Purposive Drift

Moon Shots for Management

I got very excited when I saw there was a Facebook group, "Moon Shots for Management". I had this vision of a massive boost for the economy and the good of the world. First an enormous Keynesian spend on rockets and moon colony equipment around the globe. And, second, a vast improvement in the quality of our organisations and business by removing hundreds of thousands of so called "managers" and sending them to populate the moon colony where they could manage each other without doing any damage to the rest of us.

Sadly, the reality is a little more prosaic, though, perhaps equally ambitious in scope. Inspired by a meeting and subsequent article by Gary Hamel, Jack Martin Leith has set up a Facebook group and a Ning website and network hub to help reinvent management for the 21st Century by tackling 25 challenges (all of which seem very worthy and worthwhile)

My one concern is that the largest political challenge isn't numbered among them. That is what do we do about challenging the vested interests of the bunch of apparatchiks, administrators, corporate politicians and the odd sociopath who have come together as a class over the last thirty years to appropriate surplus value from their workers, customers, investors and taxpayers, while at the same time inadvertently undermining much of the real value in their organisations and business and who are largely responsible for the mess we find ourselves in today.

Note: I have immense admiration for real managers in both the private and public sectors, unfortunately many of those who carry the title aren't.