The abolition of geography by telecommunications is proceeding so rapidly that most businesses have yet to catch up. One entrepreneur, however, got lucky. He had expanded all over the globe, selling in 75 countries and opening subsidiaries in a third of them. He was about to establish a regional office to coordinate the furthest flung satellites, in Asia Pacific, when he made a sudden, marvellous discovery: teleconferencing.
Plans for a regional HQ were promptly scrapped, saving much money, killing the imminent extra layer of potential bureaucracy, and maintaining his personal contact with the managers running the national companies. The teleconferences work fine, and his organisation has stayed flat and fast. Since delayering and speed of reaction are two of the prime virtues in today's management, other companies must surely reach the same conclusion: manage with the full, flexible aid of information technology, not along the tramlines laid down by organisation charts.
The impact of communications on management is nothing new. Peter Drucker has often celebrated the remarkable effectiveness of the men who ruled India. Because messages took so long to reach distant officials, and so long to come back, their superiors had to agree objectives and action plans at the start; let subordinates get on with the job; and judge them by success against plan. That elegant simplicity vanished in the era of worldwide telephony and jet travel: superiors and bureaucrats could interfere to their hearts' content - and the discontent of everybody else.
Just as electronic shopping turns the wheel full circle (back to the home delivery of earlier times), so electronic management is returning to the Indian principle. The boss, like my entrepreneur, will directly contact managers who are delegated full responsibility to perform agreed tasks. But modern bosses have an advantage. Thanks again to IT, they can check on performance day-to-day (hour-to-hour, if they're wholly neurotic) without having to bother anybody with questions. The answers will all be instantly available via the system.
In theory, senior management's ability to 'dig down' the database to check on sales in Droitwich, Osaka and Cape Town, or to verify profit margins in Bangkok, Wichita and Lima, makes possible more Draconian control than the most dedicated bureaucrats ever envisaged. But long ago the telephone was expected to have the same effect, reducing middle managers to mere tools of the top. Instead, as Shoshana Zuboff has pointed out, the phone liberated subordinates. Operating at a safe distance, they were readier to answer back, argue, put their own points of view.
Similarly, the new tools for managing at a distance are strengthening the trend for managers to become more and more like consultants. The latter have long been peripatetic, depending on IT to keep in touch with their offices and files. Now managers work increasingly outside the conventional structure of offices and departments - often operating in multi-disciplinary, cross-functional teams whose location is determined by their projects. Those may even be based outside the company altogether; say, on a customer's premises, exploiting the huge benefits of operating supplier partnerships across the business system.
Tomorrow's managers will spend even less time in their offices, and even more living out of briefcases which contain the means of communication - with the laptop revolution now enhanced by the Internet. The age of PDAs (personal digital assistants) is dawning, too. To all intents and purposes, 21st century executives will be in constant touch with their work. That has its downside. Already, surveys report increases in stress as managers find it harder, even impossible, to 'get away from it all'. With distance management, there's no 'away.'
This may be a problem of transition. There's also an upside. Managers can now work from home, just like writers and artists. All office facilities can be replicated with ease; colleagues can be consulted as easily; and the stresses of commuting and city life are gone. The only issue is the extent to which eye-to-eye contact (or hand-to-hand combat, in some business situations) can be eliminated. The revolution in telecommunications, after all, hasn't denuded airlines of business class customers: quite the reverse.
That, too, may be a catch-up transition. The revolution is so far-reaching in its potential that even far-sighted thinkers, let alone practical managers, have yet to come to full terms with the changes. Indeed, even the distinguished contributors to a collection of essays entitled Rethinking the Future (Nicholas Brealey), assembled by Rowan Gibson, barely mention the telecommunications revolution, managing at a distance, or even the Internet. That's not surprising, in view of one passage from contributor Warren Bennis:
'I have a board in my leadership institute, made up of very terrific leaders, and they all have e-mail. But when I asked how many of them use it, only half of the hands went up, and some of those went up rather lamely. Rather haltingly.'
Yet what's new? Microsoft's Bill Gates has been using e-mail as a distance management tool for years. When I wrote a book on networking called Culture Shock, sub-titled The Office Revolution, I mentioned a British chief executive who happily ran his company from home: that book was published in 1990, long before the World Wide Web. Despite the headlong advance of the technology in the intervening years, the book still seems visionary: including the quote, from Francis Kinsman, that 'many managers in the next century will be faced with the facts of ferociously competitive international telecommuting.'
So they will, once their companies get round (as they must) to embracing their new technological opportunities. But ferocity will probably be less evident than liberation. Much managerial frustration stems from inability to contact the right person at the right time, or to get the right information in the right place, or to be certain that the right actions are being taken with the right results. Today, managers can achieve at a great distance what, in the past, they couldn't achieve under their very own noses.
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