This reflection is part of the book by the same author: "Concepts and Reflections for Managers". Expanded and Corrected Version, and is of voluntary and free distribution, this reflection, for those who have already acquired said book in its previous version; thus fulfilling the initial promise to enrich and update it in its content, from the permanent exchange of experiences with colleagues and students.
At the beginning of the aforementioned book, in its introduction, we said that day by day the "fashions" generally imported within a large number of texts with an impressive title and cover, seem to flood - and will continue to flood - with new terms and "new conceptions" to the world of management and leadership in these "third world" latitudes. We recommended then that intelligently it was necessary to select and take with our own "golden tweezers" - read: our own solid criteria - so as not to fall into the painful situation of accumulating errors almost unconditionally following the great "gurus" and "enlightened", that is to say: international experts and national converts who, as Jack Trout puts it in his book "The Power of the Simple", is much more than they, the "gurus",they have earned monetarily than the companies advised by them.
This reflection allowed us to take the opportunity to incorporate the concern of Ramón Piñango, for years the highest representative of the Institute of Higher Administration Studies (IESA), who in an article on the subject, published in "El Nacional" on 08/31/ 2000 under the title "The role of Intellectuals", it seems that it makes an alert or purpose of amendment (or a "mea culpa"?) When referring to "certain sheep" behind the great "guru" on duty and the "simplistic that cancel our reasoning abilityand willingness to ask, to reflect ”. Actually, let's see, at the end of 1997, in an edition of the excellent magazine Debates IESA, an article had appeared: «An Advanced Management Made in Venezuela» (Vol. 3, N ° 2), among many other good research works of that house of studies, with a certain intention of drawing attention to "managerial fashions", that even before some creole organizations came to our country, in their own way, and without realizing it, possibly, they were applying with relative success. Unfortunately, it stayed there, the intention to alert, as an isolated event, without further persistence, without major impact. The neon lights of the "fashions of the North" "shine" even more; just look at the content of the "management" magazines and the like,where we can see portrayed in full color, with the best “successful executive” suit, some of our promising managers and businessmen who run the word: “Last minute… last minute… fashion is…!”.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, said book «Concepts and Reflections for Managers» dates from 1997 and obviously it took the author, who subscribes to this reflection, many years of experience (mistakes and successes, perhaps more of these) and much reflection to arrive at what he exposes in it, including the particular introduction that he does in it and this dissertation on " managerial fashions” The aforementioned article by Piñango, on the other hand, is more recent than our book and comes precisely (belatedly?) From a notable representative of the famous "IESA BOYS" or "Yuppies", who in good part, ostensibly, are they had been commissioning to repeat in echo and in unison the managerial "last screams", call them: Total Quality, Reengineering, Out Sourcing, Bench Marking, "Empowerment", Executive "Coaching", "Just in Time", "Keep it Simple", Kaizen, Six Sigma… and you stop counting; each of these "fashions", according to our Creole spokesmen and promoters (not just the "yuppies", to be fair), "better than the previous one"; or in a more simplistic and even daring attitude, even ruling with airs of exaggerated self-sufficiency that "the other is no longer useful… now the wave is…". But this is true! Although you do not believe it,In times of the modernization of the INCE (between 1990 and 1992), when the author of this reflection worked as Manager of Strategic Planning, and they fought tenaciously in the institution to assimilate, plant and consolidate the philosophy of Total Quality, a managing colleague from PDVSA, loaned to the institution and by the time he had just graduated from an advanced management course at IESA (for obvious reasons we reserved the name), he approached as if to tell a terrible secret and then to make sure that no one would hear him Allow yourself the expression, «he dropped this pearl»: “Francisco, forget about total quality, we are wasting time, that is no longer useful, we have to face reengineering, that is the wave now, brother !. FORGET!" Imagine the long - and sour - discussion we had…"Imagine the long - and sour - discussion we had…
And so, more recently, being in advisory activities and as a facilitator of different courses and professional updating workshops, collaborating with fellow friends hired by a renowned publishing company, on several occasions we have met some of their managersin their crowded offices with some brand new "last minute" management books and magazines in a prominent place on their desk and after the usual greeting they threw us the hint, as if to verify if "we were on something" or "at all": " Colleagues, have you read it already ?: »EMPAUERMEN» !, and these others: «Management by Values», Management by Conflicts… Knowledge Management… (we are not going to list all that garbage or "garbage", as the gringos themselves would say) This is good, I'm "stabbing them!" To all these, still our colleagues of yore, we assure it and we resist accepting it, they have not finished deeply understanding their organization, their environment and their people! In fact, they had never attended (nor shared with their collaborators) the workshops designed to support the improvement of the management of their company:"They are too busy" to worry about trifles? like the revision of the philosophy of management of the company, that is to say: the Mission, the Vision, the Policies and the Corporate Values, the Strategic Objectives; And as if that weren't enough, the review of their weaknesses, their strengths, critical factors… ”let the personnel (the“ subordinates ”) go, we don't need it, we are professionals; also, that's what the advisers are for, so they can tell us the recipe, we pay them and they leave ”. Result ?: The effort and money invested in the expected change was lost. Of course, the promotional brochures and leaflets with the brand new ¿nueva? management philosophy of the company in question, appeared in the press. Any additional comments ?: we leave you, dear reader, to your knowledge and understanding. Believe us,puzzling situations like these we experience daily in the business world and in public administration.
