The world didn't come to an end on 9/11, so it transpires. But, then, outcomes in the real world seldom, if ever, match the total catastrophe envisaged in the unreal world created by fear and shock after a disaster. Life somehow or other goes on. Look at today's business press, and you will see that life has not only continued, but is beginning to vibrate with new happenings and heroes. As the stock market rises from the floor, so does the mood of management.
In one recent issue of Business Week, for example, a hero of the bygone boom days, Martin Sorrell of WPP Group was making optimistic noises about the future of the battered advertising industry - where WPP is No.2 after an amazing run of takeovers. Sorrell is still buying, moreover: the latest target being Cordiant, which was Sorrell's alma mater in the days when its proud name was Saatchi & Saatchi. 'Communication services', he says now, 'as a proportion of gross national product will bust through the highs of 2000'.
Those heights, until quite recently, looked like Everest seen from sea level. But the same issue of BW has found five managers among the 'Stars of Europe', people who are 'leaders at the forefront of change' and who have certainly been climbing over the past few years. Thus, at the largest tyre maker, family scion Edouard Michelin enjoyed an 18% rise in operating profits in 2002, with higher margins. At publishers Reed Elsevier, led by Crispin Davis, the operating profit leap was even greater, at 29%. At these companies, and at Severstal (Russian steel), Barilla (pasta, etc.), Puma (athletic shoes), these are busy, rewarding times.
NEW HEROES, NEW PRODUCTS
The times are generating new products as well as new heroes. For its 2003 Design Awards, BW received 1,279 applications from 15 countries, with winners ranging from the non-drip Dutch Boy Twist and Pour paint can to a brainwave from giant Philips - a 'Heartstart Home Defribillator'. Not surprisingly, the magazine has also found some innovative leaders, including one David Levin, the man behind Simbian (software for digital handhelds), and three others in telecoms, pharma, and fish (a Briton, Alan Jones, who has cornered two-thirds of France's burgeoning - and sturgeoning - caviar industry).
Plainly, some of these products and progenitors will fade away into nothing but faint memories. But it's certain that the appetite for new heroes (and heroines) will be fed and simultaneously created by the media machines. The bright super-stars of the dot.boom era are again riding high in the new firmament - Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs of Apple, John Chambers of Cisco, Microsoft's Bill Gates, Oracle's Larry Ellison, etc. Their revived reputations will spur a comeback for managers in general. The horrors of Enron, WorldCom, and so on, will recede into the background, and the managers of the West will recover much of the credit lost in the pay and other scandals.
But will the revival lead to fresh excesses in due course? The highly personalised accounts in BW suggest one source of future decline and fall - the undue canonisation of 'leaders'. There's usually scant evidence to demonstrate that the most publicised managers are any more able than hosts of others. Their most evident strength is that they dominate their boards. But that, so research has indicated, is a function of lasting long enough - half-a-dozen years will do the trick - at the helm.
TECHNICAL STANDARDS
It's not as if technical standards exist by which managers can be judged and compared - even though 'scientific management' has been a familiar phrase ever since the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the engineer who allegedly died with a stopwatch in his hand. That was his prime weapon in a private war against waste of time and general inefficiency. Taylor deeply understood the great truth enunciated by the scientist Lord Kelvin; what can be measured can be evaluated, improved, directed - in short, managed.
But managers know full well that management is not measurement. What is it, then? BW seems to believe that managers are somehow separate from entrepreneurs and innovators, since it has separate groups for all three among its 25 stars of the future. At first sight, somebody running a non-profit might seem to have no need for entrepreneurial or innovative skills. But don't you believe it. Non-profits and public service operations desperately need people who can develop or adopt new ideas and turn them into viable activities.
They also desperately need, as all businesses do, men and women whose skills are purely administrative: who can create smoothly running departments, remove obstacles from paths, bring order to chaos, and enable others to perform their roles more effectively. Their work also has a creative element. But the mechanic who keeps the cars on the road is not the same breed as the engineer who designs the machine. Managers need administrators, true: but administrators need managers more, if they want to work in a successful organisation.
A great restaurant needs a great chef far more than a great head waiter. In my latest book, The Fusion Manager, I echo the comparison, made over 30 years before in The Naked Manager, of management with cooking. Like the chef, the chief executive must deploy powers of planning and organisation to optimise the use of well-won resources. No two chefs, and no two CEOs will run their affairs identically, or with the same results, even if they had the same instructors. The latter can teach the principles of cookery or management; but teaching won't guarantee great cooking or managing.
