Managing without management - Ian Godden

Large corporations are losing out to smaller ones. The panaceas of the early 1990s, such as empowerment and re-engineering are in trouble, but no-one knows why or what to do about it. The authors argue that the root problem is management itself, and the answer is to manage "without" management.;Large corporations are being strangled by their own management processes. Big business is not too large in terms of revenues, but is too complex and has too many products, divisions and functions - and too many managers.;The good news for large corporations is that it is now possible to manage without management as a separate activity or set of jobs. Six powerful forces can be mobilized to dispose with management: customer power, information power, investor power, global market power, simplicity power and leader power. A new breed of superleaders will emerge that has more in common with Hollywood stars than today's top executives, and whose role is to become market developers and customer champions.;The authors hail the emergence of a totally different type of 21st-century supercorporation that will be truly global and expand into all parts of the economy. This supercorporation - the 20 per cent corporation - will be quite unlike today's big companies, with no headquarters, standardized operations throughout the globe, and very simple structures. These corporations will be controlled by customers and information technology, and not by managers.;The supercorporations will be immensely wealthy and influential, and will drive up living standards. They will make life very difficult for their competitors. Unless the transition to supercorporations is handled creatively, there could be very large increases in unemployment and social disruption in the next two decades. Managing the transition to a world without management will pose the biggest challenge of all.