Management 2.0: the Gary Hamel’s Vision

A very intersting post by Gary Hamel supports the Management 2.0 Hackathon: a large, online, problem-solving event that will harness the collective intelligence of progressive management practitioners and technologists from around the world, using a social networking platform to collaborate. The Hackathon is a hands-on, collaborative effort focused on generating fresh and practical answers to today’s management challenges, as well as equipping participants with the skills to become inspired management innovators.

Gary Hamel’s note and the Management 2.0 Hackathon iniziative (by the way: according with Wikipedia, the term hackathon is a portmanteau formed from the intellectual slang hack and marathon. Curioser and curioser, it sounds pretty coherent with our Postmodern Alice Project) confirm the importance of the Humanistic Management 2.0: “The management model that predominates in most organizations has its roots in the early 20^th century”, writes Hamel.  ”At that time, management innova­tors were focused on the challenge of achieving efficiency at scale.  Their solution was the bureaucratic organization, with its emphasis on standardiza­tion, specialization, hierarchy, conformance and control.  These principles comprise the philosophical foundations of Management 1.0, and are deeply baked into management mindsets and processes.  In virtually every organization, one finds that power cascades down, that strate­gies get set at the top, that tasks are assigned and not chosen, that supervi­sors review subordinates rather than the other way around, that control is imposed, and that senior executives allocate resources.

Before the Web, it was hard to imagine alternatives to manage­ment orthodoxy.  But the Internet has spawned a Cambrian explosion of new organizational life forms–where coordination occurs without centraliza­tion, where power is the product of contribution rather than posi­tion, where the wisdom of the many trumps the authority of the few, where novel viewpoints get amplified rather than squelched, where commu­nities form spontane­ously around shared interests, where opportuni­ties to “opt-in” blur the line between vocation and hobby, where titles and credentials count for less than value-added, where perfor­mance is judged by your peers, and where influence comes from sharing information, not from hoarding it.”

It is possible to read the whole post here.