This week, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson published a new article in Fortune, talking about Dynamic Shared Ownership ("DSO"), the company's ambitious de-bureaucratization initiative. Everything Anderson says about DSO sounds good and well. And it seems that…
It would be really nice if such a thing as a "status quo" existed. Granted: There's a rock band by that name that was founded in 1962 . But in the context of organizations and change and organizational development, the usefulness of the term "status…
Towards the end of last year, I conducted a series of client workshops for different companies – about Beta, Cell Structure Design and Beta Transformation. Full disclosure: The series consisted of four workshops that happened on two continents and in…
When we founded the BetaCodex Network, in 2008, upon breaking away from the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, we wanted our new movement and the BetaCodex approach to organizing to be about more than just talking: We wanted to make decentralized,…
In my book Organize for Complexity, published in 2014, I outlined the central ideas of BetaCodex thinking: That the industrial-age social technology of “management” (often referred to as Taylorism, or command and-control) was made obsolete by…
We tend to think that change is hard. I wrote about that common misconception elsewhere before. But one thing stands in the way of even beginning to think about change and transformation: Conspiracy theories. In fact, in organizations and…
The Kotter approach, often referred to as Leading Change, was the best change management model of the 20th century. It looks pretty dated now. The new kids on the block are VFOT, or Very Fast Organizational Transformation approaches: They are…
During my first job at Xerox in BuenosAires, in 1996, my boss Alberto (who was a great guy) taught me that organizational change was hard. Later I witnessed many times over how hard it was. Change always took a long time, and change management was…
Five years ago, I would have told you (and I did!) that serious organizational transformation could not be achieved in less than 18 months. I considered 1,5 years to be an excellent and in fact super-fast time-frame. A tough one, even. And I had…
The days of the sophisticated systems of variable compensation are over.
By Niels Pflaeging
How can we bring about intended change quickly, easily, reliably and without tears? How do we get the organizational transformation we envision to stick? Any contemporary, modern theory and practice of change will clearly have to look rather…
Over the past four decades, a number of trends, or movements have provided promising, constructive impulses for organizations and the world of work. The most recent of these trends has been produced by the Agile movement. Before that came TQM/Quality…
If you want adaptive organizations you need to go for serious decentralization and consistent functional integration.
By Stefan Willuda
In the 1960s, organizations from all backgrounds and of all kinds of sizes began grooming and perfecting management practices such as fixed target setting, target negotiation, planning, budgeting, forecasting, plan-actual variance reporting,…
It all started with Bruce Henderson (*1915–†1992). Henderson can be regarded as the pioneer of the double axis chart in the business world: In 1970, the American devised the Growth Share Matrix, which would propel Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the…
The problem with probably 99% of models, or concepts of organizational design, organizational structure and development is that they fail to appreciate the difference between periphery and center - and are thus antiquated. Such approaches now belong…
Take a look at social media, and you get the feeling that new is good.
Words can blind us - or they can make us see. Most of the time, we are not fully aware that the words we use are loaded with meaning: It makes a hell of a difference whether we are talking about teaching or learning. About goals or direction. About…
This text is an edited excerpt from an interview that was done for the weekly "Lider Business Magazine", Croatia.
An interview with Niels Pflaeging
Niels recently gave a couple of interviews to Croatian media, ahead of the forthcoming COMELEON Conference, which will happen in Zagreb on 24 and 25 October 2019. The text below is an edited compilation of these interviews, during which he talked…
Ben Linders interviewed Silke Hermann & Niels Pflaeging about their new book OpenSpace Beta. A handbook for organizational transformation in just 90 days. This is a excerpt of the interview which was first published on InfoQ.
An interview with Silke…
Most managers today, most change agents and people in organizations doubt that something like organizational transformation is possible at all. At least within their particular company, or organization. If they do not reject the idea outright, they…
The Holacracy fad is over, or at least it is coming to an end. Finally. To me, the demise of this fad is a relief, as it is to most of you, I suppose. But there are bigger questions to ask within our community, in the light of the Holacracy's…
A few months ago, a student from Germany asked me how it came that I was "pretty much the only one" passionately and repeatedly claiming that Theory X people do not exist. The student suggested that I was probably mistaken with my interpretation of…
Command-and-control (a.k.a. management the social technology) is "socially loose". Here, pressure is performed from the top-down. Control works just the same way. It is, quite simply, the top of the organization, that is always in charge in this way…
The realm of organizational leadership, collaboration and work is packed with methods, concepts and theories. In spite of that abundance of concepts and dogmas, however, most of us are hardly aware that the terms and words we employ in organizations…
A two-part interview with Niels Pflaeging by Philippe Brière. Part 1.
Philippe Brière: Niels, “Creating prosperity while nurturing human and natural systems” - that is the vision of the Business Innovation for Global Good movement, also known as…
This question is wrong.
