Per Nikolaj Bukh, Kurt Klaudi Klausen, Dana Minbaeva and Niels Peter Mols
Most research in organization and leadership argue and provide evidence to the as-sumption that management and leadership makes an important difference in making organizations capable of achieving goals in an effective and efficient way. Managers have the responsibility to implement corporate strategies while using the advanced managerial tools and leaders are expected to lead the way forward by being visionary and emphatic in order to encourage employees to work for the common good. Work-ing environments characterized by demotivation and stress are often attributed to bad leadership, and organizations where there is no alignment between the strategy and performance, between intent and realization are often found to be caused by lack of management.
So it seems there are many arguments in favour of believing in modern manage-ment and leadership. But are we persuaded? There is a growing literature saying that modern leadership is built on an illusion. The British researcher Ralph Stacey (2007) for one has argued that modern leadership is built on the illusion of rationality saying that it is impossible to predict and to plan in human systems. Others like Shia and Holt (2009) and Golsorkhi et al. (2010) argue that e.g. strategy is to be seen merely as practice that cannot be designed. It is not a novel insight in the social sciences that we have limited intellectual capabilities and bounded rationality. This is common knowl-edge at least since the time when Herbert Simon and James G. March wrote their classical works on organizations. Other nestors of modern thinking like Karl Weick underline that often action breeds thinking, there is an intimate relationship between action and the creation of meaning. Similarly the founding father of the idea of posi-tive deviance Jerry Sterning says that »it is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting«.
The critics however from time to time raise substantial doubt. Let us have a closer look at three such critical voices in the public debate in Denmark. In 2007 former
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leading employees of the ministry of Finance wrote a chronicle in the Danish newspa-per Politiken »Foregive us – for we did not know what we were doing«. The authors Klaus Hjortdal a.o. had been responsible for crafting and implementing New Public Management reforms in the Danish public sector from the 1980es and on. Now they regretted their doing saying that managerial ideas and mechanism of contracts and control had devastated the public sector to an extent where these mechanisms proved detrimental leading to unnecessary centralization, bureaucratization and regulation of the entire public sector .
In 2014 Svend Brinkmann a professor of psychology at Aalborg University published a book »Stand firm. A revolt against the current imperative of change and develop-ment« (Brinkmann 2014) raising a firm critique of positive psychology and literature on how to help yourself saying that the expectations regarding flexibility amongst leaders and employees urging them to give positive feedback and say yes to ever new ideas of self leadership and development made them feel insecure and inadequate.
Finally in 2014 a management consultant Christian Ørsted in the newspapers and over the internet said »I apologize for having preached deadly dangerous ideas of manage-ment and leadership«. He also criticised the positive psychology and went on argu-ing that when nothargu-ing is good enough and everybody is expected to give the most of themselves at all hours and run ever faster all the time we all end up burning out with stress and angst.
So what are we to believe? Maybe we should rephrase the question so that we ask ourselves what would happen if we did not have executives who had ideas about a brighter future, managers who did not know about budget and quality control, perfor-mance management etc. and leaders unable to recognize and praise the well-function-ing team and individual? Maybe. Or maybe we should acknowledge that it is time to step back, reconsider our basic assumptions and redefine what we mean by manage-ment and leadership? Nicolai Foss, a professor at CBS, together with Peter Klein from University of Missouri, published an interesting paper in MIT Sloan Review, a highly-esteemed practitioner-oriented outlet. They write: »The new environment suggests the need for a redefinition of the traditional managerial role« (Foss and Klein, 2014: 3;
emphasis added). Indeed, this »new environment« reflects the dramatic global changes and challenges faced by all companies these days. These include business challenges, such as the ageing workforce, skill shortages, or industrial disputes, as well as crises sparked by class-action lawsuits and the proliferation of social media (Pearson, Roux-Dufort and Clair, 2007). At the more extreme end of the challenge spectrum, we find the shock events of the past decade, including the Enron scandal (Benston and Hartgraves, 2002), terrorist acts (Wernick, 2006), a global financial crisis (Griffith-Jones, Ocampo and Stiglitz, 2010), several natural disasters (e.g., the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004; the
Editor's Corner Icelandic volcano eruption in 2010; the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011), and environmental disasters (e.g., the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion off the US’s Gulf Coast). What matters in this »new environment« is not well executed strategy or high performance. What matters most are corporate agility and enterprise resilience.1 So, the questions that we should be asking now are: What does leadership and man-agement look like when the ground is shifting beneath one’s feet? In the times of permanent change, who should be leading, and how? When leaders aren’t there, how do organizations achieve better leading and better following? How to lead into the unknown?
Clearly, we cannot go on with the old-fashioned understanding of leadership that as-sumed the clear division between the leaders and the followers. Nor can we work with definitions of management that assumed stable environments, large bureaucracies and clear organizational boundaries. Yet, the death of management and fatal disease of leadership are greatly exaggerated. Disagree? Well, dare you not believe in manage-ment and leadership?
References
Benston, G.J., and Hartgraves, A.L. 2002. Enron: What happened and what we can learn from it. Journal of Ac-counting and Public Policy, 21, 105–127.Foss, N, abd Klein, P. (2014). Why Managers Still Matter. MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall/September.
Brinkmann, S. 2014. Stå fast. Er opgør med tidens udviklingstvang. København: Gyldendal Business.
Chia, C.H., and Holt, R. 2009. Strategy without Design. The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action. Cambridge:
Casmbridge University Press.
Griffith-Jones, S., Ocampo, J.A., and Stiglitz, J.E. (eds.) 2010. Time for a visible hand: Lessons from the 2008 world financial crisis, Oxford UK: Oxford University Press.
Golsorkhi, D. et. al eds. 2010. Cambridge handbook of Strategy as Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hjortdal, H. et. al 2007. Tilgiv os – vi vidst ikke hvad vi gjorde. http://politiken.dk/debat/kroniken/ECE274053/
tilgiv-os---vi-vidste-ikke-hvad-vi-gjorde/
Pearson, C., Roux-Dufort, C., and Clair, J. 2007. International handbook of organizational crisis management.
New York: Sage.
Solsø, K., Thorup, P. 2015. Ledelse I kompleksitet. En introduction til Ralph Staceys teori om organization og ledelse. Viborg: Erhvervs Psykologisk Forlag.
Stacey, R.D. 2007. Strategic Mangement and organizational Dynamics. The Challenge of Complexity. London:
Prentice Hall.
Wernick, D.A. 2006. Terror incognito: International business in an era of heightened risk. In G. Suder (ed.), Cor-porate strategies under international terrorism and adversity. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
Ørsted, C. 2014. Undskyld, jeg var med til at fremme en livsfarlig ledelsesform. Politiken, 5 December.
Notes
1. Enterprise resilience refers to the ability of an enterprise to respond or »bounce back« from shock events (Branzei & Abdelnour, 2010).
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