 
     
 
|
COVER STORY
Deconstructing Management Fads
Continued...
The Defence of Management
| DEFADDING CORE COMPETENCE |
| Fad effect: To
historically-diversified business groups, who constitute the majority of corporate India,
the concept of focusing on a few chosen activities is anathema. For, developing and
leveraging core skills, and eschewing unrelated diversification, implies that new
opportunities cannot be seized. Defad
effect: The principle of core competence is a philosophy of long-term strategy,
and not a passing wave to be surfed. If employed to determine which businesses to be
in--and, by extension, which ones to exit--and how to add value to it in a unique way, it
can deliver unmatched and sustainable competitive advantages. Critically, following this
principle involves identifying, growing--and, sometimes, acquiring--and nurturing key
competencies, none of which can be accomplished either in the short run or through a
casual dalliance. Indeed, the entire organisation has to be reconfigured around the core
competencies it has picked. So, long-term commitment to the demands it makes of a company
is essential for its benefits to be recorded--making it difficult to treat core competence
as a passing fad. |
The calls for radical transformation and the
adoption of a new paradigm reflect a number of commonly-proposed fads about modern
management: simplify, cut out, cut back, eliminate... These fads can be summarised in five
trails... (But) what's wrong with these ideas? Aren't they simply putting into words what
the best managers and firms are doing?... Practitioners and writers are giving these
trails the status of present-day conventional wisdom Since everybody is saying these sort
of things, surely, they must be right. But are they?
Management Redeemed, F.G. Hilmer & L. Donaldson
Trying to drive a square peg into a round hole should not
result in scorn being heaped on either the peg or the hole. That dubious distinction
should, normally, be reserved for the person displaying the palpable lack of sense in
attempting what is fundamentally impossible. In the case of management practices, however,
efforts to achieve results with tools that were never designed for those ends have
resulted in the principle, rather than the botched execution, being faulted. Why be
surprised when reengineering fails to deliver market-busting strategy? It was never meant
to. Why shake your head when benchmarking cannot inspire your people to give off their |
