Sovereignty and Leadership through Master Control E-Book

Fredmund Malik

• Herausgeber: Campus Verlag
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Die Malik ManagementSysteme
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 114

Beschreibung

Management is no matter of ideology, nor is it a question of fashion. Management is a craft - the universal and most important discipline of the 21st century. Fredmund Malik, the leading expert in the field of general management, provides you with the knowledge it takes to be a successful executive and manager, in any position, within any organisation. Good management at the top level does not mean busying oneself with any task imaginable, but instead establishing an order which gives the system a firm inner structure. In this part, Fredmund Malik explains how leaders can apply the Master Controls to themselves and how they can develop a responsible corporate policy fit for managing complexity. Fredmund Malik's theory is system-oriented and can thus be applied regardless of time or place. It is designed to work in all areas and industries of any society, irrespective of changing trends or national and cultural differences. Taking as his point of departure the consistent traits displayed by complex systems - phenomena that executives and managers are likely to address on a daily basis - Malik sets the standard for sound management in a knowledge-based economy. Read more about the Malik Management Systems: Management Is a Craft The Principles of Effective Management Tasks of Effective Management Tools of Effective Management The Malik Management System and Its Users Managing People - Managing a Business The General Management Functions Management For a New Era Instructions for Self-Organization Cybernetics: Background of the Malik Management Systems

Leseprobe

Fredmund Malik

Sovereignty and Leadership through Master Control

Outline

Management is no matter of ideology, nor is it a question of fashion. Management is a craft – the universal and most important discipline of the 21st century. Fredmund Malik, the leading expert in the field of general management, provides you with the knowledge it takes to be a successful executive and manager, in any position, within any organisation. Good management at the top level does not mean busying oneself with any task imaginable, but instead establishing an order which gives the system a firm inner structure. In this part, Fredmund Malik explains how leaders can apply the Master Controls to themselves and how they can develop a responsible corporate policy fit for managing complexity. Fredmund Malik’s theory is system-oriented and can thus be applied regardless of time or place. It is designed to work in all areas and industries of any society, irrespective of changing trends or national and cultural differences. Taking as his point of departure the consistent traits displayed by complex systems – phenomena that executives and managers are likely to address on a daily basis – Malik sets the standard for sound management in a knowledge-based economy.

Read more about the Malik Management Systems:

Management Is a Craft

The Principles of Effective Management

Tasks of Effective Management

Tools of Effective Management

The Malik Management System and Its Users

Managing People – Managing a Business

The General Management Functions

Management For a New Era

Instructions for Self-Organization

Cybernetics: Background of the Malik Management Systems

Information about the author

Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik is an orderly professor for corporate management with a teaching license from the University of St. Gallen, an internationally renowned management expert, the founder and chairman of Malik Management, and the creator of the Malik Management Systems® framework. He is also a bestselling and award-winning author of over ten books, including classics like “Managing Performing Living” and “Strategy of the Management of Complex Systems” (in German language), as well as a columnist for opinion-forming media and one of the most distinguished thought leaders in the area of management. As a board member and chairman of several governance bodies at renowned world market leaders, Malik also has broad first-hand knowledge of international corporate governance practice. In the 1990s, Malik was the first macroeconomic thinker – and for a long time the only one – to point out the damaging effects of neoliberalism to society as a whole. He was also the first to criticize the Anglo-Saxon business administration theory with its one-dimensional fixation on shareholder value, which Malik identified as one of the main causes of the global financial crisis. Thanks to his cybernetic methodology and toolset, Malik was one of the first to realize the imminent danger. As his tools enabled him to read the warning signs early on, Malik and his team developed innovative solutions to manage the complexity of today’s major challenges. With his cybernetic-based management theory, Malik has been setting standards for Right and Good Management.

His numerous distinctions and awards include the Cross of Honor for Science of Art from the Republic of Austria, 2009, and the Heinz von Foerster Award for Organizational Cybernetics from the German Cybernetic Society, 2010.

