Cognitive Design

The world of work has change radically but the world of management has not. Work is now service not product, network not hierarchy, intangible value not cash flow, open not proprietary, crowdsourced not outsourced and untethered not done in the corporate office.  What customer, employee, value, organization and strategy mean has fundamentally changed over the last 25 years.

Nearly everyone admits that our management theory, much of what we teach MBA students and certainly what managers practice on a daily basis is out of step.  Some argue that this accounts for the steady decline in return of assets across most industries for the last 40 years!  Management needs to be reinvented.

One attempt to do that is the Management Innovation Exchange or MIX.   As described in the McKinsey Quarterly:

“The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) is a Web-based open-innovation project dedicated to catalyzing the creativity of thinkers and practitioners interested in reinventing management. That’s not an undertaking for any one individual or organization—it’s everybody’s problem, which is why the MIX is designed as a collaborative platform both to surface bold ideas and make progress on a set of make-or-break challenges.”

Check out this 3 min video by Gary Hamel, MIX’s founder. They held the first ever M-prize early in the year. It produced some interesting result but did not (as far as I could tell) lay the seeds for a management revolution.

Two more prizes are currently active including the Human Capital Management Prize (What’s your bold idea or radical fix for transforming human capital systems and leadership practices? ) with a deadline of January 20, 2011 and the MBA Prize, open only to graduate business students offering $50K in funding to test bold ideas “ aimed at redistributing power,unleashing human capability, and fostering renewal in our organizations.” with a deadline of February 28, 2011.

I strongly encourage readers to check this site out and ”join the MIX” as relevant.  Cognitive design has a big role to play in reinventing management for the 21st century.

I am preparing a submission for the Human Capital Management Prize.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 16th, 2010 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Events, Service Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.