'In both activities,' I continued, 'you ignore fundamentals at great risk - but sometimes succeed. In both, science can be extremely useful, but is no substitute for the art itself. ' Another parallel is that self-taught, self-developed practitioners can outdo the best and oldest pros. In both activities, perfection is seldom, if ever achieved - France's Gault-Millau guide used to cap its restaurant ratings at 19.5 out of 20, on the grounds that perfection is only given to God: yet the pursuit of that unattainable perfection should be a guiding principle - for chefs and managers.
RELIABLE MAXIMS
I would include the importance of that principle among the 'reliable maxims' which together with instructive anecdotes and the avoidance of dogmatism, I deemed (and still deem) more useful to cook/managers than detailed instructions. These aim to substitute book-learning for practical experience and hard results - and as Thinking Managers has pointed out, you cannot expect to manage by rote. You can derive those reliable maxims from studying the great exponents, but their actions and theories have the limited force of anecdotes, and fall well short of the power of universal laws.
That's why what is taught as management at business schools has only a partial bearing on the realities of business life. Nobody pretends that you can teach somebody to be an entrepreneur like John D.Rockefeller or an innovator like Edwin Land of Polaroid. You can show people (as Edward de Bono does so brilliantly) that they are capable of far more creativity than they (or others) believe. The test of their creativity is not their learning, but their results: not the technology, but the product.
This has great relevance to management, which, as many have written, is not a science, but more an art. Yet curiously I know no book which discusses The Art of Management: there is a very well-known book, widely read by managers, which deals with The Art of War - but this dates back to ancient China. Despite its antiquity, though, the book gives many useful analogies, not least that management is a close relative to military command: hence the almost universal adoption of military modes like the separation of line and staff, and the supreme, overweening authority of the Commander-in-Chief (for which read CEO).
TRIPLE TALENTS
As suggested above, this supremacy has resulted in a dangerous cult of adulation. If you are a Rockefeller or a Land, this can hardly be helped. Your creation has provided jobs, wealth and consumer benefits right round the world. You are inevitably a super-star. But stardom has nothing to do with the processes that make one company more effective than another. Those processes require the Triple Talents of the manager (who makes things happen), the entrepreneur (who makes things start) and the innovator (who makes things different - and better).
There's a fascinating illustration of the Triple Talents in the recent history of Procter & Gamble. As the inventor of modern brand marketing techniques (including the soap opera), P&G became a byword for innovative management (and innovative products like Crest toothpaste and Pampers diapers). But from the 1980s onwards, the great company fell into the hands of veteran managers whose efforts to innovate failed to compensate for slowing sales of the block-buster legacy brands. The inbred corporate culture, which had been seen as a great strength, was now regarded as a liability - a bulwark of conservatism.
When the weakness of the stock price finally made the need for change imperative, P&G turned to an insider, Durk Jager, who sought to bully the company and the consumer into submission to his will. When the new products and the earnings flopped, Jager was assisted out of the door. His replacement, A.G. Lafley, another veteran, has presided over a turnaround that's very visible in the share price (up 58%) - and has already been lionised in magazine profiles. From one of them, in BW, emerges a clear picture of Lafley's version of the first talent - management:
1. He gives human resources priority, personally tracking the performance of 200 senior executives.
2. He made managers concentrate on the major brands ('instead of trying to develop the next big thing').
3. He made an ally rather than an enemy of the culture.
4. He changed the style at the top: quiet manners; moving top executives away from their 11th floor eyrie; meeting with 12 seniors at a round table every Monday morning - and, above all, listening.
The above quartet admirably demonstrate that prime art of the manager - making it happen. But what Lafley has made happen is less impressive; indeed, it's fairly standard practice for the large corporation in the 2000s. He has cut employment, made two major acquisitions, replaced half the top 90 managers, and turned to outsourcing in a big way. It's hard to see any evidence here of the two other Triple Talents, entrepreneurship and innovation - and P&G will surely need both to meet intense competition and the immense power of Wal-Mart: the giant retailer could before many years have passed account for a third of P&G sales.
ARTISTIC GENIUS
Lafley could, of course, surprise his critics by dynamic moves in the marketplace and elsewhere. But it's asking a great deal of any leader to combine the Triple Talents in one person. What the great manager does is to emulate the artistic genius by seeing the whole picture. Read the wonderful letters of Vincent van Gogh, and you will see exact discussion of technique and detail - but all set within a total concept of the image he wanted to create on paper or canvas. The manager likewise needs imagination to see what the business can become and to enlist the help of the people best able to start new ventures and develop the different and better.
Then the CEO can hope to pass the acid test: passing on a company in such good shape that the successor managements will do even better. (Lafler's predecess-ors at P&G failed this test abysmally). Managers have spent a long and painful time waiting for the upturn. Now that it has probably arrived, the only sensible recipe is to deploy and develop the Triple Talents at all levels - then the good times can go on rolling.
