because it satisfies the needs of "consumers".Although management is generally considered to be a practical science, its main feature is that it can be logically right and that it can help managers complete their tasks. However, as long as we carefully look at what is popular, we will understand that the consumption of management ideas There are many needs of readers besides completing tasks.For example, the theories of management gurus can strengthen managers' confidence in their own decisions. Those theories give managers the "predictability" that can relieve anxiety-such actions will produce such results.In the first few decades of management, management has not yet become a respected profession, so the popular management concept is to establish the legitimacy of management, but after that, most of the popular management concepts of management appear in this way: they are very close to Managers have their own experiences and beliefs to the point that they think these are their own. For another example, some management concepts, such as giving full play to the creativity of employees and some IT-related methods, although there is no way to prove or falsify them, will be eagerly accepted by the HR or marketing departments of many companies, because those concepts can make the company Appears to have advanced management. Another characteristic of the most popular management concepts is that they can be extremely simplified, they can be condensed into a slide, and they can be simplified (sometimes distorted) into a slogan-like conclusion.Michael Porter's five forces model for industrial analysis can be so widely accepted, which has a lot to do with its form.Such simplifications may allow us to apply them conveniently for those trying to implement the idea, but we cannot really apply them effectively if we think deeply about the subtle messages behind the simplifications. If we just ride the waves of management philosophy trends, at best we get psychological satisfaction, at worst we use management ideas to bring down the company.After the above discussions, we may have realized that there are no pure and absolute management concepts, and those popular management concepts are especially affected by various factors.And, even if it's a good management philosophy, it doesn't necessarily apply to your business. In the end, management concepts are popular externally, but there is another group that is crucial to play a role in the enterprise. Davenport keenly discovered the group of "idea practitioners" who turn ideas into reality.The work of this group of idea practitioners is as follows: they first scan and find ideas suitable for the enterprise situation, generally speaking, they synthesize various ideas and modify them to meet the needs of the enterprise.Then, in order for the idea to be accepted within the enterprise, they must package the idea. Although the management idea has undergone a round of packaging outside, it still needs further processing to be accepted by the people inside the enterprise.Third, sell this concept to the top managers, middle managers, and ordinary employees in the enterprise.Only if they are successful in the first three areas should they embark on the work of turning the idea into reality.Sometimes, these ideas that have been successfully implemented in the enterprise can also be summarized, refined, and "sold" outside. The nature of management makes us need popular management concepts, and the huge market opportunities behind popular management concepts allow them to be pushed to us when needed.However, to be able to utilize the wisdom behind these ideas, we need to have a deep understanding of our needs and their characteristics, otherwise we may only "buy" unwanted or wrong products.We must always remember that we are consumers of management concepts, and we need to make rational judgments and choices when we buy things.