Steve Denning is radical about a new form a management. Actually it’s not that new an idea. It is just rare. By “not so new,” I mean it was the way craftsman succeeded for centuries. They were constantly innovating and linking every decision and action to the impact on their customers they served. In his new book, The Leader’s Guidebook to Radical Management, Steve lays out how it works.
The Seven Basic Principles of Radical Management
Radical management is a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter-locking principles of continuous innovation.
1. The goal of work is to delight clients.
Traditional management aims at producing goods or services, or making money for the shareholders. Radical management aims at delighting clients and focuses, not just the marketing department, but the entire organization on this goal.
2. Work is conducted in self-organizing teams.
Managers do not interrupt innovation cycles and allow the team to organize it owns work with a vision-holder keeping the focus.
3. Teams operate in client-driven iterations.
This in turn leads on to working in client-driven iterations, because delighting clients can only be approached by successive approximations. And self-organizing teams, being a life-form that lives on the edge of chaos, need checkpoints to see whether they are evolving positively or slipping over the edge into chaos.
4. Each iteration delivers value to clients.
Client-driven iterations focus on delivering value to clients by the end of each iteration. They force closure and enable frequent client feedback.
5. Managers foster radical transparency.
Self-organizing teams—working in an iterative fashion—in turn both enable and require radical transparency so that the teams go on improving of their own accord.
6. Managers nurture continuous self-improvement.
Traditional management sets a limited goal of “good enough” quality, which translates into an acceptable number of defects, an acceptable range of standardized products that hopefully meet customer requirements.
Continuous improvement means having the entire work force find ever better ways to give more value to clients.
7. Managers communicating interactively through stories, questions and conversations.
An underlying requirement of all of these principles is interactive communication. Unless managers and workers are communicating interactively, using authentic narratives, open-ended questions and deep listening, rather than treating people as things to be manipulated, none of the above works.
A Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, published by Jossey Bass is released on Oct. 25th.
I will post a follow-up Q & A with Steve on Friday and offer way to buy his book and be able to immediately download dozens of free papers and books on management.