Competition within organizations is neither good, nor bad. Whether internal competition is useful, constructive and appropriate depends on the level on which we let it happen, or on which it is stimulated or suppressed. In…
Change is not a journey. Never has been. Trouble is: Change agents around the world have been imagining change as projects, programs, planned exercises to be "kicked off" and "implemented". We have interpreted change as difficult ventures, endlessly…
Since the rise of the corporation at the dawn of the industrial age, much has been said and written about leadership, power, and structure in organizations. Some in the field of organizational research believe that developing a robust theory of…
Most managers and business leaders aim to make their organizations flatter. They try to reduce middle management, to skim the amount of hierarchical layers, or they scrap internal bureaucracy in order to achieve more efficiency, more effectiveness,…
It seems like everyone is putting out some sort of theory on “Digital Transformation” these days – whether we want them or not. So much is being aired about this supposed revolution, and related phenomena such as digital business models, new work,…
The great Kurt Lewin was the first, in the late 1930s, to distinguish leadership styles: Authoritarian, Democratic and Laissez-faire. So far, so good. But guess what: Two of these "styles" have nothing to do with leadership, really. Zip. Zero.…
It was just a couple of hours ago that I saw an illustration here on my news stream on LinkedIn, about the differences between "the boss" and "the leader". Most of us have probably seen this kind of visual many times before: They invariably argue for…
Beware: Some of these tweets by @NielsPflaeging can contain counter-intuitive insight and may even cause temporary cognitive dissonance.
Remember: #Management means fixing the people. #Leadership means fixing the system.
The world has changed - which is why we need to transform command-and-control companies for them to adopt a new organizational model, says Niels Pflaeging. The BetaCodex Network, which he co-founded, applies research and open innovation to increase…
The future of work is already here. Not only in the minds of some outstanding thinkers, high-minded idealists, quirky innovators and lofty utopians – or people like you who are reading this blog! No, the future of work and organizational leadership…
As the EU crisis drags on, the mind-numbing ineffectiveness of the negotiation and alignment processes between Athens, Brussels and the other EU countries becomes apparent. This week, a key topic of the Greek crisis is being discussed: privatization…
Why do "heroes", or the men and women who advanced organizational thinking in theory and practice, matter for leadership today?
Five key insights into creating profound, transformational change, quickly and easily. Sounds impossible? Then check out these concepts for a more constructive and robust alternative to change management, or planned change as you know it.
Let's get…
This interview with Niels Pflaeging was originally published by Baltic Forge.
Today's organizations, by and large, are in a mess. Our societies, economies and markets have changed, but companies and the way we organize work overall, haven’t:…
Much, too much has been said and written about power in organizations, and about leadership. Most of what has been said and written about the subject is utter nonsense. And we know it. Many experts in the field of organizational management and…
For decades, organizations of all sizes and from all kinds of industries have curated and perfected management practices such as fixed target setting, target negotiation, planning, budgeting, forecasting, plan-actual variance reporting,…
To organize for complexity also means to organize learning and development for complexity - on the individual, the team and the organizational level. Much has been said and written in recent years about learning in orgs and business schools. But much…
I recently flew to Lisbon to participate in a two-day talk and workshop led by Pablo Aretxabala and Jabi Salcedo from K2K Emocionado. K2K has successfully transformed 70 organisations (many of them industrial companies) in the Basque Country from…
Here’s the way it was in 1969 when I became a consultant: NO cell phones, NO pagers, NO fax machines; NO personal computers, NO PowerPoint, NO CD’s, NO DVD’s, NO internet. My “personal digital assistant” was a little black book in which I wrote down…
The last article by Sumantra Ghoshal - published only after his untimely death.
Maybe the best article on management ever written.
Although the Command and Control style of management is a fairly modern phenomenon, like all ideas, its roots go much further back, to a very dominant model of how to discipline and organise institutions. The philosopher Michael Foucault famously…
A comparison is made between the field of organizational psychology as I saw it in 1965 and how I see it today. Many issues remain the same, but the field is more differentiated, fragmented, and individualized than ever, despite culture, especially…
Budgeting, as most corporations practice it, should be abolished. That may sound like a radical proposition, but it would be merely the culmination of long-running efforts to transform organizations from centralized hierarchies into devolved networks…
This essay describes differences between papers that contain some theory rather than no theory. There is little agreement about what constitutes strong versus weak theory in the social sciences, but there is more consensus that references, data,…
I have no clue how I develop theory. I don’t think about it; I just try to do it. Indeed, thinking about it could be dangerous: The centipede was happy quite Until a toad in fun Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?” That worked her mind to such…
Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s must first resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members…
Executives don’t realize it, but a hierarchy of managers exacts a hefty tax on any organization: Managers are expensive, increase the risk of bad decisions, disenfranchise employees, and slow progress. In fact, management may be the least efficient…
Organizations are not ships. Organizations are not helicopters. Organizations are not orchestras.