In any case, returning to our essential approach, the healthiest, the most sensible thing would have been - it would be - that our qualified and enthusiastic Creole spokesmen, at the end of each promotion of the different "fashions" that will always "fall" on us here, either in the well-known national and imported "management" magazines or through innumerable and expensive conferences, videoconferences, talks and workshops, they also declared by way of an essential tagline:
«WARNING: IT HAS BEEN DETERMINED TO MAKE UNCONDITIONAL CASE OF THIS MAGIC FORMULA… (insert the name of the fashion in question here)… AND TO INTEND TO APPLY IT AS IS, WITHOUT INTELLIGENTLY PLACING IT IN THE COMPLEXITIES OF YOUR COMPANY, INCLUDING PEOPLE! (THE SYSTEM) AND ITS ENVIRONMENT (THE MACRO SYSTEM), MAY CAUSE SERIOUS DAMAGE TO THE HEALTH OF YOUR ORGANIZATION ».
Our proposal seems overly ironic and even irreverent, right ?; however, get busy figuring out, for example, how many of our companies have successfully reengineered. We can anticipate that among many other cases reported by some of our graduate students in Business Management, who have experienced it firsthand, is that of a television channel that at least got the most out of fashion by making an insistent full-page audiovisual advertising and written in the press, AT THE OPPORTUNITY TIME OF THE ANNUAL SALE OF ADVERTISING SPACE: “We are doing Reengineering, we are changing for you!”.Needless to say, the millions invested and the time and energy spent did not get very far in terms of the expectations initially created in the members of the organization, including my disappointed and bewildered students, but how much space they did not sell to their advertisers!: A double picket strategy ?; it would be an interesting case to analyze in another context.
Another exemplary case that we consider worth citing, that of a famous bank scattered throughout our territory that a few years ago “cackled” at its best (with a very expensive advertising campaign in all the media) that had achieved the ISO Certification- 9000 !, with which he had reached "Excellence!". Big lie, for those who know exactly what such certification is about and the complexities of the process of implementation and achievement of it, in addition to the implicit costs (in dollars!). In reality, the aforementioned international "award" was referred to only one financial product (or instrument, to be more exact): one (a savings book) among several dozen that banks regularly process and trade; the rest of the organization, the system and all its processes, and finally, all the key aspects of it,(refer to "Restructuring is not the same as Reorganizing", in Part IV of the aforementioned book) to be improved… Well, thanks !. Are you not also, like us, a long-suffering client of that well-known bank? What do you think of the service? Have you had a chance to talk aboutefficiency, quality and leadership with an employee of that bank? In any case, as in the case of the television station, how many new unsuspecting savers did not capture that bank that was in the “fashion of quality”? Additional comments are here too.
