"When a man has to work without a sufficient understanding of his work, he will have - unlike the machine - to fight against a force that comes from himself." Elton May, 1933
1: Article Summary:
"The Five Minds of a Manager", by Jonathan Gosling and Henry Mintzberg (2003) proposes a set of five considerations that he recommends managers to bear in mind and whose purpose is to offer a vision that allows to elucidate the "complicated and confusing world of the manager".
The following is a compendium of the five sets of considerations mentioned:
Managing Yourself: An Invitation to Reflect these days, when managers desperately need to stop and think; stop and reflect deeply on your past experiences. In the words of the authors: “You have opposed a space for imagination, between your experience and your explanation. It can make all the difference. "
From this simple consideration, a "successful vision" can emerge in the business field in which the organization is inserted.
Managing the Organization: Especially in a large company, it is simply not possible to organize without prior analysis. A good analysis provides a language for the organization allowing people to participate and understand how their efforts are conducted; this provides metrics for performance. As the organizational structure itself, it is fundamentally analytical, hence the decomposition to establish the division of labor and its relative complications is explained. All the changes that affect the organization require constant decision-making that must be based, fundamentally, on the continuous analysis of the organization and its components.
Managing the context: Explains the difference between a global vision and a world vision, where the most representative thing is that in the former, the local consequences are not important compared to the overall performance of the economy: companies are not, in truth, responsible for local consequences. In contrast, in the world view, local consequences are a key performance indicator, where companies are held accountable for the local consequences of their actions.
Managing relationships: Emphasizes the need for managers to interact in their work, not under a boss and subordinate approach, but as colleagues and partners. In this way, each collaborator becomes a controller of their own work, obtaining unimaginable synergies without collaboration.
Managing change: Consider two forms of management: Heroic management, based on itself and Committed management, based on collaboration. In the first case, the way in which both forms face the implementation of their actions is striking: in the first, because there is a part that imposes the change and another that resists; in the second, because the implementation cannot be separated from the formulation and therefore that is the key.
2: Introduction:
Through this critical article, we will try to discover what is really hidden under the suggestive title of the article by Gosling and Minzberg. The objective is to highlight the practical knowledge of theories related to Organizational Psychology that are derived from their reading and that make explicit the true contribution: to encourage the deepening of the topics covered.
The basic questioning that animates this article is: What does this article mean for Organizational Psychology?
2.1: Reaction or proaction: what to think about?
The approach proposed by the authors is novel because it presents in a creative and clear way the classic systemic approach of the company, where the manager is faced with the challenge of running a company trying to align its own resources with external, internal and the human factors present in the management problem whose final and recursive objective is the perennial change translated into the growth of the company: deep down a continuous pre-adaptation problem (Johansen, 1982), which makes the human being have to live questioning their own paradigms, breaking them over and over again, testing and proving the topicality of the general systems theory without which it would be impossible to understand the problem dynamically.
If, as Johansen (1982) proposes, cultural evolution has replaced natural evolution, causing this process to go from linear to exponential growth, in whose acceleration the communicational advance has acted with great impact, it is clear and necessary to understand that who really presides over the destiny of the company and forces decisions to be made is not the manager, but the change itself. This constant, systemic mutation has forced a change from reactive action to proactive action, where the important thing is not to react according to what happened in the past, but to prepare action for what is to come.
There is no doubt that the first task of a manager is to continually reflect on himself and on the business he runs; reflect as a manager on the actions that he has undertaken and their results, to generate in himself a dynamic and successful managerial vision.
2.2: Organization for execution versus organization for management.
In a globalized economy, where knowledge, technologies and applications tend to standardize, being easily accessible and above all, globally accessible, the fundamental problem is one of execution. “Today it is very common that the difference between a company and its competitor is its ability to execute correctly. (Ram Charam, 2002) ”. How to do it is as or more important than what to do.
On the one hand, in execution problems it is necessary to value the set of analytical considerations described as Management of the Organization and that are reflected in an adequate division of labor, and, on the other, the considerations related to the Management of Relationships, especially, because in current times access to specialized human resources and outsourcing of services is actually increasingly growing thanks to the advancement of education and knowledge, added to the high level of interaction that companies have achieved with each other.
