Maybe it’s time to change something…

In 1900, the average life expectancy in the United States was 47 years. Only 6% of homes had a telephone, and only 14% had a bathtub. The car fleet consisted of 8,000 vehicles, and there were 144 miles of paved roads in the country, just over 230 kilometers. And a particularly revealing fact: at that time, right at the beginning of the last century, 42% of the workforce was still dedicated to agriculture. Needless to say, the situation has changed radically. In almost all areas, today’s world has very little to do with that of the early twentieth century.

However, there is a rather striking exception. Not everything has changed at the same pace. To prove this, it is enough to analyze the situation in the United States in 1900 from another perspective, emphasizing other aspects of reality: by then there was already the standard job description, and production planning, cost accounting and profit analysis were also beginning to be common practices. Not only that. Companies already applied financial controls, variable salaries and incentives, and had human resources departments. Surprising, isn’t it? In 1900 the same management practices were applied that we still use today, more than a century later…

This means that something is not working well in the system. There is a worrying gap. Society today is absolutely different from that of 1900. Everything has changed. People, infrastructures, the flow of information, the possibilities of communicating and accessing increasingly broad and shared knowledge. And yet, management practices remain substantially the same as they were in 1900, at the beginning of the last century. In other words, companies are trying to face an absolutely new situation with tools from the past. And so the results cannot be satisfactory, neither for organizations nor for the people who are part of them. That is why I argue that, perhaps, the time has come to change something… What do you think?

We have to reinvent ourselves as leaders and as people, yes. But where do we start? What can we do? Surely no one has the exact answer, but I will dare to give three fundamental keys that, in my experience, can help us face change. We need:

• Innovate in Management as we know it today, creating flexible organizations, designed for people, that are not hostile to innovation and that allow us to fulfill ourselves and give the best of ourselves.

• Develop new capabilities to reinvent ourselves as managers and make the most of the enormous opportunities for value creation offered by the Era of Mass Collaboration.

• Find new sources of energy. In times of accelerated change, energy, and not time, is the most valuable resource. The reality of each day kills our passions and prevents us from seeing the future.

I will try to develop these ideas in the next posts.

*You can see the content of this post summarized in the following presentation: