Every year I turn with enthusiasm to the Harvard Business Review’s list of ‘breakthrough ideas‘. This year, published in February, there are no less than 20, ranging from The Synthesising Leader via peer-to-peer leadership development to ‘Why they call it work’. Looking through these gave me a breakthrough idea of my own. There are no breakthrough ideas at this moment in management time.
Take The Synthesising Leader. The summary says that ‘the ability to decide which data to heed, which to ignore, and how to organise and communicate information will be among the most important traits of business executives in this century’. The only answer I can think of to that is ’so what else is new?’ This contribution is neither a breakthrough, nor especially relevant in the year 2006.
Peer-to-Peer Leadership challenges ‘the effectiveness of conventional methods’ for training next-generation executives; conventionally, senior leaders impart general, sometimes out-dated, principles to junior managers. But the interaction with peers has always been a vital part of good management development, both in the classroom and in the working environment.
Why They Call It Work holds that ‘employees should not demand that their companies imbue their lives with meaning’. In fact, the suggested dependence faded long ago, when the corporation man and corporate loyalty started going out of the window. The contributor of this idea says that people’s jobs should be worth doing - commensurate with their skills, experiences, priorities and goals. He says ‘that should be meaningful enough’, but what he describes has being good people management practice for as long as I care to remember.
Now, there are useful tips and notions in each of the 20 ideas. If they don’t constitute breakthroughs (and they don’t) it may be connected with the general decline in management’s eminence as a branch of human sciences. Nobody believes in the big management idea any more. That any prove to be a good thing - so long as managers remember the importance of finding their own important thoughts.
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