by Hans Stoisser (with contributions from Lukas Michel)
THIS BLOGPOST WAS FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE DRUCKERFORUM’S BLOG
“Enough! Enough of the imbalances that is destroying our democracies, our planet, and ourselves,” writes the Canadian management thinker Henry Mintzberg.“ A society out of balance, with power concentrated in a privileged elite, can be ripe for revolution.” – How can that be?
In the West it has been our enduring crisis: an overleveraged financial economy, huge debts and imbalances, increasing inequalities, and resistant high unemployment rates. At the same time we see stock markets at all-time highs and CEOs earning obscene amounts of money. This is what Henry Mintzberg is referring to and what is threatening to undermine our basic institutions like democracy, market economy, rule of law, and civil society.
A different global society
Additionally, the crisis in the West together with Asia’s and specifically China’s positive economic track record has led to the replacement of the liberal democratic nation state as the role model for the global society by the state capitalistic system. In fact, the new model is a combination of state-capitalism – where the state is seen as an important actor in the otherwise corporate world – and shareholder value thinking – where the purpose of a business to make money is seen as an overall good for society – which is highly attractive for elites everywhere in the world. Authoritarian regimes, together with an oligarchic private ownership, patriarchic societies, the rule of elites instead of law, and an oppressed civil society, are again in advance. This has resulted in the rise of an unprecedented rich ruling class from China to Russia, Saudi Arabia to Brazil, and Nigeria to Angola. Hence, the West’s self-inflicted crisis is also backfiring on it from the outside its boundaries and a different form of global society is emerging. Economic and social crisis inside, less influence and reduced power in the rest of the world, what can the West do to not destroy its basic institutions? Assuming that the emerging global society is a self-organizing social system, solutions along the political left-right scheme become meaningless. No single government or multinational corporation has enough power to control the system. It is the interplay of decisions and actions taken by governments, supra-national institutions, civil society organizations, national and multinational companies and the like which is shaping the future of our planet. Looking for high-level parameters capable of influencing the global society, Peter Drucker has given us a hint. Long ago he realized that knowledge societies are societies of organizations with the single organization as a key element. And behind each of these interdependent organizations are people whose practice is put to work by an “operating system”. And this, of course, is …… the Art of Management.
While the choice of the management system is independent of the type or the activities of an organization, it is a value-decision that articulates fundamental principles, ideas and values of what we think an organization and hence society is all about. With the global triumph of mainstream management thinking, principles center almost solely along financial values and financial engineering. To overcome its implicit logic of “winner takes all” we need a managerial operating system, which helps managers to deal with the increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of our emerging global society. We think such a system can only be based on an appreciation of the individual and a sustainable use of our planet.A European Humanistic Management Movement
Europe has come a long way to arrive at its “humanistic worldview”. From ancient Greece to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation right up to the modern peace project called the European Union. European Humanism with Kant and Rousseau brought forward the concept of self-responsibility as the human trait that determines motivation and meaning. The appreciation of the self-responsible individual as a manager, employee, customer or any other stakeholder is the solution for a higher ability of organizations to act in a turbulent environment. Only a people-centered management based on humanistic values allows drawing on the ingenuity and creativity of the human beings. In any organization values are articulated as operational principles, which guide its decisions and actions. For aEuropean Humanistic Management Movement we think the following constituting principles can be put forward:- The raison-d’être of any organization is value creation for society (public value) and not maximizing the value of the own organization.
- The operating system and toolbox, guiding decisions and actions, follow systems and design thinking rather than a pre-dominant financial focus.
- Organizations shall be adapted to people rather than people to organizations.
- Configuring everyone’s toolbox to cope with the challenges of a dynamic environment is an ongoing management task.
