Human capital and management 2.0 ~ Strategic Human Capital Management (HCM) Blog

Tuesday, 6 January 2009

Human capital and management 2.0

Happy New Year.

This month's Management Today carries an article on Gary Hamel's thinking around Management 2.0: 'Corporate Apocalypse'. I think Hamel is leading some of the most exciting research currently being undertaken anywhere, and want to summarise some of this here.

The article starts by echoing my own views on the connection between the the recent problems in the City leading to the current recession, and today's organisational and people management practices:

"The bomb that has blown up the heart of the world's financial system was not primarily financial. It's true that finance provided the high explosive in the shape of the structured vehicles, collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and derivatives devised by the rocket scientists of Wall Street and the City. But it needed a detonator to set them off: the unfit-for-purpose management model that has governed the way our companies work for the last 40 years."

It then warns that "the world recession unleashed by financial excess now threatens an entire genus of Management 1.0 corporations" and quotes Hamel's colleague, Julian Birkinshaw, who advises companies to pay more attention to nurturing purpose, organisation and human capital:

Purpose:

"The need for companies to articulate a purpose beyond making money (a conference near-consensus), distributed leadership and strategy- making, the fostering of community and citizenship, building trust"

Organisation:

"Tools and techniques for harnessing the 'wisdom of crowds' - crowdsourcing, information markets, virtual worlds and games - will emerge from Web 2.0."

Human capital:

"Trust - an abused word, but without which no lasting relationship is possible. Reinstating requisite trust between investors, consumers, suppliers and company is an essential part of Management 2.0."

The article goes on to note that the challenge for management 2.0 will be:

"Re-orienting management from compliance to creativity, from flogging efficiencies out of existing resources to generating new ones, from zero-sum to positive-sum by recognising."

In 2009, this blog (and its sister blog) will continue to help readers create value out of purpose, organisation and human capital.

I hope you'll keep reading, and if you want to subscribe in your reader, my blogs feeds are http://feeds.feedburner.com/JonIngham and http://feeds.feedburner.com/Social-Business.

Hamel's blog and feed are at http://blogs.wsj.com/management and http://blogs.wsj.com/management/feed.