The third road of management

Why this home page? The world has changed and change is just accelerating. This requires a new way of managing global organizations.
There are two schools of thought. The first one, widespread in Japanese companies, relies on permanent operational improvement and independence left to each function and region in a bottom-up way. The other one, mainly taught in most MBA’s, tells us that a limited number of look alike informed people, under the leadership of a C suite executive, decide the strategy of the organization in a top-down way.
Both ignore the fact that the world has become more global and complex at the same time. Customer trends are more homogeneous globally and heterogeneous locally.
There is a different way of managing a global organization that ensures the consistency and alignment of the teams through a strong strategy and the flexibility of the bottom-up approach with initiative taking of each actor.
I have experimented it as an actor and as a leader.
The third road of management combines indeed the strengths of the existing schools of thought. In this new way of operating where the global strategy is crowd-sourced from the teams who will have to execute and the final decision is left to them. It is what we call the “Freedom within a Frame” principle where the frame is collectively defined and the freedom left to the ones who execute.
This principle is based on three beliefs
1. Value creation is more important than cost control alone and emerges from everywhere.
2. People want to be empowered and are much stronger if they are part of the big picture
3. Future winners will need to have a strong global differentiation and high level of flexibility at the same time.
As it is a crowd sourcing and collective approach, it is a learning process and I am therefore expecting as much feedback as possible. Eventually we will write a book on this revolutionary approach.
Thanks for you interest.
GG