Taming the Wild World of Management, Performance and Communication - 13459

Management has evolved a long way from its original meaning of 'governing a horse'. The industrial revolution fostered 'scientific management'; 1930's Hawthorne studies discovered that people's social interactions could alter productivity; and the dawn of the computer age in the post-war 1950's brought general systems theory into management thinking. Today, mobile wireless connectivity aims to transform ever-changing networks of players, mandates, and markets into something that can be 'managed'. So why is there no clear and simple recipe for how to practice management? We talk about financial management, safety management, and operations management, but surely the 'management' part of those endeavors will share the same set of practices. Instead, we are still arguing for 'management' to include everything from developing people to negotiating contracts. A manager's job may include many things, but one of them, the job of management, needs to be nailed down. Three standard practices for managing in a network are developed: (a) support the dialogues that connect people vital to accomplishing a goal or objective; (b) develop and sustain the scoreboards that serve as a road-map to reach the goal; and (c) control the feedback to 'govern the horse'. These three practices are useful for more than reaching goals, as they also support coordinating across boundaries and running productive meetings. The dialogues for productive relationships, scoreboards for goals and deliverables, and feedback for performance together constitute a recipe for managing in a networked world. (authors)