"Management must manage!" Harold S. Geneen quotes (American Businessman, He was CEO of ITT (International Telephone and Telegraph) (1959-77)

Based on our today’s seminar, the Leadership within Innovation and Business Creation, I would like to write over some of my thoughts did surface after the lecture. We had a really interesting and helpful discussion, contemporary and future challenges and possible implications towards these directions for the managers were discussed, and many interesting points were raised. Eventually some of the issues which we as candidates of future’s managers should expect to deal with emerged as globalization, environmental issues, cultural clash, rapid technological changes, and scarcity of natural resources, financial breakdown and possible recession and such. Needless to say these alterations will be strong reflections over the managers therefore apart from the regular management duties as planning, organizing, monitoring and such, the management level will also need to revise some old habits and further gain some new skills, abilities, attitudes and behaviors to overcome these ongoing and some newly born issues. You will find some of the crucially important abilities and attitudes from my perspective in the following paragraphs:

Success comes along with trust
Building up relationship on mutual trust is located in the heart of the organizations, the other way around will block the development and the progress. Being trustworthy and open minded will definitely ease the work on managers’ shoulders.

The coming age will be the age of collaboration
Managers have to have the ability and capability to create a strong business network and cooperate with various external parties in order to gain and conceptualize knowledge and innovative ideas.

Doing the right things to do
Generally speaking environmental consciousness around the world has been increasing over the past decade. Consumers are more aware of the issues emerging around them. In this sense future managers shouldn’t be driven merely by profit and success, in fact always act socially responsible manners.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

True eye opener!

An Organic Organization and Cross-functionality to Spark Creativity

Here in this my new entry I will bring up some of my thought and points which struck me in the lecture we had with Mr. Ulf Spendrup and combine these thoughts with the learning’s I gained at Organizing and Leading Change seminars. Having said that, I must admit that I have always enjoyed hearing the pioneers and successful leaders form industries like Mr. Spendrup earlier this week, also I have always thought that these are great chances in order to put theory we have been taught into practice. So this week was a great opportunity in this sense.

During the lecture with Mr. Spendrup, he many times emphasized and praised being small and organic organization, he further put his view as a “Small is beautiful!”. As we know from the theory some of the main characteristics of being small can be counted as the following; flat structure, less hierarchy/more organic, flexibility, cross-functionality, cross-reference and less categorization. In small organizations ideas tend to be exchanged quickly between the employees, everyone can and should contribute from their own perspectives because it is being needed to survive. There is also a distinct lack of categorization of people within the company. Of course, employees are fulfilling their roles as engineers, electricians, and so on, but everyone is encouraged to give input on ideas. In addition the employees usually are not focused on one area, but diversified and skilled in many different areas with the ability to cross-reference in their work. At this point I believe the points has been mentioned above are completely in line with the Spendrups experience and besides these are the points Mr. Ulf and his brothers counted upon while they had been struggling their ways through today’s success. The cross-functionality and valuation of past learning’s was further highlighted in Spendrups’s ability to start new projects and jump between projects, and in the process make use of what had been learnt. The total flexibility to jump between projects was crucial for the company to be able to jump more quickly onwards. I believe these are highly important learning’s at the same time that much harder to control and follow in the course of growth. As in line with the theory, being small also brings chaos into the company and it might be destructive for those not familiar dealing with it!

One last point should be made for trust. Trust is the headstone of a healthy organization, without trust none of the points been made above will work properly. Trust among employees and more impotant trustworthy management is a must to set up a well functioning organization.