If there is one thing which keeps growing
unabated, no matter how the stock markets soar or economies flounder, it is
“management thoughts”. Management thoughts are taking us by storm.
Two decades ago Prahalad and Hammel persuaded
us to look at core competence – the combination of pooled knowledge and
technical capacities that allow business to be competitive in the market place.
Prahalad and Hamel were confident that core competence is what allows a company
to expand into new end markets as well as provide a significant benefit to
customers. Core competence is not easy to replicate.
It is important to consider that core
competence is based on past experience of the organization. Its basis is the
way you ran the business in the past – taking that concoction of ideas, values,
capacities, learning together which enabled your business to take great
strides. If you figure out what your core competence is, you can move forward
taking advantage of them. If you do not, you become a scatter-gun.
Today, we find the idea of core competence
has lost its luster. The past no more gives us the clue to the future. What
management Gurus propose now is not reorganizing, or re-orienting the
organization. Some like Tom Peters talk of disruption. Disruption and
Re-Imagining is the “new” prescription!
In his 2003 book, Re-Imagine Tom Peters
rants, “We pursue preservation. But the old order is doomed… We value
permanence. But ‘permanence’ is the last refuge of those with shrivelled
imaginations…We practice change. But ‘change’ is not enough.” So, what is Tom
Peters’ vision of the future? Is it about mending the organization based on
what we learnt from the past or ending the past and building a new future? This
is what he says:
“A world where the idea of Corporations that exist in Perpetuity is considered…So Much Nonsense.A world where the urge to merge is buried beneath…the Drive to Self-Destruct (and to Re-Imagine)A world where the timid goal of ‘improvement’ (and the tendency to tinker) has given way to …and unabashed commitment to destruction.”
When you self-destruct and re-imagine you
do not go by core-competence and past learning - you create anew. Haven’t
organizations broken from their past and built their future? Have all
organizations grown progressively by only dreaming about their perpetuity,
merging, improvement, tinkering?
The story of Nokia is not one dramatized
by management Gurus. Much before Peters wrote about destruction Nokia had done
what he urged in 2003. Nokia’s history of a humble beginning as a paper pulp
manufacturer in 1865 and over the one hundred and fifty years since progressing
to cables, paper products, tires, rubber boots, consumer and industrial
electronics, plastics, chemicals, telecom infrastructure and more is a long
history of not only successful change but also of “unabashed commitment to
destruction”. The latest in the process is parting with its hand-set business.
But looking at Nokia’s history means we are looking at the past, there is a
lesson there.
On the contrary there are organizations
not ashamed of their “permanence”. An example is Siemens. The Economist claims to have first written about
Siemens in 1868, when it joined a consortium to build telegraph line from Britain to India and Russia.
By 1882 the company was in the business of manufacturing electric dynamos.
Today it manufactures everything from hearing aid to gas turbines, trains to
software. No, no destruction, but a huge re-imagining!.
A look at some of the largest companies in
the world like IBM and GE will persuade us that they are not the same companies
they were a hundred years ago. They have not just transformed, but in a way,
become different companies. Do they have any core competence? Have they
indulged in self-destruction? Apparently no. What about re-imagining? Indeed,
they have done gargantuan re-imagining of their business! Have they done all
these without building core-competence? Indeed, not. Their core competence is
not in technology or marketing. Yet, they may be very good at them. Their main
core competence is to Re-Imagine themselves, and to become newer and newer
corporations.
So, what is new about Tom Peters?
By V.K.Talithaya (vktalithaya@managementmasala.com)
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