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MANAGING WITH SPIRIT OF MILLENNIUM
OCT 13, 1996 -
THE STAR
By Dr Tarcisius Chin
THE third millennium officially begins on Jan 1, 2001. But
sentiments are already fixing Jan 1, 2000, for the celebration
as many major nightspots for the evening of Dec 31, 1999,
throughout the world have already been booked out.
For many, the spirit of the new millennium is already upon us;
plans are, for example, under way for a millennium tower to be
built in London and in Tokyo, and many conferences and
seminars have been structured along its theme.
Managements as a discipline, has moved with the spirit of the
new millennium. Thinkers and scholars have assembled together
trends and have tried to construct the future that is fast
beckoning us. For over two decades, managers have been taught
not to react but to proact; proaction has moved to creating
the future we desire now and not waiting to meet the future,
often unprepared.
Let us examine some of the major trends that, collectively,
can help us install management approaches, tools, techniques
and applications to effectively menage the future. One obvious
trend is the breakdown of national and economic boundaries.
For many people, the borderless world is already a reality and
globalisation will continue its relentless march until all
barriers are removed. WTO is the platform to promote
globalisation, but Internet and emerging global communication
technologies will be the driving force.
Because of globalisation, competition will be intense and only
the highly innovative organisations able to respond swiftly to
generate high consumer value will survive and prosper. Size
has given way to speed and unorthodox but smart strategies
will prevail over conventional wisdom.
Take the case of the battle for software control over the
Internet. Microsoft has been the acknowledge leader in global
PC software distribution, first with DOS operating system in
1980 followed by Windows IO years later. Netscape, on the
other hand, focused on creating the Navigator browser which
still dominates the market.
But with the fantastic growth of Internet's World Wide Web and
online communications, it is very conceivable that Microsoft's
Windows could become obsolete as Navigator has the potential
to supplant the operating system and break Microsoft's
hammerlock on the PC industry.
The battle between Microsoft and Netscape has begun and
Microsoft introduced in very short time its own browser the
Internet Explorer 3.0, developed in just one year. By the end
of the year, an enhanced Explorer 4.0 is expected on the
market, this time developed over just six months!
Of managerial interest is the observation that product life
cycles are becoming astonishingly shorter and shorter. A year
ago, Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft stated "no matter how good
your product, you are only 18 months from failure." His is now
proven wrong. The span has been reduced to six months for
Explorer 3.0. And the frightening thing about this is that the
span is expected to shrink even further!
The lesson for management is that the winner is not the
company with the best product, but the team that can run the
longest the insanely fast product development treadmill.
Monolithic organisations just cannot respond quickly enough to
competitive pressures to win. Hence traditional organisational
structures have given way to guerilla teams and affinity
groups composed of multi skills (ala Mission Impossible, Dirty
Dozen and the Magnificent Seven), active around the clock not
centralised is a particular physical location, but connected
by a singularity of purpose.
The success of Asea Brown Boveri is that its workforce is
generally not in excess of 200 people in a given
organisational unit. Autonomous but integrated groups drawing
upon the right combination or human talent is what guerilla
teams are about.
Even in the large organisation of Microsoft (19,641
employees), Internet Explorer began with eight employees in
August last year moving to 30 by number and by the time it was
released on Aug 13 this year the number had risen to 800
employees. The management lesson is that guerilla teams are
fluid and structured around requirements not the other way
round.
And who will be the managers leading the guerrilla teams? In
the case or Microsoft vs Netscape it was Bill Gates himself
who demonstrated his competence as a worldclass CEO by driving
and transforming the company to exploit the potential of the
Internet with considerable corporate agility.
What is the management lesson in this for Malaysian managers?
In essence, the effective manager of the future has to be the
personification of a leader, manager and entrepreneur wrapped
in one person.
Many of our managers are technocrats operating within a
structure and context of responsibilities to deliver a given
performance. He is given identifiable resources and a budget
to operate from. He works within limits of authority and
frequently keeps his nose clean by not shaking the corporate
boat, plays, politics and walks the safe ground.
This sounds like the role of a col onel in the armed forces.
If we agree that the conventional army is no longer
appropriate for modern corporate warfare, we need guerilla
leaders who can also exhibit entrepreneurial flair for new
ideas processes and technologies and who also have the soft
skills to lead, communicate, motivate, negotiate and implement
all these wonderful new products and services to fight the
competition.
The attributes of management leadership and entrepreneurship
are not exclusive to Bill Gates or to CEOs, but can also be
stimulated and nurtured at every level of the managerial
hierarchy .There is a leadership management entreprenuer
continuum which demands from time to time a dominance of one
feature over the other two, but over time all three features
will have to be called upon if we seek to be an effective
manager for the future.
Al higher levels of management, leadership and
entrepreneurship will dominate over technical management, but
these qualities will need to be developed on lower levels if
proaction is our creed.
As we seek to develop generational managers the Malaysian
Institute or Management has already moved vigorously towards
developing and shaping the leadership and entrepreneurial
talents of our younger managers. We have been doing this as
our response to the new millennium and the inspiration of
Vision 2020.
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