In the words of Ahumada (2005), "The increase in scientific and technological knowledge enables organizations to identify and exploit various technologies and explore various markets in which to develop their activities." From this point of view, it is concluded that the execution problem, which represents the current urgent concern, is directly related to teamwork, a concern that is covered by the considerations of the article by Mintzberg et al. In sum, the organization must have a clear execution orientation, rather than a particular management model.
2.3: Management of the context: an approach to organizational learning?
Regarding the problem of the environment described in the considerations about Context Management, it is necessary to admit that the phenomenon of globalization is not new (Garten, 2001), the first era of this type occurs in the Renaissance, when the explosion of discoveries scientific and technological, added to the invention of modern banking, generated a dynamic interaction between European and Asian countries and the American continent. The importance in business of these considerations are truly a pillar of managerial thinking and therefore the environment and its analysis has always been an obligation of any manager,especially now when the environmental legal framework is practically globalized as well as the labor regulations to mention some aspects and where the world tends to integrate countries and markets. Markets, consumer behavior, economies, society, everything changes at a dizzying rate. This is just a tip; But what to do and how to do with these changes in the environment is the manager's primary task.
Companies must continually change in order to compete; This implies that the change itself is produced by a recursive competitiveness problem, which tests the organization to face it successfully. Ahumada (2001), dedicates chapter IV of her book "Theory and Change in Organizations", to the value of knowledge and organizational learning as a factor of competitiveness of the company, without a doubt her approach explains with greater property this set of considerations on the general context outlined by Gosling and Mintzberg in their article.
2.4: The change: is it manageable?
Johansen (1982), believes that it is possible to manufacture a crystal ball referring to the advances in strategic planning and the management tools that are investigated. Drucker (1991), ensures that in difficult times the balance becomes more important than the profit and loss chart, which means that the company must put financial strength before profits. At Sony, one of the most innovative companies in Japan, its president Akio Morita believes that innovation and fast action disappear when companies lose their sense of crisis and urgency (Farrel, 1998). It is the concept of the Mottainai. All these assertions are a reaction to the uncertainty of change, which in turn forces us to change.
The great challenge for management is not only to accept change, but to understand it, manage it and conduct with skill and competence everything that implies the infinite impact, of change on change, both in the environment, as in the organization itself and each one of them. its members. Gosling and Minzberg show sympathy for committed management: collaboration. Perhaps an approach to this style of leadership is Management by Values proposed by Blanchard (2004), or the well-known Management by Competencies. Everything that generates collaboration is the key to managing change, everything that generates resistance is obviously a change process itself.
3: Conclusion:
- Hidden under the suggestive title of "Five Minds of a Manager", Gosling and Mintzberg, give us a valuable article that covers all the problems of senior management, updated and complete. A practical vision that allows us to look at the great tasks of Organizational Psychology in its most important aspects. Successfully managing resources, relationships and results is not so easy without the help of organizational psychology, and without a doubt it will be more so in the future. Topics that concern the work of science, and especially applied science, are deployed in all its practical spectrum, marking the way for whoever wants to investigate: Leadership, Organizational Learning, Organizational Change, Competences,as an approximation to the challenges that the globalization of the economies in which companies are inserted is in store for us: the natural habitat of managers.
4: Bibliography
- Mintzberg, Henry et al (2003); HARVARD BUSSINES REVIEW; 2003 November Johansen, Oscar (1982); THE PRE-ADAPTATION; (Santiago, Editions of the University of Chile) Charam, Ram et al (2002); EXECUTION; Ahumada, Luis (2005); WORK TEAMS AND TEAMWORK; (Valparaíso, Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, Chile) Garten, Jeffrey (2001); STRATEGIES FOR THE GLOBAL ECONOMY; (México DF, Pearson Educación de México SA, México) Martínez Amador, Emilio (1984); GREAT SOPENA AMADOR ENGLISH / SPANISH-SPANISH / ENGLISH; (Barcelona, Editorial Ramón Sopena, Spain) Ahumada, Luis (2001); THEORY AND CHANGE IN ORGANIZATIONS; (Valparaíso, EdicionesUniversitarias de Valparaíso, Chile) Drucker, Peter (1991); THE MANAGEMENT IN TIMES OF CRISIS; (Buenos Aires, Printed in TG Yanina, Argentina) Farrell, Larry (1998); IN SEARCH OF THE BUSINESS SPIRIT; (Barcelona,Ediciones B, SA, Spain) Blanchard, Ken et al (2004); SECURITIES ADMINISTRATION; (Bogotá, Editorial Norma, Colombia)