Org speak in most companies is pretty vulgar and usually highly exchangeable among them. That is why the Dilbert cartoons work so well. The words are quite the same everywhere. The language is rather bloated, pompous and impersonal, and full of…
I find that the words "courage" and "fear" are greatly over-used these days, in the context of work and organizations.
All organizations possess three structures to solve their inescapable problems of compliance, of social interaction, and of value creation. Within OrgPhysics, the value creation structure is the only one of the three structures through which…
It is difficult to overstate the extent to which most managers and the people who advise them believe in the redemptive power of rewards. Certainly, the vast majority of U.S. corporations use some sort of program intended to motivate employees by…
Almost 30 years ago — in 1970 — the largest commercial bank in Sweden, Handelsbanken, was in a major crisis. Profitability was low and the bank was in conflict with the authorities. As a result of the crisis the executive director left the bank, as…
Reductionism is a doctrine that maintains that all objects and events, their properties and our experience and knowledge of them, are made up of ultimate elements, indivisible parts. For example, the physical sciences, which ruled the scientific…
Accounts of the origins and development of management have two deficiencies: (1) they fail to distinguish managing a business from other types of managing and (2) they are more often histories of writing about management than of doing it. Explaining…
The human aspects of Japanese manufacturing management techniques, in particular those embodied in the Toyota production system, are currently under intense debate. Do they represent a good model for the future of theAmerican workplace? Some…
In this excerpt from his recently published book, The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First, the author argues that many managers continue to overlook the extent to which the more effective management of people can improve firm…
This article examines the origins of one of the most widely accepted mental models that drives organizational behavior: the idea that there is resistance to change and that managers must overcome it. This mental model, held by employees at all…
The architect Bill Caudill was a contrarian. He pioneered the idea of working intimately with clients to create spaces that met their needs; this flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which held that the architect was pure artist, barely deigning…
Everything you need to know about lean manufacturing tools and why they won’t work in service organisations I gained an antipathy to change by tools training and projects in the early Eighties while studying TQM programmes that failed. In essence the…
"The individualist says, Be true to thyself. The profounder philosophers have always said, Know thyself, which carries the whole process a step further back: what is the self, what integrations have I made?"
By Mary P. Follett
A new and major wave of activity to democratize is now evident in Australia. It ranges across the Office Structures Review in the Public Service, various second tier wage/productivity agreements signed by major institutions to a continuing sequence…
My concern is with the next agenda that must be engaged upon in the next couple of decades to overcome the essential failure of social science in the postwar years. It has failed to meet, or to contribute in any really deep way (with exceptions) to…
Guest editorial
By Ronald Purser
Kurt Lewin’s ‘changing as three steps’ (unfreezing-changing-refreezing) is regarded by many as the classic or fundamental approach to managing change. Lewin has been criticized by scholars for over-simplifying the change process and has been defended…
Could capitalists actually bring down capitalism? A writer for the New York Times asked that question earlier this year, as the accounting scandals involving big U.S. companies piled up. No, he concluded, probably not. A few rotten apples would not…
Forget praise. Forget punishment. Forget cash. You need to make their jobs more interesting.
By Frederick Herzberg
Are you thinking about transforming your company's structure and administration, enabling more self-organization, making the organization more agile, and promoting networked collaboration within the company? When the insight to move the organization…
In our language usage, there are countless proverbs, sayings, and formulations that question the practical usefulness of theory: "All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life." "The practice is golden, the theory is wooden."…
There are few terms in the business world of such high importance as the term leadership: Be it in the context of personnel management, where there is too little understanding of whether and how meaningful it is to lead people. Or in the field of…
There is no question that we have to transform our today's companies. Our tayloristic and thus hierarchically controlled companies are not up to the demands of complex markets and complex organizational challenges.
By Peter Proell
Do not get me wrong. I am passionate and positive about agile work. The agile manifesto outlines the principles that state-of-the-art software development is made possible. However, the attempt to establish this way of working in companies inevitably…
This paper is dedicated to the topic of learning method, or didactics - and especially to the concept of learning in small groups, as a driver of organizational development and change.
By Silke Hermann and Niels Pflaeging
In this paper, the authors outline a few key concepts of discourse learning, such as invitation, the use of practical theory, and joint reflective discussion.
The challenge of selling change in an organization is right there in the metaphor we use when we ask the question: “Alright, great work everyone, now how do we get employees to buy-in?” You’re (probably) doomed!
By Drew Weilage
There’s an easy answer: Because your organization wasn’t designed to get things done. Part One: Structures
There’s an easy answer: Because your organization wasn’t designed to get things done. Part Two: Systems
So if structures are how organizations organize the work. How is the work actually accomplished?
by Bill Pasmore, Gurudev S. Khalsa
How management education promised a better workplace—and why it delivered nothing but more creative ways of exploiting people.
by Ronald Purser
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