Strategy: Navigating the Complexity of the New World (Management: Mastering Complexity, Band 3) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik is habilitated Professor of Corporate Governance and an internationally renowned management expert. He is founder and chairman of Malik Management, the world's leading knowledge organization for integrated management systems based on the science of cybernetics. Based in St. Gallen, Malik Management has around 300 employees, offices in six countries, and a network of partner organizations in the fields of cybernetics and bionics. It is the biggest provider of reliably functioning solutions to interconnected problems of organizational complexity and control. Malik Management helps thousands of managers to integrate and improve their knowledge of general management systems via training and intervention.

Malik is the author of more than ten award-winning bestsellers including the classic Managing, Performing, Living. He pens regular columns in opinion-forming media. He is among the most cited and profiled management thinkers of our time. His numerous awards include the Cross of Honor for Science and Art of the Republic of Austria (2009) and the Heinz von Foerster Award for Organizational Cybernetics of the German Association for Cybernetics (2010).

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Introduction

Strategic Solutions for REvolutions®

This book describes my strategic solutions for the REvolutions of the New World, which are already under way. They are part of the Great Transformation 21 which I will address in the following chapters.

These revolutions could either trigger a destructive social meltdown, or they could bring about a new economic miracle and create a new, better social order of human interaction. Which of the two will eventually happen depends very much on what solutions the global leadership elites have access to in dealing with this immense challenge, which of these solutions they even recognize as such, and which they will ultimately choose. One thing is certain: conventional means will not do the trick, as they have largely contributed to the current global crisis.

There is also transformational power within the strategic solutions themselves that are presented here: they act as catalysts for these revolutions, enabling them to pass off more quickly, yet without violence. They also facilitate the much-needed liberation from the old ways of thinking, from organization and management concepts, all originating in the past century and still prevailing, as well as from long-outdated organization structures and social problem-solving processes.

In my book Corporate Policy and Governance, the German version of which was published in 2008, I laid down a "Manifesto for Corporate REvolution". Some of the developments anticipated there have materialized, foremost among them the collapse of the financial system which I had also seen coming as early as in 2005. Further profound changes, such as in technology as well as in people's social value structures - in particular the younger generation with their perspective on and concept of the world - have progressed so far that they can no longer be stopped, but should be accelerated and guided in more constructive directions wherever possible. What was considered impossible by most people on publication thus became reality shortly afterwards.

In 2008 I wrote that knowledge was going to matter more than money and information more than power. My first point is now being proved by the ongoing self-destruction of the financial system, the second point by the ever-increasing global effects of the social media. Ruling and leading will never be the same again.

The financial crisis as such, however, will not form a central topic of this book. Over the past 15 years I have published everything that needed to be said about it - now I let the facts speak for themselves. Nor will I talk very much about the knowledge society in the narrower sense. Instead, I will make available the necessary strategic knowledge, the Wholistic Management Systems® I have developed, including navigation, information and steering systems, new strategy concepts, and about a dozen new, clearly superior methods and tools. The knowledge society will need these tools to master the new challenges and to grow and develop along with a new social order.

Just like in earlier phases of epoch-making transformation, almost everything is going to change fundamentally and radically. But while past revolutions were driven by such things as new machines, the key driver of the upcoming revolution will be a new way of functioning for the social structure, its management at all levels, and its strategy and methods, including cybernetic self-organization and self-control.

The Great Transformation 21, the transition from the Old to the New World, will be larger than any other social transformation we have ever gone through, as it will span the entire globe. The closer I have examined the effective but also explosive power of the Great Transformation and the corresponding strategic solutions, the narrower did the limits of language turn out to be. Describing the complexity of globally interconnected systems and finding words for the simultaneity of their change dynamics is just as difficult as putting a Beethoven symphony into words.

Wherever I turn, I face a lack of words to describe the new, the dimensions and speed of change, and the unknowable that this change is bringing. The usual superlatives - all those "super" and "mega" words -, even if they were not quite that trivial, would not suffice by far to describe the dimensions of the Great Transformation. Apart from that, all these terms originated in the Old World, so they can hardly convey more than the Old World's scope of imagination.

Still, occasionally I have to use these terms for lack of better ones. If, for instance, the new methods introduced here enable even the most complex decisions to be taken 100 times faster, increase team efficiency more than 80 times, and help create maximum consensus in only three days where even the smallest compromise was previously blocked by social divisions, and if this power of solution has brought success in hundreds of applications, without even one exception - what terms could be adequate for such achievements? While I strive to convey the radically new dimensions of effectiveness, I want to avoid any kind of grandiloquence and jargon. Previous transformations have always brought on a new language because new things cannot be described with old language; but such language can only develop in the process of change itself.

The Great Transformation from the Old to the New World will fundamentally change almost completely what people do, why they do it and how they do it, even who they are and what concept of the world they have. It will revolutionize the way society and its organizations function. Functioning twice as well at half the cost is just one of many challenges that most people consider impossible to master - although it has already become a reality. In just a few years' time people will think back uncomprehendingly and with pity, remembering today's sluggish political decision-making processes, coalitions getting in their own way, corporate management bodies paralyzing themselves, of change processes smoldering slowly, of lethargy and resignation in most organizations, of monstrous megaconferences without impact, and of the cluelessness of global organizations.

The leaders of these organizations will be pitied and also admired for having given their best and having tried to meet their responsibilities even under such inhuman conditions, even though their efforts increasingly failed because even the most talented racing driver doesn't stand a chance if he drives an outdated car.

People will, however, also wonder why these leaders were not given new solutions much earlier, although I published them long ago and they have been successfully applied by others hundreds of times. Anyone familiar with these solutions will immediately see the new ways to end crises, even using them as acceleration ramps for progress in the New World. For me, the ethical mission resulting from all that is to do anything within my power to spread the news about these new, global, society-saving solutions.

The money released by the new solutions - money which at present is pointlessly tied up in old structures - will not be used for maintaining museums, to store and display the past century's outdated methods. Rather, we will use it to create a new type of university where the next generation will learn, from the very start, those leadership skills whose lack got us into this mess in the first place - skills such as networked and wholistic thinking; knowledge about systemics as the theory of entities; the practical application of cybernetics, the science of functioning; and the use of bionics to transfer evolution's best solutions to socio-cultural organizations. This would strengthen our social solution intelligence by several orders of magnitude, because all of these things could then be accomplished in less...