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This week’s featured book came to us from our friends across the pond @businessreads. You can read all about this must-have leadership title below and pick up your own copy by clicking here. Already read it? Let us know what you think in the comments!
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Many leaders realize that in today’s economy it will no longer be the smart highly paid people in the corporate center that drive success. Instead it will come from harnessing the knowledge and creativity of all their people, especially those that work at the interface between the organization and its customers. They also know that their budget-driven management processes are too slow, rigid and expensive and encourage the wrong behaviour. But business leaders are on the horns of a dilemma. How do they empower their people and adapt to change without losing control?
This book is about rethinking how we manage organizations in a post-industrial, post credit crunch world where innovative management models represent the only remaining source of sustainable competitive advantage.
Drawing on their work within the ‘Beyond Budgeting’ movement over the past twelve years including many interviews and case studies Jeremy Hope, Peter Bunce and Franz Röösli set out in this book an executive guide to building a more empowered and adaptive organization based on 12 management principles:
Principle #1 – Values: Bind people to a common cause, not a central plan
Principle #2 – Governance: Govern through shared values and sound judgment, not detailed rules and regulations
Principle #3 – Transparency: Make information open and transparent, don’t restrict and control it
Principle #4 – Teams: Organize around a network of accountable teams, not centralized functions
Principle #5 – Trust: Trust teams to regulate and improve their performance; don’t micro-manage them
Principle #6 – Accountability: Base accountability on holistic criteria and peer reviews, not on hierarchical relationships
Principle #7 – Goals: Set ambitious medium-term goals, not short-term negotiated targets
Principle #8 – Rewards: Base rewards on relative performance, not fixed targets
Principle #9 – Planning: Make planning a continuous and inclusive process, not a top-down annual event
Principle #10 – Coordination: Coordinate interactions dynamically, not through annual budgets
Principle #11- Resources: Make resources available just-in-time, not just-in-case
Principle #12 – Controls: Base controls on fast, frequent feedback, not on budget variances
These principles will enable and encourage a cultural climate change that will enable your organization to attract and keep the best people as well as drive continuous adaptation, innovation and growth.
They define the new management model for the twenty-first century organization.
Praise for the Book
“Every executive will have already had to face the well-known dilemma between trust and control. Based on the principles described, the authors succeed in finding a way out of this dilemma. Supported by concrete practical examples, these twelve principles add up to an integral management model which encompasses employee engagement, efficiency and innovation intelligently.”
- Philippe Hertig, Managing Partner, Egon Zehnder International (Switzerland)
“As Albert Einstein once accurately stated, problems can never be solved using the same approach as that out of which they came. The management approach in The Leader’s Dilemma is not subject to this unconscious, but very frequent mistake. It shows an entirely new approach on leadership and management, which regards organizations as living systems.”
- Erich Harsch, CEO, dm drogerie-markt
“Executives are increasingly recognizing that the traditional model by which they manage their organizations is obsolete and counter-productive. In The Leader’s Dilemma, Hope, Bunce and Röösli radically re-define the core principles of management – including accountability, goals, rewards, planning and coordination – to bring management into the 21st century.”
- Dr Jules Goddard, Research Fellow, MLab, London Business School
“In a dozen clear principles, The Leader’s Dilemma codifies a rethink of the conventional management model. The book’s approach should be studied by any company aiming to survive and thrive in a transforming business landscape.”
- Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies and author of Employees First, Customers Second
