Gautam Ghosh on Management

Gautam Ghosh writes a blog that provides his “musings on the corporate world, management & strategy, HRD, training, innovation & creativity, knowledge management & creation, organizational development, the “new” economy, systems thinking, complexity theory, etc.”

He offers a nice weekend musing that I immediately aligned with. Gautam writes, “It is my view that organizations (of any form) are unnatural entities with their command and control structures and secretive ways. For organizations to survive and thrive they need to embrace the ways of a natural human community (which they already are, but pretend not to be).” He goes to quote Dave Pollard who points out:

“James Surowiecki (who wrote in his book The Wisdom of Crowds), laments the fact that, despite compelling evidence that executives and experts are poor at making decisions, and that the collective wisdom of large numbers of people is very much better at it, few businesses rigorously canvass their employees and customers for anything more than inconsequential assessments after the decisions have already been made. “

Gautam concludes, “Once we start discovering the wisdom rather than just the 'optimum decision' business will cease to be seen as extractive by the rest of community. But how do we get there?”

This is a question that Zuboff and Maxim tackle in The Support Economy and one I have posted on a bit and the a bit more. It is the need tor transition from the command and control management of the industrial economy to the community driven organization required by the knowledge economy where everyone’s view counts (or should be counted). There are no easy answers but eBay is the poster child for the community driven organization and one of the fastest grwoing.

Comments

[Gautam]

Hi Bill

Thanks for reading and pointing me to your thoughts. Will go through them in detail !

Great to discover people who share one's values all over the blogosphere !

Warm regards
Gautam