In the organization of the future there are only two groups of people: those who create value and those who coach into value creation.
In the organization of the future there is no place for “managers” because the psychological mechanism that justifies them is made redundant.
The need for a “manager” is a symptom that you need investment in either of those two groups of people. Therefore instead of spending money on proxies you spend on addressing the real needs of your organization.
The only investment that makes economic sense is the investment in value creation.
The fact that we separate subjects of scientific study (“management” in this case) and consider them isolated from everything else is a scientific mistake as Descartes himself pointed out in his “Rules for the Direction of the Mind”. Its what PMI terms a “reduccionist approach” to understanding systems. But we compound that error with another one which is to apply the same approach to the application of those principles. That is why we pay people just to “manage” instead of investing in a unified evolving semi-autonomous and light-governed value creation structure — the organization of the future.
Jack Dorsey (former CEO of Twitter) recently claimed that he can dismiss all middle managers and have direct access to his workers. He is correct in doing so not exactly because of his argument (based on automation technology) but because of the principle stated above.
Donald Reinertsen in his book “The Principles of Product Development Flow, 2nd Generation Lean Product Development” applies principles from network engineering, manufacturing, the military and others, to the approaches for managing complex systems under variability conditions. It is aligned with the principle stated by Descartes. Its proper science.
Compliments of the Author 