Page 44 - Chapter One

12 The Management Shift

community and autonomy. Authority is distributed and decisions are made
on the basis of knowledge rather than a formal position in organizational
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hierarchy and organizations are managed holistically as complex adaptive
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systems.
Many leading management thinkers have recognized the need for this
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shift. In addition to Peter Drucker, examples include Charles Handy,
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Henry Mintzberg and Gary Hamel. A synthesis of a large body of the
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literature on leading knowledge workers also reveals that in order to
foster innovation in knowledge- based organizations, a different leadership

style is needed, based on horizontal rather than vertical leadership, where
power and authority are distributed on the basis of knowledge.
The Management 2.0 Hackathon, conducted within the Management
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Innovation eXchange (MIX), an online community of over 20,000 leading
management thinkers and practitioners passionate about reinventing
management, generated a set of principles that contributors recommended
organizations should adopt: Openness, Community, Meritocracy,
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Activism, Collaboration, Meaning, Autonomy, Serendipity, Decentralization,
Experimentation, Speed and Trust.

Many of these principles are not new and have been advocated by
prominent thinkers in management literature. For example, in their
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book The Puritan Gift, Kenneth and William Hopper argue that the
key management principles that include decentralization of decision-
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making were brought to the US by Puritans in the 17 century and
were responsible for the economic prosperity of the US, as well as the
prosperity of the Far East when these principles were in turn brought
th
there by Americans in the 20 century.
Peter Drucker’s timeless wisdom

Management based on Taylor’s ideas is in contrast with ideas advocated
by one of the most influential management thinkers, Peter Drucker. He
has advocated that the task needs to be understood by those who are
involved in executing it; that employees need to be given autonomy;
that organizations should strive to achieve continuous innovation; that