Four More Key Lessons From The 2008 ‘Moonshots For Management’

As the challenge of re-imagining the concept of management re-emerges, it is instructive to learn from the 2008 ‘Moonshots For Management’—a group of 35 management scholars and senior executives, led by Gary Hamel, that set out to “define an agenda for management during the next 100 years.” My last article identified five key changes that actually occurred to management over the next 15 years that the Moonshots group missed. Here are four more key elements whose importance the Moonshots group seem to have missed, including the foundational teachings of Peter Drucker back in 1954.

1. The Moonshots Group Missed That Industrial-Era Management Operates Like An Auto-Immune System

The Moonshots group noted that “The current management model is an integrated whole that can’t be easily broken into pieces.” But the Moonshots group treated industrial-era management as if it did consist of 25 separate “challenges.”

The Moonshots group recognized that existing management processes had a built-in resistance to change: “Management processes often contain subtle biases that favor continuity over change. … While continuity is important, these subtle, baked-in preferences for the status quo must be exposed, examined, and, if necessary, excised.”

What the Moonshots group failed to identify was that the inbuilt resistance to change went beyond each individual process. The processes of industrial era management to change worked together as a complex adaptive system, like the auto-immune system of the human body. As a result, when a change was being pursued in one area, such as innovation, the other processes of industrial-era management—budget, strategy, HR, risk management, and so on—would join to together to prevent the change.

Industrial-era management is thus not amenable to change by piecemeal actions. What is needed is a way to change a resilient complex adaptive system.

2. The Moonshots Group Missed The Need For A Resilient New Complex Adaptive Systems

As the Moonshots group missed that in industrial-era management was a resilient complex adaptive system, they showed no signs of recognizing that, to change it, they would need a new, more powerful complex adaptive system to replace it, including different mindsets, values, and assumptions. In other words, the Moonshot group gave no sign of grasping what they needed to be looking for.

Instead, the Moonshots group proposed a set of 25 unconnected “challenges”, each of which might have had potential as component of a new complex adaptive system But without the framework of a new complex adaptive system, the prospects of any of those 25 challenges leading to any significant positive change was slim. As the Moonshots group presented no coherent vision of a new complex adaptive system, its individual proposals for change made limited progress.

3. The Moonshots Group Missed The Resilient Complex Adaptive System That Was Already Emerging

The Moonshots group dismissed in principle the idea that the solution to the problem of industrial-era management might lie in current management practice. “All too often,” the Moonshots group wrote, “scholars have been content to codify best practice instead of looking beyond it. Practitioners have been more inclined to ask ‘Has anybody else done this?’ than ‘Isn’t this worth trying?’ What’s needed are daring goals that will motivate a search for radical new ways of mobilizing and organizing human capabilities.”

By looking for “radical new ways of mobilizing and organizing human capabilities” beyond current practice, they missed the possibility that radical new ways of managing were already being tested and implemented. Thus the Moonshots group failed to notice the extraordinary experiments being carried out with great success on a large scale by firms such as Apple, Amazon, and Google, with their intense customer focus and the decentralized innovation practices. Those firms were not yet the most valuable firms in the world. That would take another five years. But these firms were growing very fast. The Moonshots group failed to realize that if the growth of these firms continued, they would soon be the most valuable firms on the planet.

4. The Moonshots Group Also Missed The Founding Ideas Of Modern Management

The Moonshots group not only missed the ideas that firms like Apple, Google, and Amazon had been implementing with great success for than ten years. They also failed to notice that the approach of these firms did not have its origin in some obscure management theorist. The ideas had been clearly articulated in the writing of the father of modern management, Peter Drucker, in his 1954 book, The Practice Of Management. In that book, Drucker stated principles that closely resemble what Apple, Amazon and Google were already implementing in 2008 with great success.

· “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.” (p.37)

· Marketing is the whole business seen from … the customer’s point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must therefore permeate all areas of the enterprise.” (p.38)

· “In the organization of business enterprise innovation ... extends across all parts of the business, all functions, all activities.” (p.40)

· “Managing a business must always be entrepreneurial in character. It cannot be a bureaucratic, an administrative or even a policy-making job. (p.47)

· “The spirit of an organization is created from the top.” (p.158)

· “Management cannot create leaders. It can only create the conditions under which potential leadership qualities become effective (p.159)

· “Central-office staffs seriously impede the performance of operating managers.” (p.242)

The Moonshots group wrote in their report of the need for “new minds unencumbered by old beliefs … that may help us escape the limitations of tradition-encrusted management practices.” This would, they said, require “hunting for new principles in fields as diverse as anthropology, biology, design, political science, urban planning, and theology.”

But in retrospect, it is clearer that the actual solution to many of management’s ills lay much closer to home. It turned out to lie, less in “hunting for new principles in new fields,” and more in restoring the founding ideas of management theory put forward by Peter Drucker in 1954.

The problem facing the Moonshot group lay less in dropping “old beliefs” and more in getting back to the founding principles of management that had been put forward by Peter Drucker in 1954, and that had somehow been lost sight of—ideas that were already in 2008 being energetically implemented by firms that would soon be the most valuable firms on the planet.

And read also:

Why Peter Drucker Is The Albert Einstein Of Management

Peter Drucker's Virtuous Firm Vs. 'The World's Dumbest Idea'