Schelling. Simon received the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his study of decision making, and Schelling in 2005 for his game-theoretic work on conflicts and cooperation. Simon’s research brought a radically new perspective on cognitive processes, how the individual decides and acts, while Schelling’s helped us better understand interactions between individuals and the effect of these interactions on overall results, which can be very different from their individual intent. Other important intellectual contributors are Michel Crozier and Robert Axelrod. Crozier started his career by studying labor movements in the United States after World War II and then created a new approach called the strategic analysis of organizations. Axelrod is a political scientist who has helped us better understand cooperation as an evolutionary process and also coined concepts we have used to name some of the simple rules.16
These developments have led to a variety of new perspectives on organizations and to useful insights about human behavior that are extremely relevant to how organizations manage complexity. For example:
Human behavior is strategic. People adapt to their environment strategically (in the sense that game theory uses the term) in order to fulfill certain objectives or goals. They may be more or less conscious of those goals, but the goals can be identified by studying carefully how they act. In this respect, human behavior can always be analyzed as a rational strategy in an individual’s context; there are always “good reasons” (in the sense of reasons with explanatory power) for how people behave.17
Formal rules and procedures don’t have a predetermined effect on people’s behavior. Rather, people actively interpret rules and use them as a resource to fulfill their goals. What matters are not the rules, but the ways people use them.
Cooperation isn’t just some taken-for-granted value or goal (the desire that people “work together as a team”). It is a complex social process, hard to create and easy to destroy. Organizations have to create the right context for cooperation.
Power isn’t a necessary evil or source of coercion. It is a critical resource for the individual in organizations and for mobilizing collective action.
These concepts are the basis on which the six rules operate and why these rules work, especially given the complexity that is making all traditional hard and soft management approaches obsolete. Our focus with the six simple rules has been on making these concepts actionable—that is, to help managers to use them in their day-to-day work running business organizations. You can think of the six simple rules as guidelines for practice. Because all performance issues arise from people’s actions, decisions, and interactions—what we call behaviors in this book—the six rules provide the basis for tackling the whole lineup of organizational challenges, including productivity, innovation, growth, and cultural transformation.
Getting Started
Each of the six chapters of this book is organized around one of the simple rules. The purpose of the simple rules is to let managers really manage, to use the tools that managers have always used—strategy setting and organizational design—but for a different end and a far more effective outcome. The rules help managers foster both autonomy and cooperation to effectively handle business complexity and prevent much organizational complicatedness. Unlike other recent books that propose new roles for managers, we focus less on psychological issues of individual motivation and one-to-one interactions and more on managing large-scale situations and the collective properties (for instance, productivity and innovation) that emerge from multiple interactions among groups, units, and teams.18 There is a lot of loose talk these days about self-organizing systems and the end of management. Let’s be clear: we believe in the essential role of management. But we contend that traditional methods, developed for a different, less complex era, are obsolete or fast becoming so. Let’s begin, then, with the first fundamental rule of management, simple rule one—understand what your people do.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
