4.2.2 Companies as merchandise
4.2.3 Employees’ co-determination
4.2.4 Compliance with laws and voluntary commitments
4.2.5 Diversity
4.2.6 Well-being
4.2.7 Environmental protection
4.3 Control systems for management with decency
4.3.1 Regular customer surveys
4.3.2 Regular employee surveys
4.3.3 Supervisor evaluation and 360° feedback
5 Modern management concepts from the perspective of good leadership
5.1 Traditional management concepts
5.1.1 Process and quality management
5.1.2 Lean management and business re-engineering
5.1.3 Project management and multi-project management
5.1.4 Change management in the sense of planned change
5.2 Generative management concepts
5.2.1 Change management in the sense of ‘learning organisations’
5.2.2 Innovation management
5.2.3 Knowledge management
5.2.4 Error management: a positive culture of dealing with mistakes
5.2.5 Agility
5.3 Do management concepts restrict or expand opportunities?
6 Case studies of good management
6.1 Working together: the works council as financial controller
6.2 The new headteacher
6.3 Do-it-yourself theatre!
6.4 The branch is closed, and the boss is leaving too!
6.5 Life on a skateboard: up, down and up again!
6.6 Buurtzorg: close to people
6.7 Support from initiatives for businesses
7 The hope of political support for fair management
Acknowledgements
Index of keywords
Index of persons
Bibliography
Annotations
List of figures
Fig. 1: The implicit values of business
Fig. 2: Graph of maximum profit calculation
Fig. 3: Values of fair management
Fig. 4: Frame of reference for dark management
Fig. 5: Aspects of good staff management
Fig. 6: Hierarchical relations between economic goals
Fig. 7: Example for formulating minutes
Fig. 8: Excerpt from an example task analysis for a team leader
Fig. 9: Example of a detailed task description as part of a task analysis (excerpt)
Fig. 10: The Johari Window
Fig. 11: Johari Window after feedback
Fig. 12: Three-step process of organisational change according to Kurt Lewin
Fig. 13: Comparison of concepts of change based closely on Georg Schreyögg
Fig. 14: Comparison of management concepts
Preface
Economics has been the subject of criticism for some time, although this criticism is primarily directed at economics theory. Walter Otto Ötsch (Mythos Markt [The Myth of the Market]), Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century), Peter and Andrew Schiff (How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes), Joseph Stiglitz (People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent) and others trace back global and national economic problems to an inadequate theoretical structure. Regarding the 2008 financial crisis, David Orrell even concludes: ‘I criticise the mathematical models that the economists use, not because they didn’t predict the crisis… I criticise them for having made the crisis possible in the first place. They created a false sense of security, like putting on a seat belt that isn’t anchored to anything.’1
This book is not primarily about calling into question the foundations of economic theory and the theory of business, which is closely related to it. Rather, it aims to draw attention to the hazardous yet mostly unheeded side effects of the theory of business. The extremely questionable conceptions of value which the theory of business is implicitly founded on are the starting point of these considerations.
In my opinion, alongside the proper amount of theory, business studies also conveys values which must have a considerable influence on current and future managers, even if (or maybe because) this occurs subliminally. Conveying these dubious yet rarely questioned values encourages the conditions within the economy that the public quite rightly lament. The results are exploited resources, greedy executives, avaricious consumers, demotivated workers, burnout and even death!
The questionable values of business studies contribute to reducing the people within a company to a factor of production to be controlled just like the machines. From this derives the widespread paradigm of the manager who has to have everything under control and keep it that way. This book contrasts this approach of ruling with a model of management that puts the focus on the initiative of the employees. In this sense, leading means creating a framework in which employees have the desire to be successful by themselves and will do whatever it takes to remain successful. This ‘Guide to fair management’ serves as a basis for this, which I present to you as an alternative framework for management.
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Why should you read this book?
1 This book discusses serious weak points in the traditional teaching of business studies. In particular,