At the end of a very successful shareholders’ meeting:

Investor: Congratulations to an outstanding performance!

CEO: Thank you, it’s been a good year for us.

Investor: Still, I sold all my shares while you were presenting. Got a good price for them.

CEO: But why? You just told me –

Investor: I’ll tell you why. The numbers you presented were great, so that speaks for the past. But there was nothing to convince me that the future of your company will be just as good.

Order, Time, Peace

Systems are what they are and they do what they do;

if you don’t like it, change the system.

Stafford Beer, Founder of management cybernetics

There are top management floors which resemble beehives even with business being as usual. And then there are those which, under identical circumstances, exude the silence of a cathedral. In the former, people need to keep getting things under control – in the latter things are under control. Complexity, tasks, and requirements are the same in both cases; what differs is the way they are handled.

It is entirely up to top management to create either one of both worlds. Only they can change the system – if they don’t like it – by applying the right system or corporate policy, thus establishing the basic rules that enable the system to function in a complexity-compatible way.

Effective managers do not make many decisions; rather, they solve problems by establishing policies. Right top management is not operations. Everyone knows that, but not everyone manages to transition to the entirely different solution I am proposing here. The greater the complexity, the more important this will be, however, because operations provide the poorest approach to steering a complex system.

Right top management means establishing Master Control by the means I have been describing. The result is an order which “keeps the system together internally” and which provides cohesion and alignment throughout. To the extent that this is achieved, one is basically free to sit back as the system organizes and regulates itself. There will be peace and quiet on the top floors, and the top managers in such organizations have time – which they use for reflecting rather than acting. They monitor the system from a certain distance, and with a constant view to the outside world. They confine themselves to three essential tasks:

adjusting corporate policy wherever necessary, which usually requires no more than subtle control impulses,

tune in their “antennae” to the whole modus operandi, the basic pattern of system behavior, and

dealing with the so-called corporate issues.

These are problems and opportunities arising “out of the blue”, and which are to be tackled from the top, because they are important and because they do not fit anywhere else at that point.

Who are the managers responsible for corporate or systems policy? They are the people heading organizations, no matter what kind, whether they be individuals or members of top-level corporate bodies: owners and executive officers, university presidents and ministers of science, board members at corporations, top-level administrative bodies in public service, theater managers, artistic directors and cultural politicians, members of federal and state governments, etcetera. Their top management functions carry a variety of names, their basic functions are the same. By way of generalization, I usually speak of executives although I am not too happy with this term, as I will explain later.

Their Working Conditions: Proliferating Complexity

Measured by the requirements of their tasks, corporate top management of institutions still encounter rather unfavorable working conditions. The concepts, knowledge, and technologies for a very different kind of corporate management, however, are in place. It is all but certain that a radical change will REvolutionize the way top managements function.

If we were to contrast the situation of most executives to the possibilities existing in management cybernetics, it is comparable to aircraft pilots having at their disposal the modest means of aviation of the 1960s, as opposed to full-blown modern-day avionics and satellite navigation.

In other words, most executives are insufficiently equipped, both in terms of system methodology and technology, for regulating complexity in the way required. This is due not so much to their tasks but to the challenges of fulfilling them even in highly complex environments.

The key problem for executives is not so much the size of their organization but the complexity of the systems and the function for which they are responsible. The management of small companies can be much more complex than that of large ones, just as fighter planes put much higher demands on pilots in many respects than big passenger aircraft, to remain within the aviation metaphor.

Their Task: Total System Master Control

Based on what has been pointed out so far, the non-delegable tasks at the top management level are as follows:

Making decisions on corporate policy in the sense of the concepts discussed here.

Formulating the required principles and rules.

Implementing them, according to their degree of validity, through effective communication.

Making sure that these principles are adhered to in the organization.

Evaluating the results of the institution’s operations.

Correcting deviations, justifying and modifying the Master Controls as required.