To illustrate, and reinforce even more, what we present here about the cheerful managerial fashions, we will allow ourselves to tell an experience lived many years ago by the author, in 1983, when he visited and stayed for a long time, as an advisor, in our country a well-known Southern exponent of Strategic Planning (it is irrelevant to mention his name). He was part, the undersigned, of the first group of students together with fifteen colleagues participating in the introductory course on this management tool. It is worth noting that at that time many public and private organizations, particularly the former, got ready to implement the methodology proposed by him; the others began to review what they believed they were doing well with a view to improving their planning and management control processes.Remember that at that time a countryman of the strategic advisor of yore, who worked as an advisor to the OAS for Cordiplan (today MPD), the public body where I worked, used to ask my classmates every day if they were giving them systems theory as an initiation to the Strategic Planning course, to which by then, ignorant and unconcerned about the matter, they answered no. The man's lament, in a very southern tone, did not wait: "… but how is it possible, man?… strategic planning and they are not looking at systems… they have not told you about systems ?!"to which by then, ignorant and unconcerned about the matter, they answered no. The man's lament, in a very southern tone, did not wait: "… but how is it possible, man?… strategic planning and they are not looking at systems… they have not told you about systems ?!"to which by then, ignorant and unconcerned about the matter, they answered no. The man's lament, in a very southern tone, did not wait: "… but how is it possible, man?… strategic planning and they are not looking at systems… they have not told you about systems ?!"
From time to time, as the years passed, the author of this reflection continued to recall, with surprise and ignorance, the reason for the insistent question and concern of the OAS advisor regarding the non-inclusion of the "systemic" issue in the framework of the methodology of strategic planning. After all, we thought we knew what there was to know about strategic planning. It was a long time later, in the early 1990s, that a book on systems theory and analysis by the author C. West Churchman, "Systems Approach", came into our hands, who also led us to inquire about the father of systems theory: Ludwig Von Bertalanffi. Later, truly interested and captivated by the subject, we read two quite illustrative and practical works on the systems approach and its application in organizations:one of an excellent professor at the Simón Bolivar University. Milan Juranovic, unfortunately little spread in our country, and the other by Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline", where he highlights the value of Systemic Thinking as one of the skills that "intelligent organizations" must develop. We finally understood, many years later, what the concerned OAS adviser was referring to: How little we knew about strategy! We were “building the building”, ignoring nothing more and nothing less than the foundations! Even today we are amazed, to say the least, that there is so much supply of courses, short courses and workshops on strategic planning and management, that they blatantly ignore the BASE, like that, in capital letters. The same happens with the emerging panacea of "Six Sigma": their promoters intend to pontificate,based fundamentally on aspects of statistics applied to processes, that total quality has gone out of fashion; Therefore, according to them, the unquestionably valuable principles of the modern concept of quality would be of no use, since they are not mentioned in their book. Imagine! when that is where the key to a successful organization lies: firstly understanding that total quality compromises nothing more and nothing less than the entire system: the organization, and the environment, including customers, suppliers (internal and external), the competition, and the center of it all: the individual, Personal Quality, the mother of all qualities! Quality as a way of life, as a culture! However, the result of such fashions: we still see so many managers, and of course apprentices with pretensions of leaders,who do not fully know their organization, much less their environment; Then, let's not be surprised that they are easy prey for MANAGEMENT FASHIONS! and failure.
Based on everything previously raised, then, what to do? Close your eyes and cover your ears so you don't get confused that the "magic formulas for success" are generating for many bona fide people? Is it really "rubbish", as we noted earlier, all this management fads? It depends: trash if you ignore the WARNING, IF YOU DO NOT INTELLIGENTLY ANALYZE THE TRUE ESSENCE IN SUCH OR ANY FASHIONABLE WAY. In fact, with this - with the indiscriminate promotion and "purchase" of such managerial "fads" - many of our organizations, both public and private, large and medium, have lost time, energy and money; worst of all: its members, particularly the underrated operational levels, have lost confidence in the organization's leadership,as well as the motivation and enthusiasm required when senior management urgently proposes a “True Change” in order to float the organization.
Undoubtedly, dear colleague, we must be in "intelligent tune" with everything that happens around us. Certainly, you have to keep updated. Read, download from the internet how much managerial "formula" is for sale, find out and update yourself constantly. But remember: do not let yourself be "subjugated" by everything that comes "from the outside" (let us be reiterative), which has been a regrettable and perverse constant throughout our recent history. Mature your own conclusions, keeping in mind from now that a good dose of intelligent vision of the future, of proactivity, of teamwork and learning, of creativity, of the spirit of risk, of strategic thinking (that is to say: Systemic, do not forget it), among other no less important skills and attitudes,They are going to facilitate (or at least make it less difficult!) that daily and arduous task of leading, "truth - truth", the changes that your organization requires and our country cries out for.
