Beyond Management Control

Traditional management structures, systems,and tools, intended to make the first factories of the industrial ageefficient, are now obsolete. Applying them to knowledge-work has exactly the opposite effect, causing all kinds of breakdowns. This book explains why knowledge workers have to manage themselves and tells them how to do it.

There’s a bewildering array of management tools out there. And they all promise to help you excel at the toughest parts of your job: defining your organization’s strategic direction, managing customers and costs, and boosting workforce performance. But just 30 percent of these tools deliver as intended. Why? As Jeremy Hope and Steve Player reveal in Beyond Performance Management, while many tools are sound in theory, they’re misused by most organizations. For example, executives buy and implement a tool without first asking, “What problem are we trying to solve?” And they use tools to command and control frontline teams, not empower them—a serious and costly mistake. In this eminently useful, clear-eyed book, the authors critically review dozens of well-known management tools—from mission statements, balanced scorecards, and rolling forecasts to key performance indicators, Six Sigma, and performance appraisals. They explain how to select the right tools for your organization, how to implement them correctly, and how to extract maximum value from each. Brimming with rigorous analysis and solid advice, Beyond Performance Management helps you swiftly gauge the value of each management tool, as well as navigate the increasingly crowded field of offerings—so the tools you select deliver fully on their promise.

Ian Lennie′s topical and practical text relates everyday management practice to contemporary management theories. This book discusses the impact of postmodern and constructionist thought on the traditional framework for understanding the behaviour of managers. By examining the importance of language, aesthetics, ethics and the individual psyche, this innovative book gives management students a new framework for understanding and applying management techniques in a complex environment. This book will give students a sense of the practical relevance of contemporary theory and will offer managers a radically different way of perceiving thier enterprise ad evaluating iots effectiveness.

The design of Management Control Systems (MCS) in the context of financial institutions should be reconsidered with regards to their ability to improve organizational justice perceptions. Promoting organizational justice can help banks to build significantly more trust and influence employees’ behaviors in the best interest of the organization. Especially the design of Beyond Budgeting as a MCS that emphasizes social control mechanisms and facilitates autonomous working appears to be a promising concept for the design of future MCS in the context of financial institutions.

By examining two different modes of internal control and the fundamentals of risk management, this book analyses the role of internal control in financing, investment, profit distribution, and corporate strategies through China's experience. In doing so, it confirms the effectiveness and superiority of internal control over operation and management. The book compares the various internal control methods used in China and the USA, namely, operation and management-oriented versus financial reporting-oriented approaches. It also discusses the differences in corporate risk attitudes and behaviours under the two approaches. The author then proposes the hyper-correction hypothesis and the trimming hypothesis. Empirical findings regarding corporate cash policy, mergers and acquisitions, tax avoidance, and diversification strategy reveal that internal control in China does not result in undue risk aversion but instead manages enterprise risk within a reasonable capacity. These results support the trimming hypothesis and demonstrate that internal control is a useful risk management tool. The title will appeal to students, academics, and accounting professionals interested in internal control (risk management), accounting, auditing and corporate finance, regulation and governance.

"Command and Control is failing us. There is a better way to design and manage work - a better way to make work work - but it remains unknown to the vast majority of managers." An adherent of the Toyota Production System, John Seddon explains how traditional top-down decision making within service organizations leads to managers