It is hardly surprising that the logical sequence of these tasks is basically that of a classical-cybernetic control loop. In this logical way, the quintessential function of executives can be formulated so clearly and simply that it must appear self-evident to anyone. However, organizing them under the given conditions is anything but simple.

Their Challenge: Change Leaders

As we have seen, the conditions of complexity that exist already, and the naturally ongoing complexification, force Top Management to advance to a higher level of effectiveness. Top Management either manage to install the required Master Controls of self-organization, thus aligning the organization with the nature of complex systems, or do not bring about this kind of system quality, and fail.

The profound changes calling for this evolution have long been in the making:

The complexification calling for this evolutionary leap has long been here; and with it the natural forces, driven by intensifying information flows, which control the internal dynamics of complex systems.

Information and communication technology has long accomplished the evolutionary leap to real-time monitoring. Correspondingly it accelerates the evolution and effect of system-immanent forces. What was true in one second may no longer apply in the next, as change is a constant state in complex systems.

The effects of data and information overload, as well as of overstimulation, multiply accordingly, while under traditional thinking and problem-solving patterns, based on outdated concepts of reality, the brain capacity decreases due to stress.

The result is a yet bigger problem, the information underload, or put more simply, the lack of relevant information. It maximizes the risk of wrong decisions as well as the probability of a system breakdown, as Maria Pruckner writes in her cybernetic system study Die Komplexitätsfalle [“The Complexity Trap”]1. In a manner of speaking, it is the typical natural phenomenon in the age of complexity wherever systems have not yet adjusted to the 21st Century transformation.

Contemporary theories, methods, and technologies for the comprehensive mastering of complex situations and systems, in particular the use of management cybernetics, have long been at everyone’s disposal, and the best managers are applying them already. Wherever no higher dimension of controlling and regulating force is used, strong competition will lead to irreversible disadvantages in business.

Even top managers cannot permanently work at the limits of their physical and mental performance. Without the necessary controlling and regulating systems, not even the best personal assistants and support staffs can achieve the state of knowledge and information that the Master Control function requires under complex conditions.

Their Choice: Making Use of Complexity

Top managers in highly complex environments only have a choice between adjusting to global evolution or being overrun by it. What this adjustment requires of them is not so much knowledge or education, for there is not really a major lack of that, but new categories of organization as well as the integration of knowledge and information.

It requires a mental frame of reference which corresponds to their changed reality. It requires them to distinguish right theories from wrong, effective methods from ineffective ones, and suitable tools from unsuitable ones. In other words, the least that is needed is fundamental system-theoretical and cybernetic knowledge, helping them to make the distinctions crucial for success, to tell the relevant from the irrelevant, and to reach and maintain a concentration on the essential.

Their Conflict: Categorical Change

A remarkable proportion of managers has already developed the view required for the age of complexity. Another, by far larger proportion has yet to bid farewell to outdated ideas and concepts, which many of them find difficult to do. According to Paul Watzlawick and co, all pioneers of modern cybernetic communication theory, the reason goes somewhat like this: man is ready to accept new insights as long as he does not have to give up his accustomed premises in turn, such as his view of the world or his idea of what management is, how it works, and what makes a manager a manager.2

Management in the age of complexity requires letting go of old ideas held dear, because they have become outdated and wrong. With regard to this, the team of authors around Watzlawick points out that it will invariably result in conflict. Nothing is more difficult for people than giving up their accustomed mental models, because they are what give them orientation in the world. But the unfortunate fact is that the world has changed, so we have no choice but to change our mental models. The Malik Management System can help do that by offering better models. Whether people can or wish to accept them is up to them.

The following chapter will elaborate on the context in which top managers in the age of complexity operate.

Top-Management Frame of Reference for Change Leaders

Top management work requires navigation in the most comprehensive meaning of the word. By analogy to the longitudes and latitudes of the globe, it requires simultaneously monitoring four dimensions of orientation: the inside and outside world of the organization, as well as its present and future. It can be depicted using a simple cross-hairs diagram.