Superstition Management And Organisations

There is no HR-related topic more popular in the business press than performance management (PM). There has been an explosion in writing on this topic in the past 5 years, condemning it as a failure and calling for fundamental change. The vast majority of organizations use the same basic process which I call “Last Generation Performance Management” or PM 1.0 for short. Despite widespread agreement that PM 1.0 is failing, few companies have abandoned it or made fundamental changes to it. While everyone agrees it is broken, few agree on how to fix it. Companies continue to tinker with their systems, making incremental changes every few years with no lasting improvement in effectiveness. Employees continue to achieve amazing things in organizations every day, despite this process not because of it. Nothing has worked because organizations, business leaders and HR professionals focus on PM practices instead of the fundamental purpose of PM and the paradigms, assumptions, and beliefs that underlie the practices. Companies ask their performance management process to do too many things and it fails at all of them as a result. At the foundation of PM 1.0 practices is the ideology of a meritocracy and paradigms rooted in standard economic and psychological theories. While these theories were adequate explanations for motivation and behavior in the 19th and 20th centuries, they fail to account for the increasingly complex nature of organizations and their environments today. Despite the ineffectiveness of PM 1.0, there are powerful forces holding it in place. Information on rigorous, evidence-based recommendations is crowded out by benchmarking information, case studies of high-profile companies, and other propaganda coming from HR think tanks and consultants. Business leaders and HR professionals learn about common practices not effective practices. This book confronts the traditional dogma, paradigms, and practices of PM 1.0 and holds them up to the bright light of scientific scrutiny. It encourages HR professionals and business leaders to abandon PM 1.0 and it offers up a more appropriate purpose for PM, alternative paradigms to guide them and practical solutions that are better supported by scientific research, referred to as “Next Generation Performance Management” or PM 2.0 for short.

If organisations are not working as well as they could, it is because they are still being managed by obsolete principles rooted in the Industrial Age. Until now, management has been a very one-dimensional discipline, in which only profits mattered. Having eyes fixed squarely upon the bottom line has endangered the planet, increased inequality, and disengaged employees. It is an unsustainable situation that calls for the radical redesign of management philosophical foundations. This book shows how to liberate organisations from the constraining assumptions and structures that hold them back, and how to build more conscious, humane, efficacious, and responsible forms of enterprise. 3D Management is an application of Ken Wilber’s ground-breaking Integral Theory that embodies the next stage of management evolution: smarter, nimbler, wiser, fairer, and fitter for the forthcoming metamodern times. This disruptive theory denies the imperialism of the bottom line and replaces it with a harmonic triumvirate that takes profit, people, planet, and purpose into account equally. An integral organisation is made up of three fundamental and irreducible dimensions: science, arts, and ethics, which refer respectively to the techno-economical, developmental, and moral aspects of organisational reality. These three aspects are woven together into an essential unit by the spiritual dimension, which strives for unity and meaning. 3D Management is a summum bonum of these four key dimensions to achieve sustainable excellence, spur organisational development, and create radically engaging workplaces, as well as making a better world. The text features more than 60 vanguard organisations, harbingers of the teal consciousness that will define the future of management. “One thing is certain: the more a truly integral business catches on, the more whole and fulfilled that humanity’s future will be. And 3D Management will have helped pave the way.” (from Ken Wilber’s foreword)

Critical Concepts in Management and Organization Studies provides an accessible introduction to the key themes of critical management studies. An ideal companion for students studying critical management and organizations, it breaks down the complex language, concepts and philosophical underpinnings defining critical management studies.

Managing Information Technology Resources in Organizations in the Next Millennium contains more than 200 unique perspectives on numerous timely issues of managing information technology in organizations around the world. This book, featuring the latest research and applied IT practices, is a valuable source in support of teaching and research agendas.

Ten years ago, critical theory and postmodernism were considered new and emerging theories in business and management. What will be the next new important theories to shape the field? In one edited volume, Daved Barry and Hans Hansen have commissioned new chapters that will allow readers to stay one step ahead of the latest thinking. Contributors draw on research and practice to introduce ideas that are considered ′fringe′ and controversial today, but may be key theoretical contributions tomorrow. Each chapter sets these ideas in their historical context, lays out the key theoretical positions taken by each new approach and makes it clear why these approaches are different to more mainstream concepts. Throughout, contributors refer to existing studies that show how these developing themes will change the business and management arena. Researchers, teachers and advanced students who are interested in the future of Business and Management scholarship will want to read this Handbook.

Succession management, often little more than an annual form-filling chore and a throwback to 'chess board' charting of 1950s multinationals, needs revitalisation to become a key driver of organisational renewal in the twenty-first century. Whilst recent corporate failings have focused attention on the difficulties of leadership succession, those organisations which have made the transition to greatness have understood the impact of strategic resourcing in renewing their leadership capability and character. The challenge for organisations is reconciling leadership demand and supply. When it may be impossible to say what your organisation will look like in three years time, or what strategy it will be pursuing, demand becomes difficult to predict. And in an era of shifting career realities, supply management needs to be more than an analysis of the age profile of the leadership population. Practical Succession Management is a response to the increasing relevance of proactive succession management but the widespread difficulty of making it happen. The author focuses on the business realities of succession management rather than provide a conceptualisation of how it might work in principle or simply headline a series of corporate 'just so' stories. In a robust evaluation of relevant research and imaginative practice, Andrew Munro maps out the battlegrounds for succession management, with tools and techniques to guide readers from start to finish. The result is a book that will stimulate and challenge your thinking in opening up new options and provide practical methodologies to advance strategic resourcing within your organisation.

Many undergraduates find studying strategic management a particular challenge. The authors have tackled the complexity and ambiguity inherent in the subject without being too complex or ambiguous.